There’s something happening here; what it is ain’t exactly clear. Since it began, Severance has relied on obfuscation as a load-bearing element of its storytelling. Created by Dan Erickson, the show is many things at once — a dystopian thriller, a sci-fi satire, a workplace dramedy, a black comedy about cults, an anticapitalist broadside, an on-again off-again meditation on what we owe the people we love. But it’s stuffed all of those things into a Lost-indebted mystery box, and every time one of its mysteries is solved, you get another three or four mysteries as a perk, or a penalty.
Back from a lengthy break, Severance once again stars Adam Scott, Britt Lower, Zach Cherry, and John Turturro as “severed” office workers Mark S., Helly R., Dylan G., and Irving B. — a quartet of wage slaves for the massive and extremely demented Lumon corporation. Lumon’s proprietary “severance” technology uses a chip inserted in a worker’s brain to separate their work lives from their home lives in permanent fashion: When the gang is at work, they have no memory of their outside selves, while their outside selves have no clue what their work lives are like beyond what Lumon tells them.
It’s a recipe for exploitation and abuse, and by the end of last season all four of our heroes had had enough. With Dylan at the controls, Mark, Helly, and Irving managed to escape into the lives of their “outie” selves. This premiere picks up the moment the Season 1 finale left off, with Mark getting sucked back into his “innie” persona after blowing the whistle on Lumon to his sister Devon (Jen Tullock) — and finding out that his outie’s late wife is still alive in that basement as the strangely tragic wellness counselor, Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman).
It would be an exaggeration to say everything is different when he returns; there are still a lot of white hallways, and there’s still a macrodata refinement department, the one for which he works. (This episode finally hints at what the nature of that work might be; Severance loves not telling you important things about Severance.) But the employees are different: Now they’re Mark W. (Bob Balaban), Gwendolyn Y. (Alia Shawkat), and Dario R. (Stefano Carannante) — officious, inquisitive, and Italian, in that order.
Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman), Mark’s unctuous and mustachioed supervisor, refuses to put him in touch with his old team, whose outies he claims are all now world-famous thanks to the MDR gang’s escape to the outside world. You can tell he’s lying because his mouth is moving, but also because Helly’s outie is a member of Lumon’s psychotic founding family and unlikely to have appeared in any ticker-tape parades with the rest of them after the PR disaster they caused the company. Mark raises such a stink that Milchick appears to fire him.
Instead, Mark returns the next day (immediately, in his world) to find Dylan and Irving and Helly, all of them fresh from their last moments on the surface world. (We don’t know why Mark was revived first.) Milchick, who has taken over as boss of the level from the now-disgraced Ms. Cobel (Patricia Arquette), presents the foursome with an industrial film in which claymation versions of themselves celebrate obviously bogus “innie reforms” inspired by “The Macrodat Uprising,” now fully incorporated into the messianic mythology surrounding Lumon’s founder, Kier Egan, and his descendants. Milchick informs the gang they are free to leave if they choose to do so by end of day.
They each stay for someone else. Mark wants to find and liberate Ms. Casey. Helly wants to help Mark (and stick it to her sadistic real-world self). Irving stays because Dylan begs him to, as a friend. (The older man was about to commit suicide-by-retirement because he’s been separated from the man he loves, Burt; played by Christopher Walken, the character’s outie is married.) And Dylan stays, at least in part, because Milchik promises him the ability to visit with his outie’s wife and children.
Yet of the four, only Mark is honest with the others. Refreshingly (this is the kind of thing that you might expect to get delayed for several episodes for various bogus reasons), he tells everyone everything that happened to him right away, in plain language. But Helly lies rather than admit she’s one of the psychos in charge of the severance program and its rapid global spread, and Irving can’t bring himself to tell anyone but Dylan what he found when he went topside. (This also includes a mysterious series of paintings of a black hallway with a red-arrowed down elevator at the end of it, which we recognize as the portal to whatever limbo they’ve damned Ms. Casey to.)
Also Milchick’s new assistant, Miss Huang (Sarah Bock), is a child; Mark’s job involves doing some unknown thing to his “late” wife turned wellness coach; and there’s a mysterious man in a suit lurking in the hallway behind him at one point. This all seems worth mentioning.
Severance’s strengths are all pretty obvious. The high concept is a hoot. The show has a real look to it, a retrofuturistic cubical world of white and blue and green. Strong performances by Scott, Tillman, Turturro, and Walken elevate their material. The depiction of the mega-rich as completely delusional high priests of a death cult rings more true every time you read about the various billionaire cretins and ghouls who are in the process of buying the country as we speak.
But one of Severance’s biggest problems is, well, severance — the procedure, the concept. It’s an easy one to sum up in a sentence: They put a microchip in your brain that prevents you from remembering your real life when you’re at work and your work life when you’re not. The idea might even sound semi-appealing, until you encounter the show’s existential-horror element: Severance creates a workforce of permanent amnesiacs who know nothing about their outside identities.
However, this doesn’t mean they know nothing of the outside world. They’re obviously familiar with everything that goes into working at an office: how to use a computer, how to make coffee, how to flirt, how to use toilets, et cetera. Beyond that, they’re conversant in any number of other topics pertaining to life outside Lumon’s basement: Wyoming, buttes, brothers-in-law, gorillas, you name it. Helly knew enough about music last season to select “defiant jazz” for her musical dance experience. Dylan expressed a preference for MILFs. They know what’s going on up there.
Except, that is, when the story or a gag calls for them not to. Take Alia Shawkat’s character, Gwendoline. She’s aware of what buttes are and where you might find them, and she knows enough about in-laws to know that talking to them is a waste of your precious outie time. Yet she needs to ask Mark S. what the sky is like, or how wind feels. You can take one approach, but not both.
Similarly, the innies put up with absolutely nightmarish working conditions, and with the exception of Helly have done so for years. The maddening office layout, the depressingly awful snacks and perks, the insane bosses, the cult brainwashing, the complete and total refusal to answer any questions about what it is they actually do, the literal 1984-style psychological torture room: A professional writer dreamed up all this up expressly to be terrible, and these characters — who know enough about how the real world works to know what MILFs are, let alone what jobs are — didn’t even think to question any of it until a few weeks ago in story time.
Since “we all put up with a lot of terrible shit in capitalism’s name” is the show’s core message, it’s tempting to give this a pass. It only winds up mattering because show has leaned so hard on drawing a distinction between the innies and outies that it’s called attention to its own inconsistency. Now that the innies have briefly commandeered their outside lives, it’s more important than ever to be able to understand who knows what and why. That’s hard to figure out when the innie characters are savvy or stupid depending on the needs of the moment.
(Making Milchik and Cobel act weird as hell all the time despite not being severed only confuses things further. Mark S. and his pals have never touched grass, so of course they’re odd. What’s their bosses’ excuse?)
And as a mystery box show, Severance digs all the dusty old tricks out of the supply closet. The central mystery — what do they even do all day? — spiders out into tons of other little mysteries, and each time you solve one there’s another deeper one or two or three behind it. Formative traumatic backstories are doled out bit by bit. Portentous names are dropped to get you guessing: “What’s in THE BREAK ROOM?!?”, that sort of thing. Most of the cast literally has amnesia. No one ever responds to a question with a straight answer, no matter how strained and phony the dialogue sounds as a result. The first season does “OMG, she was her all along???” three separate times!
In short (lol), I’m not sold on Severance. But that doesn’t mean I’m not still in a buying mood. I’ve seen sci-fi shows (Foundation), workplace dramas (Halt and Catch Fire), and lampoons of the wealthy (Billions) all improve rapidly in their sophomore seasons. A show that’s all three of those things at once might pull it off as well. But success is a factor against Severance, ironically: Since what they were doing last season worked for so many people, there’s little incentive to change anything fundamental about how it does what it does. As Kier himself put it, you must be cut to heal.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
The post ‘Severance’ Season 2 Premiere Recap: Return-to-Office appeared first on Decider.
