Yahoo Lifestyle “Severance” Season 2 Review: Apple TV+ Thriller Goes Deeper, Darker and Wilder — and What's with All Those Baby Goats?
Adam Scott's Mark battles against management escalates, but the bosses may be ready to go nuclear
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Adam Scott as an employee who thinks his company is full of hot air.If you’re a fan of Severance, the Apple TV+ dystopian corporate fantasy series, you might want to know at the outset that this review of season 2 is written by an innie: a bright-eyed, responsible, uncomplaining employee of this website’s publisher. And as an innie, I can be counted on to avoid spoilers. You wouldn’t like them!
As with the show, there’s also a corresponding “outie,” whose at-home consciousness has been split off from that of the at-work innie. The one consciousness has no idea what the other one is up to, is the gist of it all. However, a little birdie told me that my outie is a slob who eats almost nothing but tinned fish and is working on an unauthorized biography of Ella Fitzgerald’s vocal cords. So, you don't need to worry about him.
On the other hand, Severance, which launches its naggingly engrossing new second season on Friday, Jan. 17 with a single episode, is all about an innie and his outie becoming acquainted in a dangerously haphazard way.
Related: Severance Season 2: All About the Sci-Fi Thriller Starring Adam Scott and Patricia Arquette
Mark (Adam Scott), whose innie is a valued numbers-crunching employee of a mysterious corporation called Lumen Industries, has been jolted by a brief but intense spark of reconnection with his other self.
Lumen, it turns out, has a lot of explaining to do after Mark realizes that 1) a colleague, Miss Casey (the gorgeously enigmatic Dichen Lachman), has up and vanished from his daily work life, and 2) in Mark's outie existence, Miss Casey was actually Gemma, his dead wife. Add as many exclamation points and question marks as you'd like.
This hands management a gift-wrapped HR crisis that becomes a PR nightmare when the public gets a whiff of how the innie-outie program, which was already controversial, is plagued by profound kinks in its operation. Headquarters goes to work cleaning up the problem and getting Mark back to work on a project known as Cold Harbor. Meanwhile, Mark is determined to solve the Gemma/Miss Casey question and rescue either or both of them (preferably both) from the labyrinth of Lumen's corridors and conference rooms.
Those are the two major plot strands of the new season, which has sacrificed much of the playfulness of season 1 for some terribly complicated world-building that leads, at least, to one mind-bending conversation between innie and outie. But, as executive producer Ben Stiller told The New York Times, “The show has to continue on its journey and can’t stay just doing the same thing.”
Fair enough. There’s still quite a lot of funny if disconcerting business involving (among other things) an office retreat that looks as miserable as the wintry frontier in The Revenant; a secret company department that houses baby goats, presided over by a kind of company shepherdess (Gwendoline Christie); and a new manager (Sarah Bock) so young she could have been hired from The Baby-Sitters Club. And someone keeps whistling "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald."
What you learn of management, though, is sinister, sly and not fully comprehensible—at least not by the end of this season’s 10th and final episode. It’s like an invisible slack chain, filled with poisonous comments by the higher-ups, and it's accidentally been shared with you, a lower-down. Lumen, as you might gather from glimpses of boardroom business, seems to have grown out of some kind of prairie religion or cult. Its history is represented (and revered) in hideous, large-scale office paintings and the occasional peculiar ritual, such as ordering a commemorative bust made of molded fruit for an employee's funeral lunch.
The human face of this shadowy enterprise is a just-promoted supervisor, Milchick (Tramell Tillman, giving possibly the standout performance of the season). Milchick can never quite get the hang of balancing a smiling approachability against cutthroat necessity. This makes him, essentially, the worst of the show's villains. Then again, you have to feel a twinge of pity for someone faulted in his employee evaluation for not using paperclips correctly.
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Tramell Tillman as the supervisor everyone loves to hateTo go any further with the plot risks giving too much away. But we will say this: Mark’s determination to retrieve his wife/colleague from the corporate underworld has a nice suggestion of the ancient myth of lyre-strumming Orpheus, who tried to lead his beloved Eurydice up from the realm of the dead. (A botched job, it turned out. If Orpheus had interned for a summer at Olympus — the Lumen of the gods — he might have understood how to follow rules.)
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Beyond that, it’s not a criticism of Severance to point out that very few of the many characters are actually likable, other than the wife of one of Lumen’s employees (probably because she’s played by the supremely empathic Merritt Wever). But even she commits what amounts to a serious betrayal.
Like most top-drawer series these days, from Succession to Ripley, Severance starts with a strong concept and then drives it up, into and along an even stronger narrative. Everyone in this story is given enough of a psychological, motivational nugget to propel them from season to season, but ultimately you perhaps care about their circumstances more than you care about them as individuals. In Severance, at least so far, it’s hard to sympathize with innie over outie, or vice versa.
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Yet it's just this strategy — to justify our small lecture — that manages to end the season with a whopper of a cliffhanger. It's quite the payoff.
You couldn’t ask more of the performers, especially Patricia Arquette as disgruntled manager Harmony Kobel. Speaking in a low, muffled, menacing voice, she sounds as if she were trying to order a hit job while eating an everything bagel smeared with cream cheese. And keep an eye out for Robby Benson. He turns up looking colorless and strangely intense, like an undertaker about to adjust a satin pillow beneath a corpse.
Severance premieres Friday, Jan. 17 on Apple TV+.
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