Severance Season Two Review – This Weird, Wild Show Is Impossibly Fascinating | Television and radio

IIt’s been a three-year wait for fans, but the creators of Severance clearly haven’t wasted a minute of it. The first series was fantastically stylish, clever, trippy and compelling. The second is even more. It requires all of your concentration and takes you down rabbit holes so deep and twisty that you may find yourself coming back. One half of your brain is trying to keep up with the developments, while the other half is trying to digest what it all means. You are effectively cut off yourself.

When we left our four heroes, Dylan (Zach Cherry) had broken into the security room and triggered the switch that awakened his three friends’ Innies in the Outie world, hoping to shed light on Lumon’s atrocities against employees and its ultimately unknown – but-certainly-not-morally-sound purposes. Mark (Adam Scott) discovered that his presumed dead wife, Gemma (Dichen Lachman), is still alive. Helly (Britt Lower) learned that she is the daughter of Lumon’s CEO – and refuses to share this new knowledge with her colleagues when they are finally reunited five months after the awakenings. Irving (John Turturro) discovered that his Outie is obsessively painting a vision full of forebodings (or, if Severance is what it is, possibly past bids) of a mysterious elevator at the end of a dark hallway, and that his beloved Burt (Christopher Walken ) lived with someone.

What follows from there is almost impossible to describe. But it is fascinating, beautiful, heartbreaking and triumphant. Mysteries and revelations, clues and new puzzles roll out in perfect syncopation, getting wilder and weirder as the series progresses, but digging deeper – into issues of identity and self-confidence, corporate abuse, capitalist evil, individual grief and collective responsibility, like the first season interrogated. – instead of spinning outwards in superficiality.

Apart from the core quartet – who have become internationally famous as “the face of resignation reform” since their Innie breakout – familiar faces include Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette), who has been promoted out of the building (much to her towering fury) and away from leading overseeing Mark’s completion of the “Cold Harbor Project” (exact meaning unknown, but again we suspect unlikely to be malevolent). Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman) now rules the floor. In a show full of wonderful performances, Tillman still stands out. What a presence. What a perfect embodiment of cold, cheerful and absolute villainy. But in keeping with the new series’ commitment to going deeper, Milchick gets touches of human emotion—and if the idea that there’s a real person in the perfect corporate man-cum-cult member is almost more frightening than anything else , well, there you have the gist of the show. Each element exists on an interconnected mass of Möbius strips. It may or may never ever let you go.

New faces include Miss Huang (Sarah Bock), the disturbingly young and uncompromising recruit to Milchick’s old position. (“Why are you a child?” Dylan exclaims when they meet. “Because of when I was born,” she replies.) Before that, she was a crossing guard. Severance retains its love of roving Wes Anderson-esque details (which reminds me – the goats return in a way that can make you feel like you’ve lost your mind but hang in there) along with its commitment to close adapted narrative.

Love and sex also appear, adding further complications – inevitably not in a straightforward way, when all are effectively two independent people in a single body, with one often lying and neither in possession of the full facts. But these romantic aspects ground the show in a welcome emotional reality we can recognise, and give us the foundation from which to tackle the knotty sci-fi and philosophical conundrums that pile up as we move through the Lumon company, the quasi-religious Eagan story and the merging of worlds towards an explanation for it all.

A slight anxiety grows as to whether the payoff, the revelation of the purpose and goals of Lumon and the Eagans, could possibly be worth the extraordinary journey there. But if there is such a thing as luxury anxiety, this is one of them. Detachment is a rarity in so many ways – stylish without sacrificing substance, a thoroughly singular vision, fresh, challenging, a wholly believable world made from a tissue of disbelief – that whatever the end ultimately is, the means will have justified it completely.