The three-year wait for “Severance” season two was worth every minute. Releasing on Apple TV weekly since Jan. 2025, the show sparked critical acclaim during its first season for its mystery, acting and bland but intriguing world. The series has now become a staple of American television, up there with other great science fiction shows like “Black Mirror” and “Stranger Things.”
You may have seen their recent stunt at Grand Central Station, where the actors popped up in their character’s corporate office personas to promote the show. With big names such as Ben Stiller as executive producer and director and Adam Scott playing Mark, the lead protagonist for the show, “Severance” is a heavy hitter that should not be skipped out on.
The plot is relatively simple but has an interesting concept: what if you could literally separate your personal life and work life? The severance chip, developed by the company Lumon, allows an individual to sever their life in half, making it so that when you go to work, your conscience switches to another identity, and when you leave, you become yourself again. You have no memories of work and no idea what you did that day; it would be as if you ceased to exist for your nine to five. Sounds like a perfect deal for any human, except for the fact that your work personality, or your “innie,” is living a literal hell.
Mark, after losing his wife in a car accident, quits his teaching job and decides to undergo the severance procedure, allowing him to grieve for eight hours less each day. We follow his innie’s confusing work throughout Lumon’s liminal Macro Data Refinement floor and the journey of his “outie” (his normal conscience) through the surrounding desolate, bleak real world. It is a framing device that not only allows for a perfect A and B plot in each episode, but one that makes the moments where the two collide all the more meaningful.
Mark’s innie is accompanied by his longtime co-workers, Irving and Dylan, and a new recruit, Helly, who are innies that have never seen the outside world. Irving’s dedication to the Lumon legacy, Dylan’s goofiness and carefree attitude and, most importantly, Helly’s defiance to everything that she is born into, make for a perfect cast to align this drastically confusing and wild experience.
But there is something more going on than the conceptual existential crisis the show provides. Lumon is not all that they seem, and strange happenings, such as the disappearance of Mark’s longtime co-worker, Petey, and the misleading torture chamber that is “the break room,” do not exactly make you feel like Mark is safe with this company. Mark’s outie lives a life of depression, darkness and emptiness that works in stark contrast to the bright, more curious and hopeful innie version of himself. So, when people from his innie’s life, like his boss and his missing co-worker, begin to pop up in his outie’s world, the sense of dread and uneasiness is brought to an all-time high. It suggests that perhaps Mark didn’t just wind up at Lumon randomly.
Without giving away too much, the show will make you question everything from paintings to tiny pieces of dialogue to the placement of food. Although every single episode gives you more answers, they simultaneously give you far more questions. The reason I am so in love with this show is that it makes me theorize. Every small detail it presents is a new opportunity to uncover larger questions. Who the are the Eagens? Why does Lumon need Mark? What is Macro Data Refinement? And, my favorite, just what in the world is Cold Harbor?
If you are a fan of science fiction, need something fun to theorize with your friends over or just love television, then “Severance” is definitely worth your time.
