Review of ‘Severance’ Season 2: A Saga of Love and Death

The spectacular finale of Resignation‘s first season introduced a love triangle more bizarre than New order could ever have imagined. During a brief visit to the life of his “outie” Mark Scout (Adam Scott), Mark S. – the “innie” whose existence had previously been confined to his workplace, discovered the chipped floor of the megacorp Lumon Industries – the wedding photo of the man who shares his body. Scout’s bride? A woman Mark S. recognized as a mysterious colleague, Mrs. Casey (Dichen Lachman). Her real name is Gemma and she was supposed to have died in a car accident; it was a debilitating grief over her apparent death that forced her husband to have his consciousness cut off. “She’s alive!” Mark S. howled in the final seconds of the season.

It was a wicked twist, not least because it meant that the two men inhabiting a Scott-shaped vessel were each desperately in love with another, very much alive, woman. Mark S., for his part, had begun a romance with his fiery colleague Helly R. (Britt Lower). What he doesn’t know, in a highly anticipated season 2 premiere dropping January 17 on Apple TV+, is that when Helly invaded her world of the outies, she discovered that her doppelganger was none other than the overlord of the innies Helena Eagan, daughter of Lumon’s CEO Jame Eagan and granddaughter of the company’s well-known founder, Kier Eagan. This may sound like the setup for a histrionic sci-fi soap opera. But creator Dan Erickson’s Resignationfor all its satirical humour, is a shrewd drama of ideas. Mark’s dilemma frames a superlative new season that examines the nature of self-worth, death, and most of all, love.

Almost three years have passed since the show aired its latest episode, so to review: Mark S. and Helly R. weren’t the only members of Lumon’s aborted Macrodata Refinement team to escape the office before the season ended. It was their cruel colleague Dylan (Zach Cherry) who discovered, in an encounter with a son he didn’t even know his outie had, that it was possible to remotely switch consciousness. In the finale, Dylan stayed late at the office to wake up Mark, Hilly and their teammate Irving (John Turturro). The defectors’ goal was to make the people in their outies’ lives aware of the horrors experienced by inies. Mark pulled his sister Devon (Jen Tullock) aside at a party for his pretentious brother-in-law Ricken (Michael Chernus). Helly shocked bigwigs at a Lumon soirée with an anti-resignation sermon. Irv drove to the home of his cut-off boyfriend, Burt (Christopher Walken). When he discovered that Burt was cozying up to another man, he lost it, knocked on the couple’s door and called out Burt’s name.

And so another philosophically messy love triangle ensues, in a new season starting five months after the events of the finale, as Lumon makes questionable reforms after the incident it has already incorporated into corporate history as the “Microdat Rebellion” and Mark S. seeks after Gemma. Together, Irv and Mark’s predicament raises fascinating questions: If an innie falls for—or gets physical with—someone who isn’t their outie’s partner, is that cheating? (For that matter, if an innie and an outie form relationships with the same person, is that partner two-timing?) Does the outie have the right to forbid their innie from forming romantic or sexual bonds? Deserves innies actual love more than outies because they are prisoners, confined to a windowless office and denied a life outside of work? What about Dylan? How does separation complicate his outie’s relationship with a family that has never knowingly met his innie?

These explorations of the meaning of love for someone living a dual life tie in with the show’s complex connection to death. Trying to cope with his wife’s passing by killing his sick subjectivity for 40 productive hours a week, Mark Scout enables the birth of a new self—one free to fall in love without the baggage of not having lived long enough to to experience heartache. . When a character’s time on Lumon ends, in the new season, the others mourn that person’s loss as if they were dead. Because isn’t that what effectively happens to an innie who will never again wake up in a sterile elevator? An innie can be a prisoner, imprisoned by a conspiracy of Lumon and their outie. But this season forces Mark S. and his team to confront the reality that quitting their defunct jobs, which they get a chance to do without their approval, would be tantamount to suicide. This is the paradox of innies’ existence: while it was unethical to create them, destroying them would be an act of violence.

You might notice that this review has had less to say about what happens in Season 2 than about the ideas behind the plot. It has something to do with the long list of plot points Apple has warned critics not to spoil; rest assured, the new episodes are just as twisted as the first season. They’re also stylish, with more eerie white backdrops and ’70s sci-fi thrillers from executive producer Ben Stiller, who directed half the season. The performances – especially Season 1 MVP Lower, who is being asked even more this time around – are fantastic. Lingering questions are answered and new ones are asked, even if Resignation has one flaw, which is that Lumon’s methods sometimes seem inconsistent with its ostensible purpose.

But ultimately, now that so many shows are technically flawless but conceptually empty, what makes this one stand out is the resonance—the simultaneous relevance and timelessness—of its themes. After slogging through a second season finale that, in my estimation, surpasses even the first, I couldn’t be more eager to hear what else Resignation have to say.