Severance Full Season 2 Review

This review contains major spoilers for Severance season 2.

Season 2 of AppleTV+’s Severance got off to a bit of a slow start, as it expanded its scope to give more depth to the Macrodata Refinement team and their employers at Lumon Industries. But the back half of the season picks up speed and returns the surreal science-fiction series to its former, compelling self, finally delivering some answers to its core mysteries. Creator and showrunner Dan Erickson’s twisty plot and multi-personality premise allows the cast to truly show their range, while the talent behind the camera – headlined by director Ben Stiller and cinematographer Jessica Lee Gagné – set the bleak tone with their stark footage of empty offices and desolate frozen landscapes.

This season focuses on the conflict between each character’s Innie and Outie self, jumping off from the first season’s brutal battle of wills between the two sides of Britt Lower’s character: Lumon scion Helena Eagan and her counterpart on the severed floor, Helly R. Watching them seek to understand who they truly are – while the Innies weigh their desire to exist against the potential to make things better for themselves and their colleagues – is fascinating.

Helena seizes on Helly’s budding romance with Innie Mark (Adam Scott) to further manipulate Lumon’s most important severed worker while also flirting with his Outie. (It’s as if she’s trying to understand what made a part of her fall in love with him.) Scott has done a phenomenal job throughout the series showcasing the difference between Innie Mark, who typically tries to put on a brave and friendly face to keep his coworkers motivated, and his depressed and sardonic Outie. This season beautifully brings both personas together in pursuit of rescuing Mark’s wife, Gemma (Dichen Lachman), only to tear them apart in episode 9, “The After Hours.” It’s a stunning performance by Scott, as his smugness and earnestness clash when it becomes clear that Mark is just as dismissive of his Innie’s personhood as Helena.

Dylan George (Zach Cherry) earns most improved character honors this season, thanks to a new Lumon perk designed to distance him from his Innie colleagues: the chance to spend time with his wife, Gretchen (Merritt Wever), while he’s still at work. The difference between the brooding, distracted Outie Dylan and his Innie’s delighted awe at getting to know Gretchen is heartbreaking, but the reconciliation between both versions of Dylan makes his arc triumphant. It also creates an example from which the other severed employees might learn to accept themselves.

Romance also factored into one of season 1’s highlights, with MDR stickler Irving Bailiff (John Turturro) abandoning his focus on office protocol in pursuit of romance with fellow severed employee Burt Goodman (Christopher Walken). Turturro burns even brighter in season 2: Irving immediately suspects Helly is lying about her time in the outside world and relentlessly pursues that theory, a doggedness that culminates in one of the best scenes of the season. The sacrifice he makes in the moment is stirring; it’s a real testament to the writing on Severance that this moment also contains a clue that pays off in the following episode. The beautifully tragic second act of the Irving-Burt arc that follows allows Walken to show a bit of his signature menace, but his character ultimately redeems himself when he gives the fired Irving an escape from Lumon’s grasp. I hope this isn’t the last we see of Irving; as severed floor manager Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman) Milchick tells Mark earlier in the season, “I’d hate to reward his courage with nonexistence.”

Season 2 goes deeper on the innies’ supervisors, too, to mixed results. Too much time is spent in the early episodes watching Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) drive around as she figures out what to do with her post-Lumon life. This feels especially unnecessary following an eighth episode focused on Harmony’s loyalty to the company and everything it took from her – those 37 minutes provide enough explanation of why she would finally decide to help Mark. The Cobel scenes have a less-is-more inverse in the way season 2 illuminates previously unseen facets of Milchick and his struggle to cling to power within an organization that seeks to diminish and belittle him. Arquette is great at vague, menacing sternness, but it feels like there’s more to explore with Tillman’s character as he navigates the absurdity of his job, like when he forces a child to sacrifice her toy just before rushing off to lead a celebratory marching band.

One of the best looking series on television grows even more so in these episodes, tightly linking the style and substance of its dark science fiction. Stiller continues to show he’s a master at creating a palpable sense of isolation and despair in the surreal frozen journey of “Woe’s Hollow” and the desolate company town of “Sweet Vitriol.” But the most perfect crystallization of the show’s aesthetic and tone might be the loop created by Mark’s panicked sprint through the empty halls of the severed floor in the season 2 opening – bookended by the joyous run he takes with Helly at the end of the finale.

After doing so much to shape the visuals of Severance in season 1, cinematographer Jessica Lee Gagné confidently takes the director’s chair for the seventh episode of season 2, “Chikhai Bardo.” The jarring transitions between scenes and themes of love, loss, and memory-tampering recall Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Dollhouse, but this is an emotional devastation that Severance can call its own. It’s bolstered by Lachman (speaking of Dollhouse), who demonstrates the kind of passion and wit that would make someone’s former husband want to forget her for eight hours a day. With their positions effectively switching, I’m looking forward to seeing if Gemma will find a way to actually reunite with Mark next season, or if Helly might fulfill her father’s vision and rule the severed floor rather than freeing the people who work there.