Severance season 2 somehow gets even weirder, wilder, and darker

I’m not going to spoil anything because the new season of Severance doesn’t premiere for 10 days. But I want to be clear — the first season of the sci-fi thriller wasn’t a fluke. The Apple TV Plus series burst onto the scene in 2022 with a story about tech workers who were forced to live in purgatory thanks to an experimental procedure that split their brains in two: one who lived a normal life outside of the office, and another who could never leave. It was tense and strange and downright horrifying — and also benefited from largely being a surprise. But even without that, season 2 hits just as hard as the original, pushing further into the dark, weird edges of the Severance universe, while expanding it in fascinating new ways.

Spoilers for the first season of Severance to follow.

As a little refresher, Severance is centered on a tech giant called Lumon Industries, which developed the mind-splitting procedure so that employees can work on sensitive projects in its basement with no concerns about that information getting out of the building. The severance procedure is dictated spatially: as soon as a severed employee gets in the elevator and heads downstairs, they, in essence, become a new person with a completely different set of memories. That’s great for protecting company secrets but awful for the people who know literally no life outside of the Lumon basement. The existence of the “innies,” as they’re known, is filled with nothing but harsh fluorescent lighting, perks like finger traps and melon bars, and work that is both mysterious and important (or so they’re told).

Season 1 ended with one of the great cliffhangers in modern television, up there with “Not Penny’s Boat” from Lost. For most of the season, innies Mark (Adam Scott), Helly (Britt Lower), Irving (John Turturro), and Dylan (Zach Cherry) had been learning more about how and why they exist in Lumon’s basement and eventually concocted an elaborate plan to see what life on the outside is like. The finale ended with innie Mark shouting, “She’s alive!” in reference to his seemingly dead wife — right before he’s switched back to his other self. The finale premiered on April 8th, 2022, so viewers have been waiting more than two years to learn the implications of that revelation.

The new season picks up almost immediately after that moment — at least for the innies. It’s actually five months later, but because they haven’t been at the office, it’s like no time has passed. Mark is the first to arrive, and he’s initially greeted by a new crew in the Macrodata Refinement wing because the outies of Helly, Irving, and Dylan never returned to work. All the new workers want to know what life is like on the outside — Mark gets questions about how wind feels and what the sky looks like — and they have a new supervisor, who, for some reason, is a child named Miss Huang (Sarah Bock).

Eventually, through sheer force of will, Mark is able to pressure Lumon into getting the band back together, and they set to work figuring out, once again, what the hell is going on. Their excursion outside lasted for exactly 39 minutes and turned the quartet into celebrities of sorts. It also increased the scrutiny on Lumon for what really happens on the severed floor. Because of this, the company is playing somewhat nice, offering things like a better break room, new items in the vending machines (fruit leather!), and other tempting offers.

There are a lot of different threads happening concurrently: the ongoing management shake-up at Lumon; just what work is actually happening in Macrodata Refinement; the steadily blurring lines between innies and outies; and the public’s growing awareness of the reality of innie life. I’ve only seen the first six episodes so far (season 2 will have 10), so I can’t say whether the show satisfactorily answers most of its many mysteries. But what I can say is that it continues to expand the concept in smart and unexpected ways, opening up Severance to all kinds of new revelations through moments like an innie retreat in the wilderness and — finally! — further details on the goats being reared in the basement.

The new season also pushes even harder on the idea that Lumon-style megacorporations exert an extraordinary amount of control over everyday life, often in ways we don’t see or understand. Even if severed employees don’t exist in real life, disturbing mysteries at tech companies definitely do. It also makes it very clear that you should trust almost none of what they say — particularly if they’re trying to seem like the good guy. (These points make it especially ironic that the series is streaming on a platform run by Apple.)

Really, what season 2 proves is that Severance wasn’t a great show because it was such a surprise — it was just a great show. And at least in the first half of season 2, its quest to expand its scope hasn’t dulled any of its sharp, strange edges.

Season 2 of Severance starts streaming on Apple TV Plus on January 17th.