‘Severance’ Season 2 Is Crazier Than You Can Possibly Imagine

Three years after its home-run debut, which layered mysteries upon mysteries so that even answers begat further tantalizing questions, Severance finally returns for its sophomore run. (Well, it will shortly; Season 2 premieres Jan. 17 on Apple TV+.) Fortunately, not only has the series retained its beguiling, head-spinning power—it’s upped the mindf---ery to astronomical levels.

A crazed descent into a science-fiction realm of bifurcation, fragmentation, doppelgangers, deception, and zealotry, Dan Erickson’s compulsively bingeable series is even more baffling and entrancing than before, diving so deeply into its tangled core concerns that it feels like an Escher painting come to life. Its dizzying storytelling and matching form combining to make it a head-scratcher of epic proportions, Severance remains an expertly orchestrated brainteaser, its insights into its characters (and their expansive backstories) and circumstances at once illuminating and confounding, given that they always hint at grander secrets and conspiracies hidden just out of view.

Led by Ben Stiller’s impressively agile direction, it’s a deft portrait of the work-life balance and the wars waged within, and a gripping inquiry into the nature of self, the conscious and the unconscious, and the push-pull between separation and unity. Traveling a vast distance from its first to its last episode, and culminating with a shattering finale that equals its predecessor, it boggles the mind and rattles the nerves like no other show on television.

(Warning: Minor spoilers follow.)

Severance opens with Mark Scout’s (Adam Scott) “Innie” awakening on the severed 7th floor of Lumon Industries, clueless about what’s transpired since his forbidden foray to the outside world during the Season 1 closer.

Sprinting through the identical white hallways of his subterranean workplace, Mark is once again a rat running through a maze into the center of a trap, and when he reaches his destination—the Wellness room that was operated by Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman), whom he’s learned was “Outie” Mark’s supposedly dead wife—he discovers that it no longer exists. More surprising, his four-desk Macrodata Refinement office is now populated by three strangers who’ve been transferred from different branches.

None of this makes Mark happy, nor does his initial encounter with Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman), who gives Mark welcome-back balloons before informing him that it’s been five months since his last visit to Lumon, during which Mark and his former comrades have achieved international fame as “the face of Severance reform” for their prior “Macrodat Uprising” mutiny.

While Milchick has assumed a new position of authority, nothing he says is to be trusted. Tillman has the coldest smile in human history, and his cheery villainy is one of many unsettling aspects of Severance that have been dialed to 11.

Every piece of information that Milchick provides to Mark is bewildering, including the notion that Mrs. Selvig (Patricia Arquette), who’s MIA, was living next door to Mark—and caring for the baby of his sister Devon (Jen Tullock) and self-help author brother-in-law Ricken (Michael Chernus)—because she had an erotic fixation on him and wanted to have a “throuple” with his Outie and Innie. Mark is additionally told that his beloved coworkers Irving (John Turturro), Dylan (Zach Cherry), and Helly (Britt Lower) did not agree to return to work, whereas Mark’s Outie begged to come back, for reasons Mark can’t fathom.

Thanks to Mark’s unsanctioned communication with the Board, Irving, Dylan, and Helly soon rejoin him on the severed floor. There, they hear about Lumon’s new measures to satisfy their needs—which, unsurprisingly, are just weirdo superficial nothings—and they catch each other up on their outside lives.

Irving, however, is too traumatized to talk about what he’s learned about his beloved Burt (Christopher Walken) and his Outie’s paintings of a black hallway and down-only elevator. Helly, meanwhile, is less than forthright about the fact that her Outie is heir to the Lumon throne. During this re-introduction session, they also hear that they’re in Lumon branch 501, which was founded in 1870, and that the company is in 206 countries—details that don’t enlighten so much as stoke a desire for elaboration.

What ensues is madness of an elaborately twisty-turny sort, some of which takes place on the severed floor, and the rest of which occurs on the outside, where Mark, Dylan, Irving, and Helly are grappling with their own crises.

The more Severance reveals, the less it conclusively explains, with Erickson and Stiller scattering myriad breadcrumbs that lead to places unknown—or, in some cases, to new (literal and figurative) mazes designed to confuse and ensnare. Questions abound, and in the season’s second half, pile up at an exponential rate.

Why does Mark’s Outie want to continue at Lumon? Why is Helly lying about her Outie’s identity? How close are the budding lovebirds going to get, and what does that mean for their dueling futures? Where does the elevator in Irving’s paintings lead, and what is Ms. Casey doing down there? What is the deal with the quasi-religious Kier Eagen doctrine, whose every element is outright insane? And who is Mrs. Huang (Sarah Bock), the teenage girl toiling in a supervisory capacity on the severed floor?

Like Lost, Severance strings viewers along by stacking enigmas on top of inscrutabilities. It’s aided by exceptionally funny and empathetic performances, as well as thrilling direction (from Stiller, Sam Donovan, and Uta Briesewitz) and music (courtesy of Theodore Shapiro’s cascading, discomfiting piano score) that mirrors its characters’ uncertainty, anxiety, transitions, and divisions.

The lines between the external and internal, fiction and reality become totally blurred, leaving its protagonists in a state of constant chaos, and often pitted against the enemy within. Need, loneliness, longing, fury, and love are all motivators for Mark, Irving, Dylan and Helly, whose Outies and Innies are halves of a whole that don’t necessarily match—or, for that matter, want to happily coexist. That tension is at the root of the show, and Erickson exploits it in intricate ways, all while elaborating upon the wacko Kier dogma that governs Lumon, introducing new villains who are somehow even creepier than the original ones, and expanding the scope of his tale, be it via fraught meetings between Outies and Innies or bombshell revelations about Lumon’s ulterior aims, which revolve around Mark’s ability to finish his latest project, dubbed “Cold Harbor.”

Frequently resembling a bizarre marriage of THX 1138 and Office Space, Severance wonders if people have the potential to be different, better, happier versions of themselves. For now, it proffers no definitive conclusions, instead content to be a fantastically woozy funhouse mirror of a thriller. Its second go-round will no doubt inspire fans to pore over its signifier-rich episodes in search of concrete truths about Lumon, Kier, and the many men and women split in two by the severance procedure. What one really hopes, however, is that Erickson and Stiller don’t take as long as before to deliver a new season.