How did season 1 end? On a Cliffhanger

(This story contains major spoilers from Resignation season 1.)

Resignation returns to Apple TV+ this week after nearly three years away from the screen. Don’t forget what happened in Dan Erickson and Ben Stiller’s riveting drama that combines the mysterious intrigue Lost with the company’s nonsense of The office? Well, you really should do something about it! If you don’t have time to re-watch Season 1 (which you are highly advised to do before you start playing Season 2), we’ve got you covered. Here’s everything you need to remember beforehand Resignation coming back online.

Resignation focuses on Mark Scout (Adam Scott), a widower who deals with his grief by completely shutting it down for an entire nine-to-five workday. He is “disconnected”, meaning a chip in his brain is blocking Mark from accessing his memories at work. He clocked in, then clocked out as if nothing had happened. Except for something did happen: Mark S. took over. It’s the name of Mark Scout’s “innie,” the term the mysterious Lumon Industries uses to describe the laid-off employee while they’re at work.

When the series begins, Mark S. is the newly minted head of Lumon’s Microdata Refinement department, responsible for “mysterious and important” work that so far makes little or no sense to the characters, let alone the viewers. Mark and his colleagues (including John Turturro’s Irving, Zach Cherry’s Dylan, and Britt Lower as Helly, the newest member of their team) spend their work days staring at computer screens, identifying numbers that make them feel scared, and sending them in boxes. Why do they do this? It is a central question to leave Resignation season one, with no clear answer promised in season two.

If Lumon sounds really shady as a company, that’s because Lumon is really shady. In fact, the whole world Resignation is a little off. The story takes place in the unidentified state of “PE”, in Lumon’s small corporate town known as “Kier”, which takes its name from Kier Egan, the company’s much troubled founder who died long ago but is immortalized in the cut-off floor of Lumon’s “Perpetuity Wing”, a veritable wax museum featuring all the main Egan relatives – and oh, they also sometimes have waffle parties here, and at “waffle parties” I mean dance parties next to orgies with a side order of a waffle. Do you have all that? Cool, me neither!

There’s the mysterious O&D department, Optics and Design, headed by Christopher Walken’s Burt, who may or may not have overseen the cutting of a previous MDR team. There is a guy who feeds and raises goats for reasons completely unknown. There’s the Wellness Center, run by Dichen Lachman’s Mrs. Casey, an idle and nearly zombified woman who’s idle and zombified because she’s supposed to be dead? It turns out that Mrs. Casey is Gemma, Mark Scout’s wife, who supposedly died in a car accident a few years ago, but still lives in the depths of Lumon. If all the different ways Lumon treats his employees wasn’t enough of a red flag, the fact that they’ve got hold of Mark’s dead-but-not-dead wife should be a positive bloody flag.

Over the course of the season, the Inies become increasingly skeptical of Lumon, to the point of an outright revolution. The four nuclear refineries stage a daring escape using “Overtime Contingency”, a protocol that allows Lumon to wake inies off-duty in an emergency. We learn of its existence when middle managers Mr. Milchik (Tramell Tillman) activates Innie Dylan in Outie Dylan’s house, allowing Innie Dylan to learn that he has a son in the outside world. Normally a dedicated employee, Dylan riots furiously and bites Milchik’s arm during a musical dance experience (you’ve seen the GIFs), and tells his workmates about what he saw. Everyone agrees: Lumon stinks, and the Innies deserve a chance at a bigger life just like the Outies, so that’s what they’re going to grab.

In the last episodes of the season, the operation begins. Dylan holds down the fort at Lumon and runs the OTC while Mark, Helly and Irving visit the outside world. Mark and Helly share a kiss before things go awry, and Irving hopes for his own love as he plans to seek out his office crush Burt. Helly, meanwhile, struggles with the startling revelation that she is an Egan, meaning her Outie is likely responsible for her Innie’s suffering in a more practical way than she could have ever imagined. Then there’s Mark, who wakes up to a book release party for his brother-in-law, Ricken Lazlo Hale (Michael Chernus). Mark is shocked to wake up face-to-face with his boss, Mrs. Cobel (Patricia Arquette), who very much shouldn’t be here at all, but is at the party because she’s spent the last time pretending to be a woman named Ms. Selvig, who happens to live next door to Mark because…well, stalks a lot?

During the party, Mrs. Cobel learns that Mark’s innie is online, and she desperately runs back to Lumon to shut down the refiners’ excursion. With any luck, she might be hired back by Lumon, after being fired from the company just an episode earlier due to her strange fixation on Mark and her equally mysterious fixation on “reintegration,” a theory that posits that fired employees can merge their two selves. . (As a side note: early in the season, Mark Scout learns all about this from Petey, an old colleague he doesn’t know at all; Petey claims that Lumon is evil, that he’s undergone reintegration, but ends up dying a few short days later As a legacy, Petey’s arrival in Mark’s life has Mark questioning Lumon’s practices, even seeing some of their shady dealings up close – including but not limited to murder via baseball bat. Just normal office stuff.)

Whether Cobel gets his job back or not, we don’t know. What we do know if she is able to get word to Milchik, who manages to shut down OTC, but only after defeating the ridiculously strong muscle man known as Dylan G. The season ends with Irving outside Burt’s home, pounding on the door ; Helly at a gala for the Egans, where she shocks the crowd by scorning resignation; and Mark holding a photograph of his outie’s wife Gemma, recognizing her as his colleague Ms. Casey, and roared two terrifying words, “She’s alive!”

And scene. That’s it. Nearly three years after one of the most aggressive cliffhangers in recent television memory, Resignation is flipping the switch again and finally answers the fates of Mark, Helly, Dylan, Irving and the rest. Old mysteries will be solved and new ones will arrive on the scene, with a small army of internet speculators ready to solve them all. So get comfortable, folks. In the next 10 weeks we have a lot of micro data to refine.

Resignation season two will be released with two episodes on Friday. The 10-episode second season airs new episodes weekly, Fridays on Apple TV+.