In our world, it has been nearly three years since Season 1 of the dystopian sci-fi office thriller “Severance” became a breakout hit for Apple TV+. But in Kier, the fictional town where the show’s action takes place, just five months have purportedly passed since the events of the Season 1 finale.
The Season 2 premiere picks up right back in the thick of things (a word of warning: You probably remember even less than you think), so if you can find 41 minutes in your unsevered life, we highly recommend rewatching the finale. But if you don’t have time, here’s what you need to remember before watching Season 2, which had a surprise early debut on Thursday, the night before it had been scheduled.
‘Innies,’ ‘Outies’ and Severance
“Severance” follows the lives of a group of workers at a company called Lumon Industries who have agreed to undergo a procedure known as “severance.” During this operation, a device — the Severance Chip — is inserted into their brains. It separates their work selves, known as “innies,” from their home selves, known as “outies.”
The lives of the innies are tightly circumscribed, with their awareness extending only as far as the walls of the office and the beginning and end of each workday. The innies typically cannot send any kind of messages to their “outies,” and though they can submit resignations, their outies never accept them.
The show’s central group of group innies — Mark S. (Adam Scott), Irving B. (John Turturro), Helly R. (Britt Lower) and Dylan G. (Zach Cherry) — work in a sterile and timelessly ultramodern office doing “macrodata refinement,” which involves moving numbers around on a vintage-future computer screen — and that’s it. None of the refiners know what the numbers mean.
Overtime
Season 1 ended as the refiners succeeded in finding out more about their lives in the outside world. Midway through his private “waffle party” — a reward from the bosses that seemed like it was about to become an after-hours orgy — Dylan bolted and raced to the Lumon company security office. There, in an admirable feat of flexibility, he straddled the space between the Severance Chip protocol switches, holding both open at once to activate “the overtime contingency.” This is the term Lumon uses to refer to the emergency protocol that grants an employee’s innie consciousness temporary access to his or her body outside of Lumon.
Without warning, Mark, Irving and Helly were vaulted into their outies’ lives — and they made some surprising discoveries.
‘She’s alive!’
Mark’s outie was at a book-reading party for his brother-in-law, Ricken (Michael Chernus), at Ricken’s home. Though Mark’s outie was dismissive of Ricken’s latest volume, a self-help book called “The You You Are: A Spiritual Biography of You,” it had become a kind of bible at Lumon for the innies, for whom its positive affirmations provided solace amid their oppressive work environment.
Shortly after the party began, Innie Mark’s consciousness took over. He met a woman he learned was his sister, Devon (Jen Tullock), as well as Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette), Mark’s boss at Lumon (she had recently been fired, but Mark didn’t know that yet). Harmony clearly knew his outie, but how?
As Mark tried to figure it out, he accidentally called her by her Lumon name rather than the one his outie knew her by, Mrs. Selvig. (She is, in fact, Outie Mark’s neighbor.) Harmony realized that Mark was his innie and tipped off Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman), the supervisor of the severed floor back at Lumon, who sprinted to the security office to confront Dylan.
But she was too late: Innie Mark was in Outie Mark’s world long enough to make a startling discovery. He had been told that his outie’s wife died in a car accident. But then he saw a wedding photograph of himself and a woman he knew to be the innie Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman), the wellness counselor on the severed floor at Lumon.
“She’s alive!” Innie Mark yelled, holding up the photo and making a beeline for his sister — just before Milchick finally forced his way into the security office and tackled Dylan, who released the switches, turning off Mark’s innie consciousness.
Unlucky in love
Irving found himself alone in an apartment, surrounded by identical paintings of a dark corridor with a glowing row of overhead lights that, he surmised, must have been made by his outie. A collection of military medals hung in the bedroom.
But more intriguing was what he discovered in a secret compartment in a chest in the closet: a list of the names and addresses of current and former severed employees — including Burt G. (Christopher Walken), a former co-worker at Lumon with whom he had fallen in love — along with a map. Burt had been the head of the optics and design department on the severed floor until his unexpected retirement — effectively death for an innie — which deeply affected Irving and left him anxious about his friend’s fate. Irving’s list was never explained.
Irving drove to Burt’s home — only to get a glimpse, through the living room window, of Burt with a man Irving assumed must be his partner. As Milchick burst in on Dylan back at Lumon, Irving ran up to the front door and pounded on it, shouting: “Burt! Burt!”
The boss’s daughter
Helly R. discovered that her outie is one powerful woman — Helena Eagan, the daughter of the head of Lumon, Jame Eagan (Michael Siberry)! This was a gut punch for Helly, who hates all things Lumon, so much so that she tried to kill herself in an attempt to escape the severed floor.
Clad in a shimmering blue, green and black gown, she milled through a swanky gala, accepting compliments on Lumon’s work from guests — and soon learned that Helena was set to give a speech that evening in support of the severance procedure, drawing on her personal experience as a severed employee. Helena underwent the procedure as a publicity stunt, in a bid to persuade its opponents that severance was safe.
Alone in the bathroom, pondering what to say, she met her father, a white-haired man who told her about his dream of turning everyone in the world into the children of Kier, the founder of Lumon who is a godlike figure to the company’s employees.
A few minutes later, in front of dozens of members of Lumon management and esteemed guests, she stepped up to the microphone — and let loose on severance and Lumon. “My name is Helly R.” she said. “I’m an innie. And everything they’ve told you about severance is a lie!”
At first, the audience thought she was joking. But she soon made it clear: She was deadly serious. “No, no,” she said. “Listen. We’re not happy. We’re miserable. They torture us down there. We’re prisoners!”
Ms. Cobel, or Mrs. Selvig, or whoever you are
Ms. Cobel, the manager of the severed floor at Lumon, was fired by the company’s board in Episode 8 when its members discovered she had been interfering with Outie Mark’s life, posing as a next-door neighbor and as his sister’s lactation consultant, Mrs. Selvig. Yet she remained loyal to Lumon in the finale, tipping off Milchick when she discovered that the innies were loose and attempting to head off Helly R. at the Eagan family gala. But why? And why has she taken such an interest in Mark?
Life after Lumon
Outie Mark’s best friend, Peter Kilmer (Yul Vazquez), who left Lumon under mysterious circumstances, was successfully “reintegrated” by a former Lumon surgeon, Reghabi (Karen Aldridge). This meant that the severance process was essentially reversed, allowing him to retain both his personal memories and his recollections of his time at Lumon.
But Petey experienced “reintegration sickness” as his innie tried to reconcile with his outside life, leading to confusion, hallucinations and memory lapses. He tried to warn Mark’s outie about Lumon’s sinister nature, but his mind was deteriorating rapidly, and he died when the strain of trying to reconcile the two separate identities became too much.
After Petey’s death, Mark found a cellphone Petey had left in his basement and made contact with Reghabi, whom he arranged to meet in an abandoned lab on a college campus. Doug Graner (Michael Cumpsty), the head of security on the severed floor at Lumon, interrupted their meeting, and Reghabi killed him with a baseball bat. Mark helped her conceal the evidence, and the innies used his key card to access the security office and activate “the overtime contingency.”
The baby goats
In Episode 5, Mark and Helly stumbled across a room at Lumon that was full of baby goats. A bearded man in a suit, who was bottle-feeding one of the goats, told Mark and Helly to go away. “You can’t take them yet,” he told them. “They’re not ready.” Umm, ready for what, exactly? Knowing Lumon, it’s likely something nefarious.
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