‘Severance’s Second Season Has Too Many Ideas and Not Enough Follow-Through

Severance, which premiered on AppleTV+ nearly three years ago, rests on a provocative soft sci-fi premise: a corporation offering employees the chance to bisect their consciousness, so that they don’t actually experience their workdays. When it launched, barely a year into the “quiet quitting” era, Severance’s dystopian portrait of work was hailed for its relevance. My fellow critics are overwhelmingly rapturous about it, and while I understand why, I can’t join them. My problem with Severance is how its dangling plot threads mostly seem designed to inspire fan theories online, and that being on AppleTV+ will neuter any political commentary it may attempt to inject. 

For those who haven’t watched the show — and statistically, that’s nearly all of you — Severance is set in and around the offices of a fictional corporation called Lumon. We get vague inklings that the company is (officially) involved in the healthcare industry, but what it makes is much less important than what it does. A group of employees, who’ve only been told the work they do is highly confidential, have agreed to undergo severance. A chip is implanted into their brains that doesn’t get activated until they ride the elevator down to the severed floor at Lumon; then, their primary consciousness turns off and a secondary identity — the one who actually does the work — takes over. The two halves are known as the “outie,” who gets to step out of Lumon HQ, and the “innie,” who doesn’t.

Mentally hibernating through every workday has clear benefits for the outies — for instance, our protagonist, Mark Scout (Adam Scott), has been severed so he can take eight hours a day off from mourning his late wife Gemma. That’s when he glides into the consciousness of his Lumon alter ego, Mark S., and spends his weekdays moving numbers around a screen in what seems to be an arbitrary way. But even the innies who are basically content can’t help being faintly curious about what their bodies are doing when their minds aren’t in them. That smoldering curiosity is fanned into a blaze by the arrival of Helly R. (Britt Lower), who is horrified to find herself in this straitened existence and takes extreme measures to escape, all of which are coldly shut down by her outie. 

The first season builds to Helly R. convincing the other members of the Macrodata Refining team — Mark S., Dylan G. (Zach Cherry) and Irv B. (John Turturro) — to switch their minds on outside of Lumon, find someone they think they can trust and ask for help freeing them from their prison. In the process, Mark S. discovers that, even though he has missed out on a lot of knowledge his outie has from living in the outside world, he does know one important fact about Gemma that his outie doesn’t, and the season ends with Mark S. screaming it through a party at his outie’s sister’s house.

Because no time passes in an innie’s perception between when their consciousness turns off and on again, Season Two starts with Mark S. coming to in the elevator to the severed floor, then racing the halls looking for someone he knows to compare notes on what they saw in their outies’ bodies. But there’s a whole new team at MDR waiting for Mark S. to be their team leader. Soon Mark S.’s supervisor, Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman), is there with balloons, welcoming Mark S. back from a five-month absence. In that time — in which Mark S. and his team have become notorious in the media as “The Severed Four” — Milchick has been enacting reforms to address the complaints the innies raised on the outside. Only Mark S. has returned, insisting that they bring him back immediately, while Helly R., Dylan G., and Irv B. all resigned. Mark S. suspects Milchick isn’t telling him the whole truth, and it’s not really a spoiler to say he’s right. 

Over the rest of the season, two factions of Lumon staffers — the aggrieved and increasingly reckless innie revolutionaries, and the managers desperate to maintain the status quo — find themselves battling each other over the company’s future.

The acclaim of the first season seems to have given creators a blank check for the second season, widening its scope with new characters, new locations and new lore about Lumon founder Kier Eagan (Marc Geller), for whom the town around Lumon HQ is named. We know Lumon is only making changes to the workplace under the duress the “Severed Four” placed on them in the Season One finale, and that innies are unlikely to be able to call them out like that again. Thus, some of the season’s funniest moments come when we see how this fundamentally corrupt company pretends it’s softening its practices. (Imagine if your manager told you that, as a reward for achievement, you had earned a literal hall pass.) 

Watching the outies and innies assimilate information about each other gives the very strong cast new notes to play; while a key plotline in Season One revolved around Mark’s former team leader Petey (Yul Vazquez) undergoing “reintegration” after the removal of his brain implant, and the question of whether it’s even possible, we watch a version of it happening on screen as the personalities of the innies and outies edge closer to each other.

But for me, the new season’s frustrations far outnumber its satisfactions. The second episode basically recaps the first from a different angle; the eighth takes us to a brand-new location to move the plot forward about an inch. Producers are so enamored with aesthetics that characters or settings appear for the sake of a memorable shot and get dropped for hours (of show) on end — yes, that means the goats. A breakout episode about a key character in servitude on the severed floor should be urgent and heartbreaking. Instead, what’s most memorable about it is how it shows colors and shapes from the Lumon brand bible being adapted to different environments. 

Crucially, for me: While the first season subtly established that Kier is located in a state abbreviated “PE” (and with Kier Eagan’s face on its license plates), we still don’t know what that stands for, where it is or what relationship it has to the world as we know it. Outies in Kier use American money, listen to songs that exist in our reality and know about the World Wars. But when they refer to real places like New York and Milwaukee, can they go there? Milchick shows Mark S. a heavily redacted newspaper story: Does the town of Kier have a free press? What do people in Kier do if they don’t work for Lumon — or does everyone work for Lumon, whether they know it or not? 

This all might seem fussy, except that previous puzzle-box shows have conditioned me to keep track of clues like this even knowing half or more of them will turn out not to mean anything. I shouldn’t need to do supplementary reading to grok this thing — it’s a damn TV show.

The main reason I don’t trust Severance to pay off in the end is that it’s on AppleTV+. Last spring, I reviewed The Big Door Prize, and how it exemplifies the “frictionless pleasantness” of AppleTV+’s comedies. (It’s a wildly forgettable show that has since been cancelled, but a trace of it lives on in Season Two of Severance with a low-fi computer animation that evokes the ones generated by Door Prize’s Morpho machine.) On paper, Severance has much more edge — the second season is, after all, largely about a tyrannized underclass who have no concept of civil rights and are attempting to overthrow their oppressors anyway — but the centrism of most AppleTV+ characters blunts it. 

On the outside, there’s talk of exposing Lumon’s scandals to take down the company (which, by the way, we don’t even have context for, given everything else we don’t know about the larger world around it — do the structures to take it down even exist?). Inside HQ, innies are just desperate to preserve their existence. Viewers’ empathy for the innies is natural: They didn’t ask for Lumon and their outies to create them to perform this forced labor. But as, essentially, baby-brains — though they occupy adult bodies, they can still count their age in hours — they have no concept of the larger project they’re thwarting if they defy their outies’ plans, so rooting for the innies is rooting against Lumon’s destruction. It’s hard for me not to feel like Apple has found a way to both-sides rapacious capitalism — though, to be fair to a rapaciously capitalist company, it’s exactly what we should expect it to do.

In an interview last week, Severance creator Dan Erickson told Gizmodo’s Germain Lussier, “​​I have a pretty solid idea of the endpoint of the show. I have kind of a final scene that has always been in my head and answers to some of the big questions. I think you sort of have to know those in order to know the rules of the world that you’re writing.” On the one hand: good? But on the other, I just can’t believe it. We’ve all been burned by at least one sci-fi show that ruined its exciting premise by spinning it out into too many seasons. I know Lumon’s retro-futuristic offices look cool, but don’t let the aesthetics trick you: the Dharma Initiative had a top-notch Optics & Design department, too, but it didn’t mean Lost’s creative team knew how to land the plane, as it were. 

I’m not confident Severance’s does either.