This is a spoiler-free review of Severance season 2, which debuted on Apple TV+ on Friday, January 17, with new episodes airing through March 21.
The dystopian mystery boxes of Silo and Severance have burnished AppleTV+’s reputation for scintillating science fiction, but after incredible debuts, their follow-ups are on opposite trajectories. While Silo thrives by widening its world and deepening its characters in season 2, Severance falters by holding too tightly to its secrets, leaning too heavily on vibes, and getting its 10-episode second season off to an agonizingly slow start.
Creator and executive producer Dan Erickson wastes two episodes resetting the status quo at the fictional Lumon Industries, the enigmatic corporation where some employees elect to surgically split their consciences into a work self and a home self. (“Innies” and “Outies” in the parlance of the show.) After “severed” employees Mark (Adam Scott) and Helly (Britt Lower) managed to use their brief time occupying the bodies of their Outies to issue warnings about what was really going on at Lumon, a big deal is made about giving Mark a new team at the job where he sorts numbers on a computer into a series of boxes. (It seems bizarre and pointless but according to Lumon brass, it’s building to one of the greatest moments in the history of the planet.) But those coworkers – played by the likes of Bob Balaban and Alia Shawkat – are there so briefly it feels like they were cast merely for a trailer gag.
Rank these Apple TV+ sci-fi series
Rank these Apple TV+ sci-fi series
The time spent on manager Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) feels even more pointless, primarily showing her driving around and making cases for how important she is. The eerie visuals of the too-white, largely empty office and the bleak, snowy barrenness of the outside world – which the Innies speculate might be somewhere in Wyoming – are part of the charm, but this season is leaning too hard on the direction of Ben Stiller and Sam Donovan. There are just too many close-ups of people looking contemplative and not enough of the dark humor that made season 1 such an effective satire of office culture and workplace sitcoms.
There are still so many mysteries about Lumon’s goals and the lives of the characters outside of the office that it feels like the writers are being needlessly stingy with their reveals. When they do come, it’s easy to feel a refreshed love for the show. It embraces its surrealist streak when Mark and Helly crawl through a goat tunnel (a scene recalling one of Severance’s major tonal and visual touchstones, Being John Malkovich) and taps into its emotional core with Irving (John Turturro) reminiscing with another old timer about his retired love interest, Burt (Christopher Walken).
Turturro is a highlight of everything he’s in and he continues to shine in season 2, where he grapples with the same feelings of loss as Mark, who became severed after the (supposed) death of his wife. Irving considers quitting, effectively killing his Innie self to avoid the pain of losing Burt, but his grief is quickly put aside in favor of relentlessly diving into new mysteries inside Lumon while sweetly if awkwardly reconnecting with Burt and his husband, Fields (John Noble), on the outside. While one of the plots Irving is focused on is fairly obvious, it actually makes his doggedness even more impressive given how much his coworkers are hesitant to question things that don’t align with what they want the truth to be.
Dylan (Zach Cherry) was largely relegated to foul-mouthed comic relief in season 1, but he’s a significantly more realized character this season. The most perk-obsessed member of the Macrodata Refinement department receives a new benefit that puts him at odds with Mark, Helly, and Irving and entangles his two selves in a conflict similar to the short-lived Paul Rudd sci-fi comedy Living with Yourself. Mark’s reasons for taking a job that requires brain surgery are tragic, but the truth about Dylan and why his success at Lumon means so much to him are even bleaker – products of an economy that runs on mundane cruelty and crushed dreams.
When the big reveals come, it’s easy to feel a refreshed love for Severance.
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Attempts to build out the character of Lumon supervisor Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman) fare less well. Tillman continues to flawlessly marry geniality and menace while Milchick navigates the difficult task of keeping the insurgent severed employees on track. Like Cobel’s plot, Milchick’s brutal performance review and an unsettling reward in the form of a book depicting Lumon founder Kier Eagan (Marc Geller) as a Black man (despite every other corporate product stamped with Kier’s white, bearded likeness) are clearly meant to be a commentary on how the cult-like company treats employees at every level. But the supervisors are so thinly drawn and unlikable that it’s hard to feel any sympathy for their plight.
It’s not all bad news: I haven’t seen the last four episodes of the season, but Severance is clearly leading to some big reveals about the nature of its titular process and the work Lumon is conducting, and the flashing visuals where the Innie and Outie worlds fuse are deeply disturbing, enhanced by some dramatic sound design that flows well into Theodore Shapiro’s eerie instrumental score. Erickson is also digging into deep questions about the nature of self and how love can exist outside of memory. Helly reckons with what a monster her Outie is, while Innie Mark is torn between his feelings for Helly and his obligation to find his Outie’s missing wife, Gemma – shown to be fellow Lumon staffer Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman) at the end of last season. This is familiar territory for Lachman, who explored these themes 15 years ago on Dollhouse. While Severance has taken a very different approach to the idea of memory wiping, it sometimes seems like it’s heading to the same endpoint.
It’s possible season 2 will pick up the pace and deliver more of the big twists and emotional depth that made its predecessor one of the best shows of 2022. But it’s hard not to feel frustrated while Silo excels at the same assignment, following every bombshell with more questions and skillfully adding new layers to its heroes and villains while leaving so much about them implied. Severance feels like it needs a performance improvement plan in order to keep its viewers happy. Whatever mysteries it has in store won’t matter if we’ve tuned out before they’re solved.
