Yep. Same caricature I drew from the first season, but it’s been three years so I figured I would re-introduce it. (copyright 2022)
The Emmy-Award-winning SEVERANCE television series that premiered on Apple TV Plus three years ago blended sci-fi, moral commentary, and cheekiness better than any television program since Rod Serling’s THE TWILIGHT ZONE. Its story of office workers who agree to sever their brains into two distinct ‘compartments’ – office drone by day, at-home dullard by night, made for a pointed satire about how difficult it is for Americans to strike a work/life balance. As the show went on, Lumon, the company the four main characters worked for was revealed to be a sinister cabal, working on mind control of the citizenry. Its ‘Big Brother’ sensibility with a corporation watching every move you make became a stinging metaphor for the infiltration of the web, social media, and the ruling class in all parts of our lives. It was cold, mean, and quite funny, and audiences ate it up. The show went on to win numerous awards and even became (ahem) the water cooler show for millions to discuss at work.
The second season, overdue for almost three years, continues in the same great vein, though it’s not quite as funny as it was back then. Perhaps the more perilous times we live in have helped render it so, but the series seems even meaner, colder, and more mysterious today if the first six episodes available to critics are any indication. The mystery has deepened even more, giving it a certain arms’ length quality that can be frustrating, but how refreshing is it to have a series that wants to challenge us, make us think, and offer no easy answers? In many ways, we are those four employees trying to figure out what the hell is going on here. It’s a puzzle, a procedural, and a glorious head f**k, for sure. And even more disturbing this time out.
You may recall that the cliffhanger from season one found that our four main characters were able to merge their “Innies,” the part of their brain that worked at Lumon, with their “Outies.” Dylan (Zach Cherry), the moody loner amongst them, found his way into Lumon’s server to undo the electronic severing device implanted in all four of them. His actions enabled Everyman Mark (Adam Scott) to become whole again and realize that his deceased wife (Dichen Lachman) was still alive. Additionally, his older co-worker Irving (John Turturro), now fully merged, went looking for Burt (Christopher Walken) in the outer world to continue the love affair they started at work together. And most dramatically of all, the lovably feisty Helly (Britt Lower) woke up in her Outie body only to realize that she’s not a corporate employee, but she is the corporation. She is the headstrong and manipulative daughter of Lumon CEO and hiss-worthy baddie James Eagen. Helly was even sent into the office to work amongst her three male colleagues as a sort of control and even a spy for this grand experiment in mind control. Can you say “head rush”? Whew!
Now, all that comes back into play again in this season as our intrepid heroes must wrestle with the results of their poking the bear and blurring the lines between illusion and reality. Their corporate overlords want to get them back in line and that task is foremost to the newly promoted corporate hatchet man, the smiling but brutish Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman). His boss, played by Patricia Arquette, has resigned but her loyalties remain in question. Instead, Milchick is now relying on an enigmatic assistant named Miss Huang (Sara Bock), and she is also mysterious because she seems to be a mere teenager. Who is she? And what’s her angle?
Six episodes in, the series asks more questions like that, without giving us an equal amount of answers. Some of the plotting is overly complex and even frustrating like when the four are forced to survive in the wilderness on a snowy, frigid retreat. The motives for such remain oblique, although the end of that sojourn in the fourth episode is the most dramatic part of the season so far. No matter where any scenes are, SEVERANCE makes the characters question all that is occurring, as it does with those of us in the viewing audience.
At times, SEVERANCE edges close to feeling like we’re being played in the same way that filmmaker David Lynch cleverly did with the return of his landmark mystery series TWIN PEAKS back in 2017. Lynch’s ultimate goal wasn’t to wrap up the mystery of Laura Palmer’s murder in a straightforward way, but rather to confront his nostalgic audience with questions of why they’d ever want to go back to that period in the early 90s, let alone think that they could. Instead, what Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost served up was a ton of nonsensical story beats, oddity after oddity, and more of an unsettling vibe overall that replaced any traditional procedural plotting that tends to come out of Hollywood. It was brilliant but also confounding, and SEVERANCE comes close to similarly screwing with our expectations, but maybe the final four episodes of season two will give us clearer answers.
What keeps the show worth following after a long three-year gestation is its commitment to its themes, its social commentary, and its ability to find horror in the everyday. There is so much tension in every scene it almost places us on the edge of our couches at home like a thriller in the cinema would do. It’s expertly produced, directed, and written, and the returning actors all shine, especially Mr. Scott and Ms. Lower, not to mention new cast members like Gwendoline Christie, Merritt Weaver, and John Noble who make vivid impressions as well. And any series that makes Mr. Walken look happy, tan, and healthy is doing something right.
Ultimately, the show remains chock full of verve and nerve, begging questions about human connection in our cold, modern world. It’s vicious satire, served up in a pristine and calm setting that feels as artificial as so many of those soothing ASMR videos populating YouTube. The show asks us to wonder if we are who we present to the public, at the office, and on social media. Mostly, it cleverly asks if we even know what happiness is in such circumstances. It’s a challenging show, and without as many laughs this year, it feels even headier.
You may miss the laughs from the first season as well. The mindless, grunt work the four were doing on their computers seemed like little more than busy work, though this season suggests it’s leading to more of a corporate takeover of the citizenry. Perhaps it can be appreciated as a timely commentary just a few days out from the start of the USA’s new White House administration promising anarchy, oligarchy, and retribution. I guess that SEVERANCE has a lot on its mind and will continue to ask its audience to dig deeper into what it all means and how we wrap our heads around such brutal truths.
Let’s just hope that we don’t have to mentally check out for another three years until we are given some of those answers in the inevitable season three of this head trip of a series.
