The wait has been excruciating, but it was worth it. Welcome back to Lumon Industries—will you manage to escape? The theme of duality is heightened, creating disorienting distortions and unexpected echoes. And the stakes are raised to a philosophical level. The second season is now available on Apple TV+.
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Thriller, dystopia, science fiction, office romance, and dark humor—these are the genres that Severance confidently navigates, offering a unique blend crafted by first-time creator Dan Erickson. A former door-to-door salesman turned acclaimed showrunner, Erickson developed this original, ingenious concept, which fortunately landed in the hands of Ben Stiller, who serves as producer and directs many episodes. Stiller immediately recognized the immense potential of the story, a narrative heir to mid-20th-century literary visions. Writers like Ray Bradbury, George Orwell, and Philip K. Dick (to name just a few) vividly portrayed the disorientation, paranoia, alienation, and oppressive atmosphere of a claustrophobic future where individuals fundamentally fight for personal freedom. The cinema of that era embraced these ideas—Fahrenheit 451 by François Truffaut being a prime example—and today’s serialized storytelling carries on that tradition.
Finally, after an agonizingly long wait—the longest in Apple TV+’s catalog, at nearly three years since the first season aired—the second season of Severance has arrived. It’s a joy and relief to confirm that yes, it was worth the wait: once again, the series stands as one of the best productions around. The story, the writing, the direction, the cast’s performances, the soundtrack, and the settings—it’s hard to single out the strongest aspect, as every element of Severance’s universe reflects immense ambition, meticulous craftsmanship, and obsessive attention to detail. The aim is nothing short of perfection, and the mark is, without question, almost entirely hit.
After captivating audiences and critics alike in early 2022 with nine episodes as precious as gems, the first season’s cliffhanger provided a perfect final touch—leaving viewers on edge yet thoroughly satisfied. The second season picks up right where things left off, diving into the aftermath and reactions of the characters to that unforgettable night of revelations.
The dark and powerful Lumon Industries serves as the setting for the story—a cutting-edge multinational corporation with an unconventional approach to managing the balance between the personal and professional lives of certain employees. Through an irreversible medical procedure, Lumon splits the self into two separate and non-communicating halves. At the end of each workday, the “severed” employee retains no memory of tasks or coworkers, while their personal thoughts never intrude during office hours. On paper, it’s a seemingly advantageous arrangement—but is it really?
The series centers on Mark Scout, also known as Mark S. (played by Adam Scott), a “severed” employee in the Macrodata Refinement (MDR) department, where he serves as supervisor of a small team. His group includes Irving B. (John Turturro), Helly R. (Britt Lower), and Dylan G. (Zach Cherry). Despite the company’s rigid policies, the quartet manages to defy Lumon’s ultimate rule: they orchestrate a brief moment where their “outies” (external selves) are replaced by their “innies” (internal selves). Their goal? To uncover the truth behind Lumon’s operations and, just as crucially, to learn who their innies really are outside of work.
The consequences of their daring endeavor are quick to unfold, and we experience them alongside Mark S., who, in the first episode of this season, finds himself face-to-face with unfamiliar coworkers. Mark’s dismay is shared by the audience, who were already unsettled by the trailer hinting at a new MDR lineup. Despite his determination, Mark struggles to get clear answers about the fates of Helly, Irving, and Dylan from Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman), who has recently been promoted to floor manager.
Yes, even the diabolical Ms. Cobel (Patricia Arquette) has been ousted—but only from the building. Just as we’re processing the shock of this shake-up, we’re introduced to the person who has stepped into Milchick’s role: Ms. Huan (Sarah Bock), whose unsettling traits are best discovered by the audience themselves. The struggle to balance work time with the scraps left for private life remains one of the central dilemmas of capitalist society, which has long squeezed workers in the name of maximum productivity, no questions asked. While there are undoubtedly environments where this balance can be achieved without exploitation, for many, bringing work home is still an ingrained and unshakable habit.
At Lumon, they promise the seductive dream of freedom from work slavery through the implantation of a tiny chip in the brain, designed to separate memories of working hours from the rest of life. The transformation happens daily in the company elevator, where Mark Scout enters only to become the unassuming Mark S. upon reaching his office floor.
Mark S. doesn’t know his last name or any details about his life; he exists solely during the eight working hours, and each day begins and ends with the opening and closing of the elevator doors. He and the other innies live only within the company’s walls, existing purely to work.
They have never seen the sky and don’t know what an embrace feels like. They delight in highly coveted company rewards, like fruit or waffles, and even in spontaneous dance breaks among desks and computers. They yearn for their external lives without understanding what led them to Lumon in the first place. The work they perform is deemed “mysterious” and “important,” yet none of them truly knows its purpose.
For the Macrodata Refiners, the job involves sorting disordered numbers displayed on a computer screen and filing them into virtual containers. The criteria? A sense of “fear” experienced when looking at certain numbers. What the numbers represent or what their task achieves remains unknown, and each innie has their own outlandish theory.
Elsewhere on the same floor is the Optics and Design (O&D) department, once ruled by Burt G. (Christopher Walken). This team appears to focus on archiving and restoring paintings, as well as creating nonsensical images or unexpected everyday objects—like a watering can.
And yes, on the same floor, there are also goats—carefully tended in a well-equipped nursery, where they are bottle-fed by trained personnel. The rest of the floor is a sterile labyrinth of milky-white corridors, all identical, overly bright, where employees navigate with the certainty of lab rats. It’s an environment that’s simultaneously clinical, absurd, and grotesque. The narrative tone is disorienting and relentless, yet it doesn’t shy away from moments of self-aware humor.
Everything in Severance is symbolic. Even the two fish in the aquarium at Mark’s house—one red, one dark—are divided from each other. The theme of duality, obsessively explored in the first season, is further amplified here, generating unsettling distortions and unexpected echoes. It also resurfaces in the expanded narrative about Kier Eagan, the spiritual leader and founding father of Lumon, whose corporate empire increasingly resembles a millenarian cult rather than a company.
Each character literally contains their own double, as it’s not just memory that is divided, but something eerily close to the concept of consciousness itself. “You innies aren’t even people,” the terrible outie Helena declared to her innie counterpart in the previous season—a despairing Helly who refused to accept her fate at Lumon. Now, the stakes rise to a philosophical level, questioning whether innies possess a soul. Some even speculate that the souls of innies and outies might be judged separately on Judgment Day.
The unsettling atmosphere—of which duality is a classic expression—so masterfully established in the first season of Severance paradoxically becomes familiar in the second. It’s a further doubling, as impossible as the one imposed on the severed employees, yet one the narrative convinces us to accept, suspending disbelief and rendering insignificant the (countless) plausibility objections one might raise. However, in these new episodes, certain flaws in the severance process are exposed, slightly tampering with the chilling precision of the original concept.
Combining the unsettling with the familiar is a remarkable feat—evoking comparisons to office-set narratives like Office Space, where a soul-crushing corporate culture is both absurd and relatable. While Office Space leaned on satire, Severance brings repressed elements to the surface, allowing them to interact unexpectedly with the “conscious” parts, without shattering the precarious balance the severed protagonists navigate.
When Mark S. sits back at his cubicle, capturing mysterious numbers on a glowing screen, there’s a sense that—beyond being eerie—the entire situation somehow makes sense, feels justified, even if that sense and justification remain frustratingly out of reach.
Manuela Pinetti
Cinematografo, January 21, 2025
