Yahoo Lifestyle Severance Season 2 Premiere Recap: Welcome Back to the Office (Grade It!)
After a very long sabbatical, Severance has returned to Apple TV+, and Mark S. seems just as disoriented as we are.
Friday’s season premiere picks up right where we left off with the Season 1 finale, with Mark snapping back to his Innie self right after shouting “She’s alive!” to the outside world. He’s back at work at Lumon, and he sprints down an endless series of corridors like he’s a rat in a maze until he arrives at the wellness center. But it’s cleared out, and Ms. Casey (aka his not-actually-dead wife Gemma) is nowhere to be found. He goes back to his workstation and is faced with three new co-workers: Gwendolyn (Alia Shawkat), Dario (Stefano Carannante) and, um, Mark W. (Bob Balaban). “Would you be open to using a different first name to avoid confusion?” Mark W. asks. (For now, he’s Mark S.)
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Mr. Milchick warmly welcomes Mark S. back to the office, clutching a handful of balloons with Mark’s face on them: “We have much to discuss.” It’s actually been five months since the switch (!), he explains, and “Ms. Cobel is no longer with the company. I now manage the severed floor.” He also introduces Mark to Miss Huang (Sarah Bock), a young girl who now works at Lumon as well. Mark wants to know where his old co-workers are, and Milchick insists they weren’t fired. In fact, they were all hailed as heroes in the outside world for revealing the flaws in the severance program, he claims. Cobel was fired, though, because “we believe she had an erotic fixation on you” and tried to get Mark and his Outie into a throuple (???). Mark still wants his old colleagues back, but Milchick says they all refused to come back — while “your Outie insisted on returning.”
Mark goes back to work, and Gwendolyn peppers him with questions: “Did you really see the Outie world? How’s the sky?… How’s wind? Is it just like getting breathed on, kind of?” Then Miss Huang calls them to the kitchenette for “the ball game.” She’s the new deputy manager, and she passes a red ball to each employee and asks them for a fact about themselves. (“Why are you a child?” Mark W. asks her, and she matter-of-factly replies: “Because of when I was born.”) Mark W. reveals that his branch was shut down and he thought he’d retire, but “this is a nice surprise.” Miss Huang then calls on Mark S., and he’s haunted by visions of Ms. Casey. “Something about me…” he says after a long pause, “is that I am lucky enough to have made four new friends today.” Miss Huang isn’t amused, though: She’s a supervisor, she reminds him, not a friend.
Mark isn’t giving up: He scribbles a note on a Post-it and folds it up, slipping it into a suit jacket before leaving work. The next day, Milchick finds the Post-it, a venomous screed that calls him “a shambolic rube who goes by Milkshake.” Mark S. was trying to frame Mark W. — who thought Milchick’s name was Milkshake — but Milchick sees right through it: “You didn’t even disguise your own handwriting.” Mark S. demands his own team back, but Milchick strips him of his department chief title as punishment. Mark distracts them and sprints for Milchick’s office, grabbing the speaker and yelling a frantic message to the board: “They’re my friends. You can’t just make them disappear.” Milchick catches up and rips the speaker out of the wall, informing him: “The board does not converse with Innies.” He puts Mark on an elevator, and Mark asks, “Wait, are you firing me?” Milchick says “Goodbye, Mark S.” as the elevator doors close.
The next thing Mark knows, he’s back at work at Lumon — and Dylan follows soon after him in the elevator. Irving is there, too, and clearly shaken by what he saw on the outside. (“Dude, what’s wrong?” Dylan asks. “You poor up there?”) Then Helly arrives, and she and Mark run to each other and hug. They go back to their workstation, and Irving excuses himself for a moment alone in the closet. Mark tells them they’re all famous now in the outside world, and Miss Huang escorts them to the break room where Milchick is waiting. They’re shown a cheery corporate video called “Lumon Is Listening!” with a talking building explaining how their rebellion led to “bounteous reforms,” including “tasty new snacks, like fruit leather!” When the video ends, Milchick says they’re being given the option to decide if they want to stay at Lumon, but if they leave, there’ll be no hard feelings: “Maybe I’ll even buy you a drink at a bistro one day.”
Dylan asks his friends what they saw up there, and Mark shares everything about Ms. Casey being his Outie’s dead wife. Helly, though, just says she saw “the inside of a really fucking boring apartment.” (Why would she lie?) Irving doesn’t believe her, either. When she mentions she tried to talk to a gardener, he scoffs: “A night gardener?” His own assessment is grim: “It’s not our world up there. That’s what I saw.” He walks off, with Dylan chasing after him, and Mark and Helly go back to work, with him still thinking about Ms. Casey: “I gotta get her outta here. I mean, she’s my wife.” (Well, not really his wife, Helly reminds him, but still.) She doesn’t think they owe their Outies anything, but she’s willing to stay at Lumon to help Mark find Ms. Casey and figure all this out. So they’re both staying.
Dylan tries to stop Irving from leaving, but Irving is firm: “I want it to be over. I want the pain to be over.” Dylan says he won’t be as productive if Irving leaves, though, and Miss Huang takes Dylan to see Milchick — who’s annoyed that his computer screen still says “Hello Ms. Cobel.” Milchick blurts out, “Your wife’s name is Gretchen. She wanted you to know.” He shows Dylan plans for an “Outie Visitation Suite” at Lumon, where he could see Gretchen at work, but he asks him to keep this to himself “to avoid resentment.” After Milchick stops Miss Huang from playing a computer game, she picks up an old-fashioned water ring toss game, and Mark and his friends all return to their desks and get back to work. As Mark starts refining data, though, flashes of Ms. Casey’s face keep running through his head…
Lumon is listening, and so are we: Tell us what you thought of the Severance premiere in our poll, and share your reactions and predictions in the comments.
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