It’s not that I’m a little late to start reviewing the second season of Apple TV+’s outstanding Severance; it’s that, like the innies on Lumon’s severed floor, I’m starting at my appointed staggered time. And what a time it is. While I am generally a huge proponent of weekly episodes of television, in this particular instance I couldn’t have been happier to watch the first and second episodes of this season at once. The first resets the status quo, as was basically inevitable when a corporation as big (206 countries!) and alarming as Lumon is in charge. The second undermines half of what we learn in the first, answers just a few questions, and raises countless more.
Here there be spoilers!
“Hello, Ms. Cobel,” the first episode, is nigh claustrophobic, seen only from the perspective of the innies, who feel as if they were on the outside, seeing their outies’ lives, only seconds before. (How much time has really passed is definitely up for debate.) Season one built to this moment of transference with precise pacing, from the introduction of furious and determined-to-escape new teammate Helly (Britt Lower) to each little step that led to Dylan (Zach Cherry) discovering the “overtime contingency” when Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman) woke innie Dylan up in a closet that belonged to his outie. That bell (app) could not be un-rung.
Outside, inside, innies, outies: Just trying to describe any of this makes it sound even more upsetting and strange than it is. I spent all of the first season thinking not just about fucked-up notions of work-life balance, of how many companies would just love to have employees with no outer lives, of how warped a culture has to be to want to wall off parts of people—but, of course, about capitalism, about complicity and ignorance, about what work is for and what it becomes, and about people’s sense of self-worth and how that gets tied up in work.
“What do you do?” is so often just a less overt way for asking “What’s your job?” and we ask it to make small talk because it’s what most people expect. Severance is a terrible idea, one in which some part of a person ceases to be a person and some other part becomes well and truly defined by their existence at work in a way that is no longer metaphor. But what if someone asked what you do and you literally couldn’t tell them? Would it be freeing? Would it be nightmarish?
I am in no way advocating for severance, to be clear. But I’ve been thinking about my own and my country’s relationship to work for a long time. (Thank you, Miya Tokumitsu, for Do What You Love and Other Lies About Success and Happiness.) And that informs how I watch this show, in part.
I also watch it as a captivating and heartbreaking drama about people who really don’t know themselves. The three innies stepping into their outies’ lives at the end of season one—Helly, Mark (Adam Scott) and Irv (John Turturro)—each experienced a crushing moment of disconnect or, unexpectedly, possible reconnection. Helly awoke in the shoes of Helena Eagan, presumably heir to Lumon itself, a wealthy and well-connected woman who took a severed job in order to make it more palatable to the masses and/or the investors and/or the government. Mark discovered his supposedly dead wife was somehow Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman), the just-fired wellness counselor at Lumon. And Irv found that the outie of Burt (Christopher Walken), the innie object of his considerable affection, was married, or at least partnered, and clearly quite happy.
All I wanted, at the start of season two, was to find out what follows these revelations. So of course Severance creator Dan Erickson (who wrote the episode) gives us everything else.
Mark returns to work to find a new team (that includes Alia Shawkat and Bob Balaban, who I hope return) and a new management structure, with Milchick replacing Cobel (Patricia Arquette), and a new hire, the alarmingly young Miss Huang (Sarah Bock), in the Milchick role, wearing his customary short-sleeved white shirts (though his were button-downs, and hers is a polo). Do we have questions about child labor laws in the fictional town of Keir, PE? We sure do.
The wellness office is gone. The supply closet is different. Everything is normal and weird and terrible and Milchick tells him it has been five months and they’re all famous on the outside, which is one of many clues that the man is possibly more full of shit than ever. (This is, sort of, complimentary. I am fascinated with Milchick.) He claims everyone else refused to come back.
Mark pitches a fit, and gets his team back. Why? How? Does this not seem too easy? My notes about this episode say mostly “Nothing feels real,” because nothing feels real. It’s innie-time all the time; it’s endless white corridors and a sense of disorientation, even as they get reoriented to the new and supposedly improved Lumon. The break room film is not an improvement. (The weird tidbits it drops about Lumon are intriguing, though.) The claim of no surveillance makes surveillance seem even more inevitable.
Also, Helly is lying, and Irv is beyond distraught.
I’m actually not sure Helly is lying. She’s so sure of herself, so guileless, that I immediately wondered if Lumon had developed severanception. Severance inside of severance. Can she not know? Has her Helena-self somehow ensured that Helly has no more ammunition to use from the inside? Would she lie to stay in Mark’s good graces? Is this actually Helena, pretending to be an innie? She does seem off in ways that are hard to pinpoint.
As for Irv, he simply breaks my heart. He appears in the elevator still banging on a door—he has shifted from Burt’s door to the office, with no pause to breathe. The scene in which he tries to walk out, knowing that is the end of him as a person, is crushing; Turturro is masterful and reserved and lost, and it was wise to give Dylan this moment of real connection and affection, as he is so often the joker and the poker-at-things.
And we still don’t know what happened between Burt and Irv’s outies when the overtime contingency ended.
The first episode felt, on its own, like a story about how hope can drive a person to return to a terrible, untenable situation. But there’s also the simple fact that Irv’s heartbreak highlights: Innies come back to Lumon—their outies allow them, or force them, to come back—or they don’t exist. They are at the mercy of themselves.
It’s not until episode two that Mark’s own heartbreak comes in. It is oddly easy to forget, when you spend a lot of screen time with innie Mark, that outie Mark is so deeply, deeply fucked up. These two episodes side by side show the range Adam Scott brings to this role; while innie Mark is curious and determined, outie Mark doesn’t even want to talk about what his innie self may or may not have learned. And everyone is so delicate with him that they are willing to play along, at least for a while.
“Goodbye, Mrs. Selvig” is all outie time, and we spend more time with the other outies than ever before: Dylan trying to get a job at a door company (listen, the “door prize” joke was good) and being rejected for being severed; Irv making weird phone calls while Burt looks on from his dark car. I am still anxious to know about Irv’s trunk, his map, his list of severed employees.
And there’s cool, cold, level-headed Helena, who tells Milchick to let Keir’s hand guide him as regards the team’s employment, so he fires them, only to bring them back when Mark makes his demands. Mark is inexplicably important to Cold Harbor, their current project, which has to do with Ms. Casey-maybe-aka-Gemma, Mark’s not-so-dead wife. (This entire situation brings new horrors to the whole idea of the numbers eliciting emotions.) The Lumon employees we’ve met have generally been disarmingly cool and scary-calm except when they’re not; I’m sort of waiting for Helena to snap the way we’ve seen Ms. Cobel snap. Or Selvig. (Sometimes you don’t have to be severed to be two different people, wink nudge.)
Episode two shows us more of this world, from Helena’s behavior and power to Dylan’s glumness, but it also brings the main story back to Mark, who was the only outie we saw in the first season until the finale. This is a gift in part because it gives us more Devon (Jen Tullock), who I adore despite her questionable taste in men. The show needs her, and Mark needs her, because she is moderately in touch with her feelings and can’t ignore the baffling possibility of Gemma being alive. Mark is not much capable of hope, at this point, but Devon is, and Devon pushes him, and then he winds up yelling at Ms. Cobel in the street (which bothers none of their nonexistent neighbors) and her freakout, paradoxically, maybe, maybe, lights a tiny spark of hope for himself. (Also, yes, she’s driving a white Rabbit, he has to follow the white rabbit, which could be a nod to a lot of things; I choose to believe it means things are going to make even less sense from here.)
Maybe. Everything is maybe! These two episodes go so solidly hand in hand that when the second one ended, I immediately wondered if someone on YouTube had edited them into one two-hour chronological story. As a pair, they are evil and delicious. Season-opening episodes of ongoing shows are often hard to really chew on because there is so much resetting, so many moving parts being pushed around to get the characters to wherever they need to be for the next stage.
Here, that place is right back where they started, but armed with new info. Much like us, the audience. What we have, and what they have, is more connective tissue, more lines to draw between the innies and the outies. I’m not a madcap theorizer so much as someone who gets hung up on little emotional beats: Mark walking out of the diner, Irv trying to walk out of his own existence, Helena watching her innie kiss Mark over and over again. And also Mr. Milchick’s motorcycle. Is he the most mystifying person at Lumon?
Nah. It’s not a contest. But I want to know more about him this season, and I want more of the horrifying reality created by Keir Eagan: This is clearly a religion as much as a corporation (the handbook is like five bibles!) and it has its own frickin’ town. With birthing cabins and punk shows in alleys. And a woman who both seems to be in charge and seems to be at the mercy of the company PR person and a dicey-seeming security-looking guy.
The entirety of Helena/Helly is a work of art, from the character-building to the way Britt Lower adjusts her posture, her walk, her face; when she’s Helena, it’s like there are more planes there (credit to the makeup team on that, too). There are so many power struggles going on with(in) her at every moment: Her innie tried to kill her, but her crisis control team insists she still has to go back to the severed floor in order to get Mark to do whatever it is she needs to do. She’s clearly in control of some things, but gives Milchick the choice to fire or not fire the team. She watches that video of herself over and over again, and she makes another video, a bullshit public statement that is so typical as to be extra horrifying. Of course a corporation (that’s maybe also a cult) would do this instead of doing anything real. Of course they’re telling the public one thing and the innies another. Of course their reforms are all just hot air, just like they so often are when corporations claim to make them out here in outie-land. It is, how should I say … timely.
Bites From the Snack Machine
- Did you know it was Keanu Reeves voicing the Lumon building in that demented break room video? I did not. I was too engrossed to notice.
- I’m obsessed with the color coding in this show, the outfits, the way Milchick now wears blue instead of white (his office has more blue, too), the way Helena’s dress contains the colors her innie wears (except that time she wore the yellow dress), the two-tone candle Ms. Cobel took from Mark’s basement and put in Ms. Casey’s wellness room last season, the colors the Macrodata Refinement office lighting can make when they want it to,, the purple in the previous conference room. I don’t know what they mean, but I can’t stop noticing them.
- What! Does Irv! Know! About the Elevator! To the Testing Floor!!!
- So very curious that the name Mark made up for his sister was Persephone; you know, the mythological character whose descent to the underworld coincides with winter, which seems to be the only season in this town.
- I will wonder about the senator’s wife and her severed birth experience forever.
- Ms. Cobel saying “I welcome your contrition” to Helena was kind of terrifying.
- New title sequence is weird and unsettling AF.
- But not as weird and unsettling as the words “Fetid moppet” said with blistering scorn. What did Helena do to earn that? It wasn’t just the gala.
- Did anything that the other MDR team said make sense? Brooms??!?
- BUT ARE THE BABY GOATS OKAY?
