‘Severance’ Review: Apple TV+’s Dystopian Sci-Fi Returns for a Frustrating but Fascinating Season 2

For a moment in the second season premiere of Apple TV+’s Severance, Mark S. (Adam Scott) is led to believe that some of his wildest dreams have come true. The innies’ courageous efforts to blow the whistle on their employer have worked. Their outies are being hailed as “the face of severance reform.” The company regrets what has transpired, and commits to do better.

This is, of course, a lie, meant to placate Mark S. just enough to get him back to his desk. But though the specifics of the situation are pure fantasy — as previously established, Mark S. and his coworkers have been implanted with chips that separate their work memories from the rest of their lives — the stink of corporate bullshit is strong, and painfully familiar.

Severance is better than perhaps any other show on television at capturing the indignities of modern work, using sci-fi exaggerations to cast our own dystopian reality into stark relief. As the Dan Erickson-created series enters its sophomore season, that sharpness as well as an insistence on the humanity of characters condemned to an environment hostile to it continue to be its twin north stars, guiding it over minor stumbles in momentum and mystery-box puzzling along the way.

Where season one saw Mark’s Macrodata Refinement (MDR) team finding unlikely connection in the sterile hell of Lumon Industries, season two expounds on the business’ efforts to keep them in their place — to bleaker effect. The twisted humor isn’t entirely gone, but the jokes and quirky details mostly take a backseat to the drama, as the firm scrambles to get back to business as usual by any means necessary.

The innies have other ideas, however, and it’s impossible to blame them. The entire Ben Stiller-directed first episode unfolds on the severed floor, making visceral the claustrophobia of a life that only ever exists at the office. But the outies aren’t able to move on so easily either — whether it’s lonely Irving (John Turturro) puzzling over his connection to a man (Christopher Walken’s Burt) he can’t remember meeting, or insecure Dylan (Zach Cherry) grappling with his innie’s indirect impact on his home life. Helena Eagan (Britt Lower), the coldly calculating scion of the company, is doing extreme damage control after the rebellious outburst from her innie, Helly R. And Mark’s obsession with finding Gemma (Dichen Lachman), the supposedly dead wife his innie has just revealed is still alive, drives much of the season’s plot.

In addition to introducing essentially three whole new characters, season two also makes room for multiple detours over its 10 hours. One is an episode-long side quest to a company retreat outside the usual MDR office; another fleshes out series antagonist Ms. Cobel (Patricia Arquette) through a trip to her hometown. The most rewarding is a chapter that fills in the blank that has been Gemma, contrasting warmly grainy montages of her marriage to Mark with the antiseptic horror of her current life at Lumon.

The scattered focus can be a bit of a drag to sit through — not enough to inspire an invested viewer to quit, but enough to inspire groans of frustration when a cliffhanger takes an extra week or two to resolve, or grumbles of skepticism about whether the series might ever fully clarify its biggest mysteries. (I still can’t tell which way it’ll go.) It also comes at the expense of some of the character dynamics that made the first season so winning, particularly among the members of MDR. When Dylan relays an anecdote about Irving slipping printer toner in his water glass to teach him a lesson, I realized how much I missed seeing moments like those, instead of hearing about them after the fact.

But it does offer an opportunity for Severance to expand its world beyond Lumon as experienced by its most demeaned workers to Lumon as experienced by everyone else — up to and including middle managers like Mr. Milchick (an incredible Tramell Tillman), who’s made to swallow his share of indignities from his own bosses. What it finds on every level is an unresolvable tension between the sort of corporate capitalism represented by Lumon and the humanity represented by its workers. To the company, universal yearnings for meaning or connection or dignity are only ever flaws to be managed or weaknesses to be exploited. When Mr. Milchick agrees at one point to commemorate a major event with a ceremony, he’s criticized by a colleague: “It makes them feel like people.”

While the bonds most central to season one (particularly the romance between Mark S. and Helly R.) remain the show’s beating heart, the most complex relationships this season are technically internal. Having wised up to the idea that there could be more to life than daily quotas and waffle parties, the innies cannot content themselves with a return to the status quo. While people in the outside world muse over glasses of wine about whether innies have souls, the innies are fighting for their right to personal agency, to bodily autonomy, to existence. This sense of self-worth pits them not only against their higher-ups but also, frequently, themselves.

This conflict is most clearly manifested in Helly R., whose outie treats her like a tool to be used or abused rather than as an extension of herself, much less as an individual in her own right. Lower’s finely tuned performance pinpoints the places where the two personalities diverge or converge, and Helly’s empathy adds poignant shades to Helena without softening her cruelties. But it surfaces as well in the two Dylans’ strange sense of envy toward each other, elevated by Cherry’s earnest performance into something more than a jokey thought exercise. Or in the two Marks’ different ideas about what is to be done about Gemma, played by Scott with such vivid passion on both ends that it’s impossible to pick a side.

That a business like Lumon goes out of its way to discourage solidarity or individuality or emotion will be no surprise to anyone who’s ever had a job. Severance goes further, pointing out how the most devastating effect of corporate capitalism is the way it alienates us from what might be the very best parts of ourselves. It makes for a season that’s frequently darker, less frequently amusing and not necessarily more satisfying — but one that hits, if anything, even more chillingly close to home.