Review of ‘Severance’ Season 2: Worth the wait

The characters on “Severance” — at least the “innie” versions of them — don’t experience time like the rest of us. Innies exist only on an underground floor of the headquarters of Lumon Industries, a company that splits the consciousness of some employees into a working self and a non-working self. While their “outies” can socialize and sleep and live life to the fullest, the world begins and ends with the office elevator. Once its doors open, it’s as if they never left.

That strange feeling is also what it’s like to watch “Severance” Season 2. The Apple TV+ hit has taken nearly three years to produce a follow-up, among the longest gaps ever between chapters of a returning series. (Though “Squid Game” and “Stranger Things” are taking similar hiatuses, “Severance” is hardly alone.) As the delay dragged on, compounded by Hollywood’s twin strikes, fan agitation only increased. Season 1 ended with a double reveal: Lumon “wellness counselor” Miss Casey (Dichen Lachtman) was actually Gemma, the presumed-dead wife of protagonist Mark S. (Adam Scott), who had divorced herself to ease the pain of her loss; and Mark’s work crush, Helly R. (Britt Lower), was Helena Eagan’s innie, heir to the dynasty that has controlled Lumon since its founding in 1865. It’s quite a cliffhanger to close on, and a bit of time for the series’ enchanting atmosphere to to lose his grip on the audience. Let’s not even talk about these viewers’ ability to remember the mystery plot or any potential clues.

But once the reveal bell rings and Mark steps into the instantly iconic, fluorescent-lit hall, those concerns quickly fade away. Despite the endless Reddit threads outlining theories and hunting for breadcrumbs, “Severance” has always been a vibe-forward experience. The world that creator Dan Erickson and executive producer Ben Stiller, who is directing half of the new season, have created is borne of pure imagination. (Erickson came up with the namesake concept while wishing he could simply erase the wear and tear of his day job.) Whatever answers the central questions about “Severance,” like what Mark and Helly’s work on “refining macro data ” even is, they’re not going to follow basic rules of logic or reason. “Severance” lives or dies not by an airtight, detailed story, but by maintaining an eerie sense of unreality. Season 2 fulfills this sine qua non with deceptive ease. Real-time viewers have had their patience strained; future binge-watchers will hardly notice a blip.

Critics were shown all 10 episodes of Season 2 in advance, though we’re forbidden from revealing much of what happens in them. The spoiler list approaches “Mad Men” levels of obfuscation; for example, I can’t even tell how much time has passed between the inies’ infiltration of the real world, giving them a glimpse into their outies’ lives, and their return to their natural habitat. (Their supervisor, Tramell Tillman’s uncannily snarky Mr. Milchick, tells Mark that it’s been five months, but the information asymmetry between cut and cut is all too easy to exploit.) I can promise that there is a real movement toward clarify what Lumon’s true intentions are, and that “Severance” neither treads water nor indicates that there is no actual master plan in place. We hear a lot, and eventually learn a little, about an initiative known as “Cold Harbor” that apparently requires Mark and Gemma’s joint participation.

However, this development is strongly concentrated in the season’s home ground. Until then, Season 2 is more about mood, expanding on the evocative images and feelings of the first season. “Severance” is equally interested in the ethics of two souls – if it is innys have souls, a problem coming up! — to share a body as it is in the explanation behind it. Helly, the most instinctively skeptical and rebellious in the MDR department, is antagonistic towards her outie; her colleague Dylan (Zach Cherry), who now knows his outie is married and has kids, feels something closer to envy. Lower, a breakout in a cast otherwise stacked with established stars, does an even more excellent job of playing Helly’s uneasiness that her love interest has another woman in his life to whom he might feel committed even though he doesn’t remember being with her.

This cast has only upped its wattage this time around, with everyone from Bob Balaban to Alia Shawkat to Gwendoline Christie joining the party — or rather, Music dance experience. Most jarringly, the latest manager on the cut floor, Miss Huang (Sarah Bock), is a literal child; when asked why, she replies, “Because of when I was born.” The new faces are welcome, but it’s the core characters that get extra depth. At first, only Scott had the chance to deliver two distinct, sustained performances. This time around, we see more of Helena Eagan at the peak of her villainous powers, and the outie version of Irving (John Turturro) sorts through the aftermath of a star-crossed affair (between his innie and Christopher Walken’s once-broken, now-retired Burt ) he cannot remember.

Such grounded sentiments provide a pleasantly disorienting contrast to the increasingly outlandish world of Lumon, a quasi-cult built around religious adherence to the teachings of founder Kier Eagan. (In one of many signals that “Severance” takes place in a slightly alternate reality, Lumon’s headquarters are located in “Kier, PE.” Whatever “PE” stands for, it’s not a state we know of.) Erickson, Stiller and production designer Jeremy Hindle have a knack for building sets that embrace the sinister, infantilizing control methods of corporations, yet feel more oblique and mysterious than straight satire. Training videos, offsite meetings and performance reviews are the latest tropes reflected through Lumon’s funhouse mirror. So are broader concepts like the tokenization and laundering of attempted revolution into sanitized propaganda.

As long as “Severance” can deliver these bits of sublime weirdness, it’s easy to suspend one’s disbelief as well as one’s thirst for concrete information. Whatever destination “Severance” aims for, the journey dramatizes the arbitrary rules and compartmentalized nature of modern work better than anything else on the air. Also, the most pressing matter is dealt with: after watching season 2, I finally know what the deal is with the goats.

The first episode of “Severance” season 2 will premiere on Apple TV+ on January 17 at 12 PT, with the remaining episodes streaming weekly on Fridays.