What are the puzzles of ‘Severance’ about?

This article contains spoilers through season 1 of Resignation.

If you can remember all the way back to the very first episode of Resignationreleased a truly mind-numbing one three years ago, and it opens with a question delivered through a gentle speaker to a woman spread out on a conference table: “Who are you?” The question repeats as the woman’s legs begin to wiggle gently. She’s basically born, albeit fully grown, dressed in nice blue separates with a practically nude heel. She doesn’t know her own name. She suspects that she might be dead and that her new reality is hell. “Am I a pet?” she asks her interviewer as he enters the room to greet her. “Like, did you grow me as food and that’s why I have no memories?” He is confused by the question. “You think we grew into a full human and gave you consciousness, did your nails?” The idea is so palpably absurd that he smiles.

The rest of Resignation was a chilling romp, an alienating collage of surreal imagery (goats!), puzzle mysteries, nerdy characters, and tensely familiar workplace dynamics. The premise of the series was that a sinister, giant company called Lumon Industries had pioneered a way to protect its most valuable proprietary data – by placing a chip in certain employees’ brains that separated their work from their real identities. In the office, cut-off “innies” toiled away with “macro data refinement”; at home their “outies” enjoyed the fruits of this labor without being encumbered by the work itself. For some, the trade seemed to make sense. Mark (played by Adam Scott) opted for the procedure after his wife’s death, allocating his innie eight hours a day where he wasn’t upset by grief. But Helly (Britt Lower), the woman on the table, found her severed life intolerable, a monstrous form of oppression. During the first season, she tried again and again to leave, to quit, even to end her own life. Each time her outie refused. “I’m a person,” her outie told her icily in a recorded video message. “You are not … Your resignation request has been denied.”

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I enjoyed the first season of Resignation without quite loving it. In contrast to e.g. The rest or OA– exciting unfathomable shows awash in details picked apart on Reddit –Resignation didn’t reward its viewers with emotional catharsis, the big swooshy mess of clean feeling. It was too cool for that, too weird. Part of the problem was the conundrum of Lumon, a cult-like organization with endless parallels to something like Scientology—the obsessive reverence for its founder, Kier Eagan; the brutal rituals (the word pause in break room referring to psychological violence rather than coffee and snacks); separating followers from their lives and families. The show’s bizarre, almost nonsensical mythology and imagery felt at odds with the more rational questions it teased: Are innies completely separate people? If they never leave the office and can’t choose to stop working, are they slaves? If they never get to do the things that all humans do—sleep, doze, lose themselves in leisure, love their families—are they still fully human?

Season 2, which had one lengthy path to executiondigs into all of these questions, making the show feel richer and less confusing without sacrificing any of the great weirdness. The Season 1 finale ended on a cliffhanger, with the inies managing to seize control of their outie selves for a moment to fly off on Lumon, only to make their own tumultuous discoveries. Helly learned that she is actually Helena Eagan, an heir to the company and, as a publicly terminated employee, its most valuable asset. Mark realized that his workplace wellness advisor, Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman), is actually his outie’s dead wife, Gemma. The revelations propelled the story forward while underscoring the grim truth of attrition – when employees have no conscious memory of their workday, there’s no end to the ways their bosses can abuse them.

The new sections immediately and happily deal with the fallout. They bring new characters, new revelations, and a significant subplot based on a character that my uninterrupted brain had completely forgotten. We are introduced to strange and new worlds in Lumon, which Mark and Helly encounter by crawling, Alice in Wonderland–style, through too tight tunnels. An episode that takes the inies outside, to an offsite adventure explicitly rendered as a horror film, offers other mind-blowingly bizarre dimensions to the cult of Kier Eagan. There are more goats, more melon parties, more allusions to the horrible things that happen down on the ominously named “test floor,” more hints about what the innies actually do all day at their desks.

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But the show is also more concerned than it has been with what it means to separate human consciousness into different pieces. Resignation dropping cultural references about clones, doppelgangers, twins. We begin to understand what “retirement” means to an innie, and the cost of being forcibly separated from their lovers, partners and children on the outside. A character explains midway through the season how theologians are beginning to think of separation—as a process that essentially splits a person into two souls. No one embodies the idea better this season than Helly, torn between her fiercely brave workplace self and her repulsively uncaring outie, though the two occasionally share the same impulses. Of the other laid-off employees, Dylan (Zach Cherry) gets a story that’s deeply moving after the season 1 twist where his innie was introduced to his outie’s child, while Irving (John Turturro) continues his explorations of Lumon’s secret corridors.

These developments add up to a series that remains fascinatingly enigmatic but gives the characters a bit more heart and humanity. Resignation is still one of the most elaborate shows on television, painterly in aspect and intricately detailed. Every frame feels intentional. And the show is particularly adept at its cinematography this season, using light to profound effect: In a scene set inside Mark’s outie’s apartment, he stands in the window, partially lit through the shadows, with only part of the couch and a glowing fish tank visible to his left. The goldfish, carelessly swimming around in an artificially bright environment, kept fed and floating and oblivious, seems almost too on the nose.