Severance season 2 review: The dystopian office drama 'works the same magic but is even more mind-bending'
Apple TV+When it premiered in 2022, Apple TV+'s surreal workplace show was a hit. Now it's finally back – and from the playful storytelling to the layered performances, there's a lot to savour.
In the second season of Severance, one character spends hours practising how to put paper clips on properly (apparently there's a right and a wrong way). Other characters find a room full of goats in their office building, and out of the office someone finds a working phone booth on the street, as if that's an everyday thing. Yet viewers of season one of the series – among the most bracing and imaginative of recent years – know that its bizarro world is also relatable to anyone who has ever been bored at their job.
With a perfect balance of the real and surreal, the show follows four employees who sort numbers floating on their computer screens at Lumon Industries, and who chose to have a chip put in their brains that cuts their memories in half. The person working inside the office, called the innie, has no knowledge of who they are beyond its walls – and their outside counterpart, or outie, has no memory of the working day. Identity crisis doesn't begin to describe it. The show's creator, Dan Erickson, was inspired by wishing that his tedious office temp job while he was a struggling screenwriter could zoom by as if it never happened, and his idea of being able to turn off your brain resonates especially well in our age of information overload.
That twist on the familiar office-show premise is a great hook. But the series' true alchemy, and the secret of its success and acclaim, is how well it builds our emotional attachment to the characters in Lumon's Macrodata Refinement Department, who now realise they have made a terrible mistake. The cast makes them so credible that it's easy to empathize with the grief-stricken widower Mark (Adam Scott), fussy and lovelorn Irving (John Turturro), rebellious Helly (Britt Lower), and Dylan (Zach Cherry), an office drone who seemed hapless until he wasn't. Some series shake things up radically between seasons, but this is a seamless continuation that works the same magic with even more mind-bending turns.
The plot picks up five months after the cliffhanging events we last saw, when Dylan stayed behind at Lumon Industries and laboriously held a switch that allowed the other three to briefly access their work memories while outside. Mark discovered that his wife, Gemma, might actually be alive, and is someone he encountered without recognising at work. Irv is an artist who for some reason has documents about Lumon employees hidden in his apartment. Most startling of all, Helly is Helena Eagan, heir to the Lumon fortune, who has undergone "severance", as the process is called, as a public display of confidence in it.
They return to the office carrying all that knowledge with them, but the storytelling is trickier and more playful now. From the start of the show, we have seen both innie and outie worlds, and so knew more about the characters than they knew about themselves. But this season we are less certain than we were – or thought we were – about some characters' motives. What is their game, what are they hiding, and are they as united as they seem? Everyone is, at least for a while, an unreliable narrator, smartly adding suspense.
Some things are the same. Scott is still heartbreaking as outie Mark, so broken by the loss of his wife that he signed up to be severed to avoid the pain of that memory for part of the day. And as disillusioned innie Mark, his sarcastic rejoinders to his bosses land with razor-sharp clarity.
Apple TV+Lower has an even more layered role now and plays it with perfect subtlety as Helly/Helena, with her immensely complicated double life. Turturro has never had a better role or given a stronger performance, suggesting the fire beneath the apparently bland Irv. He continues to love Burt, the former Lumon employee played by Christopher Walken, who delivers delightful, pure Walken line readings. No one else could make a dinner invitation that starts "We have a ham" sound the same. Tramell Tillman returns as the Lumon boss Mr Milchick, his smile more chilling than ever. Ben Stiller directs with visual flair, contrasting the dark, snowy outer world with the claustrophobic, blinding white maze of corridors at Lumon.
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Most of the differences can't be revealed yet. Among other things, we learn more about Dylan's family and we discover that it is possible to find a secret place to have sex inside the Lumon offices. Guest actors breeze in and out, including Gwendoline Christie, Merritt Wever, Bob Balaban and Alia Shawkat.
Apple TV+ sent critics only six episodes of 10, so I couldn't say more about the last stretch of the season even if I wanted to. But by midway through, the story has taken a turn involving the chips in the employees' brains, and although that raises the stakes, the storyline is not as compelling as it should be, at least not yet. Too much sci-fi threatens to tip the show's perfect balance.
And all along there has been too little attention paid to the cult-like aspect of Lumon, where everyone treats its 19th-Century founder, Kier Eagan, as a prophet, and whose company handbook is regarded as a religious, Bible-like document. The subservient way the employees always call Milchick "Mr Milchick" as if they were schoolchildren addressing a teacher is just the start of it. Whatever happens in the last episodes, there is a lot to savour, including the pitch-perfect scorn in innie Mark's voice when he says, "Praise Kier".
★★★★☆
The first two episodes of Severance season two are released on Apple TV+ on January 17, with new episodes released weekly.
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