Severance - Season 2 (2025)
Dear sirs,
As requested, please find enclosed the review of the second season of Severance. As discussed, I do fully intend to return to delivering the novel length work that has recently been published on this platform, however as you wished for some reflections on the second second of this very fine television drama, I have taken the time to give it its full consideration.
Should you have further queries regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact myself.
Yours,
The Author Is Dumb
All the ether you can huff
What do we want from the shows that we watch?
For my wife, it's about relaxing and decompression. She doesn't want to really think, she just wants easy laughs and preferably something she's watched before. I get that, the kids are draining.
I swing the other way hard. I want something that is going to challenge me, something that is unlike something I've ever seen before. Something that is absurd but that gets to a larger point. I want to laugh but it's a different kind of laughter. There's a moment in season 2 of The Rehearsal that may just be the platonic ideal of what I want from television.
Often, shows will be one thing and one thing only. If that is what you want then you'll happily watch it, if it's not then you won't. Which has always lead to a flattening. Procedurals are one thing and a lot of people like them and at the end of the hour everything is solved and it all goes back to the status quo. And you can have a Monk or a House or whatever the character that Dee from Always Sunny is playing on that new procedural show is called but it's all the same. It's one thing. It's safe.
Severance pushed that in its first season. At the time, I reflected that the concept pushed towards straight up horror. But it was more than that. In fact, a lot of my disappointment with the back half of season 1 was that it was able to pivot to a lore heavy thriller. In showing that range that it could support, it meant there was all manner of reasons that you could turn up for the show.
I could watch it for the horror and late stage capitalism corporate satire. A friend could watch it for the thriller aspect. Someone else could watch it for that cliffhanger. Reddit most definitely was watching it to try and left brain puzzle out what it all meant.
She's alive!
Season 2 took its sweet time getting to us. Which seems to be a trend in streaming TV more and more. By all accounts it took them a considerable amount of time to break the season in the writers room, and then during production (which was apparently incredibly expensive - who would have known a show set in hallways would cost so much) they would end up doing things like building sets and then tearing them down because they weren't right.
On the one hand I admire standing by your artistic principles. On the other hand it's like Netflix giving Zack Snyder hundreds of millions of dollars for his latest whatever. That money is just gone from the world now, and for what.
Regardless, it took 3 years to get to us.
So we watched with bated breath to see how it would all unfold. What were the goats? What's up with the weird, sexual 'waffle party' perk? Will innie Mark be able to find outie Mark's supposedly dead wife?
Right from the jump, the season annoyed me. This is my own personal hang up but I loathe shots that are clearly computer generated and couldn't be achieved by a regular physical camera. It's something that's been happening in action movies of recent times and it just hurts my head. I can see the seams and it annoys me and its my own thing and I don't begrudge anyone who is cool with it but the hell people?!
Out of the gate, the show is still in full on mystery box, thriller mode. Innie Mark comes back to work following the dramatic events of the Overtime Contingency (the innies get to experience the outside world essentially) at the end of the last season, and that cliffhanger is over everything. His old team isn't there. Instead there is a new team of innies that he is charged with leading in... well, whatever the hell macrodata refinement actually is.
Honestly, as someone who had issues with the back half of the first season, it was frustrating to come back into that modality and it appear that's where the show was going to live from now on. It's not that there is anything inherently wrong with that sort of a show (after all, I loved Lost) but it's hard to shake thinking that it is a waste of what is a wonderful concept that still had so much space to be explored.
The thing is, you actually loved Lost
Lost is the something like an ur-text when it comes to the mystery box. Which makes sense given JJ Abrams co-created (it's a long story but that's the credit he gets for it) the show and coined the term. The reason that Lost failed at what it set up was because the mystery box, as defined by Abrams, is an inherently flawed device.
What people often forget about that TED Talk is Abrams said it doesn't matter what ends up being the box, just that you make people want to know what is in there. Which, just no. I could derail this whole piece and go on a rant about how dumb head that is but honestly, at this point Film Crit Hulk has written near enough to 100k words on the mystery box and its flaws that if you really want to know then do a Google, you're a grown ass person.
Thing is, Lost didn't fail. It may not have ended up where everyone wanted it to (I for one am in the minority when it comes to season six and the finale but I understand people's frustrations) but you know what, for most of it, you actually loved Lost. Even if you won't say it in polite company anymore, or if you go to dinner parties where you throw around phrases like "Well clearly The Leftovers is Lindelof's mea cupla for the ending of Lost. Beverly, this salmon is just divine, you must give me the recipe."
What Lost did, and why people were clamouring to watch it in the those early seasons, wasn't cause of the mystery (though that didn't hurt), it was because underpinning the mystery was an emotional core that was strong and interesting. Those that had ended up on the island were experiencing, or forcing, redemption arcs. And the quiet genius in that was the show slowly peeled away layers to tell those stories to the audience.
Because that will always be the main thing in stories. You have to find that emotional core, you have to find that cathartic release. Otherwise, it's all just clicking smoke and what the fuck are those goats?
The fuck is up with the goats?
Sensibly, the season does have some answers to some of the questions that were held over from season 1. However, as the season goes on, it becomes clear that the show is dialling in on an emotional core. The lore is still flying thick and fast but it is secondary to the show's larger goals for the season (which ultimately end up being to gut punch the audience).
In my reflection on season one I said that the grand statement of the show was:
"How the dissolution of the loyalty of the worker to a company has essentially resulted in companies torturing their workers for reasons the workers cannot comprehend."
The main thrust of season two is more personal, more insular. It asks what would happen if you tried to sever yourself from your pain. That pain wouldn't disappear, it would be there even if you couldn't feel it. Is it possible to ever truly remove yourself from pain? Are there some pains that would transcend you trying to wholesale remove it from yourself? Would the pain grow?Even if you couldn't feel it. And more than that, would it grow to create its own being?
Welcome to the testing floor.
Welcome to the small lives of Ms Casey/Gemma, outie Mark's supposedly deceased wife. (as an aside, there is something lovely about the show flipping what had looked like a standard fridging of Gemma as the inciting incident for Mark in the story into something much more sinister and layered).
It would have been easy for the show to lean into the mystery element of Gemma and string out whatever was happening with her for the entirety of the season. In many shows that's precisely what would have happened (I can see a five season plan version of a show where season one sets up the mystery of Gemma, and then that gets strung along until the back half of season five).
Instead, the show positions Gemma as the central point around which the season orbits. That isn't entirely clear in the early stages but once we reach the mid point it reveals itself with a startling level of clarity that is largely unexpected.
The Gemma episode provides an in depth look at her relationship with Mark (outie, pre severance Mark). Because it is her relationship with him. She is the central focus, though the audience is likely to read it the other way round given he is our protagonist. We see the good times, we see the bad times, and we see the festering wound at the centre of it all.
And then we bear witness to the sheer horror of her severed experience on the testing floor. This is all incredibly necessary structural work that has to be done for the story to unravel.
That question of pain and who we are without it becomes central to the rest of the characters too. Innie Mark is positioned as a distinct character in his own right, they all are. Innie Mark has things he wants that don't align with what Outie Mark is chasing. Irving (clearly the one that seems to have greater insight into what is happening than anyone else, though this goes largely unresolved by season's end) meanwhile, moves from his golden office drone persona to become something closer to integrated across the season. He is the one that embraces his pain.
Then there is the tragedy of Dylan. If the theme of the season wasn't clear, the show just about shouts it at the audience through Dylan and the family visitation experience. If you were Reddit and you thought you were oh so clever and the show was something to be puzzled out then you would have guessed that it wasn't really outie Dylan's wife that innie Dylan would get to spend time with and that it would be a Lumen plant. I get that instinct. The show sets up the company as being unusually cruel to the workers.
Yet, it also shows a deficit of imagination because it is outie Dylan's actual wife Gretchen. Which is incredibly cruel. Now innie Dylan knows what he can never have because he is not his outie self, it is the moment where it becomes clear to him, not just the audience, that they are separate people who have separate lives. (it also is the moment where Dylan ask if his outie is dumb and Zach Charry's delivery is just chef's kiss). This is a move that doesn't just codify what the show is trying to say but also tortures 3 separate people, 2 of which share the same body.
So there's this box, and you don't know what is in it, cool right?
I'll admit that this season seems almost designed to be gamed out by Reddit. Shows with precision of this level (or where a filmmaker has a reputation for being cryptic - looking at David Lynch and Twin Peaks: The Return) will generally get picked up by Reddit and poured over like they are some divine text where secrets must be teased out.
So it was with Lost. So it was with Westworld. And so it is with Severance. And honestly pretty much any show these days. There is a need to left brain the shows (in fact, left braining media seems to be the default in our present time - its what people fall back to when trying to explain why they think something is bad - see all the 'criticism' of The Last Jedi because... checks notes... "fuel has never been something in Star Wars").
Which means that the reveal of Helena on the corporate retreat and that it was never Helly until that point was less of a twist and more just a confirmation. Which is fine but is one of those things that shows, like Westworld, do sometimes where they are playing a game with the audience but haven't properly indicated that is the case, which ups the shock of the reveal but hollows out its meaning.
Fortunately, the fallout of the reveal is well crafted. Severance demonstrated in season one that it was willing to go down all the nooks of its concept, and it is no different when it comes to the Helena reveal. Innie Mark had sex with Helena but given he thought it was Helly, that brings up questions of consent and assualt. Then Helly finds out what happened, which questions whether innie Mark was falling Helly so much as the idea of Helly and did he ever really know her if he couldn't realise that it was her in that moment (and all the other moments they were interacting). Of course, Helena complicates the theme as well because she is the one that vocalises the theme in the most explicit manner (though we don't know it is Helena at the time) but she is not be trusted. And on it goes.
Of course, Reddit can't just accept that and so they drive themselves nuts theorising. Maybe the goats are vessels for clones of Kier Eagan to inhabit? Maybe Cold Harbor will end up being that Mark has to kill Gemma? Maybe cause in that one scene there was green lighting it means that actually Irving has been a Lumen mole this whole time and they shouldn't have trusted him?
Stop it!
The show lends itself to that theorising but it keeps coming back to that emotional core. Irving gets fired. Which pretty much means that innie Irving is killed. Because Irving can no longer go to the office, he can no longer go to the severed floor, and if he can't go to the severed floor then innie Irving ceases to exist.
Which is why for all that the show leans too heavily into the lore in the early stages of the season, it ends up pulling me back in time and time again because it is always grounded in what does this mean for the character? What does this say about how they have tried to treat their pain?
Irving ends up leaving after reconnecting with Burt (Christopher Walken, his crush from season one). And that scene where he leaves and Irving and Burt touch their foreheads together, the air charged with their attraction, is critical. The assumption in season one was that severance was a complete procedure. Yes, Petey had been reintegrated (or seemingly until it stopped functioning and he died) but it was presented that you got severed and the border between your outie self and your innie self was complete. Information could not pass between those halves of yourself, one had no idea of the other. And it was only through the overtime contigency that the innies gained insight into their outie selves.
But in that moment between Irving and Burt it becomes clear that that is not actually the case. Strong emotions (the four humours), the pain, the love, can cross the severance barrier.
Which turns out to be the core ideal of Lumen and the Eagen family, and the reason for torturing Mark and Gemma. Lumen doesn't just want to create a severed workforce because that would be the ultimate late stage capitalist ideal for the corporate world. Oh no, nothing so mundane for the Eagens. Instead, they want to perfect severance technology to rid themselves and the world of pain.
That corporate satire still lingers in the background. The ridiculous corporate retreat (which like all good corporate retreats is where people get greater insight into each other and people's real, outside of the office selves are revealed), the bizarre and yet normalised corporate rituals, the tokenisation of people of colour (up to and including race swapped paintings of Kier Eagen for Mr Milchick as a gift - holy shit, there's about 3 essays alone in Milchick this season in how he presents and how that turns out to be his authentic self, much to the disgust of the company; about blackness in corporate America; and about the dancing because my god, the dancing). That's all there but the volume is turned down on it in favour of the exploration of pain and the lengths people will go to rid themselves of it.
Lumen was a company that produced ether, a historic anaesthetic. They had company towns that used child labour and exposed them to harmful work environments. Its all there and its always been there.
Macrodata refinement is about building severed personalities for Gemma so that she can be put in extreme scenarios to experience extreme emotions (read: terror) to see if that will trigger memories from across the severance barrier. (and that is the most insane sentence I have ever written). That's what they are doing down there.
And it all leads and cascades to Mark meeting himself. Adam Scott gives an exceptional performance in the scene where he is sending taped messages between his innie and outer self. It's here that we can fully see the separation of the person realised in a single performance. And we realise, that as much as we have understood on a level that they are different people, we've never really, truly seen what that means. We have been rooting for Mark. A singular entity that exists in two locations. As he tries to be reintegrated (which largely gets dropped in the breathless race to the end) we think we know what that means. We see both halves aligned in what they are trying to achieve. We want them to be victorious.
But we were wrong. They are two people. Hell, they look different, and the show goes to great lengths to highlight that to us. And like any two people, they don't necessarily agree on what they want. And the audience falls for it. Because there is a natural inclination that we want the hero to get what he is chasing after, in this case to be reunited with Gemma. To save Gemma.
The show is shouting at us the whole. You know what that means right? If outie Mark gets what he wants, if Gemma is saved, if they go off for their happily ever after, then that means no more innie Mark. There is nothing new in storytelling like the climax being the threat of narrative collapse, that if the threat is realised that means the end of the story (or in the case of TV shows, the end of the storytelling engine). Here it is the same, and that narrative collapse will mean the death of innie Mark. He will be gone.
Don't you care about his office flirtations with Helly? You cared about Jim and Pam, and there was never a threat that one of them would die. But you are happy for all of that to go away? So long as Mark and Gemma are together? That's what you really want?
Because the show has told you that innie Mark cares for none of that noise.
The trip through the layers of the underworld (and make no mistake, the show explicitly positions the levels of Lumen as the underworld) is incredible. As Gemma and Mark have severed personalities that are tied to different floors and it becomes a case of constantly flipping their roles as saviour as they move through the floors, at points Gemma understands what is happening, then it is Mark that needs lead Ms Casey to the exit so that they can achieve their freedom once and for all.
And Gemma exits the building and Mark stops. He turns, and there is Helly (though I'm sure Reddit will theorise for decades on whether it is Helly or Helena). And this isn't outie Mark. Gemma screams at him through the exit to come with her, that this is what they want. But he's innie Mark. He doesn't care for that noise. He is a child. Not long in this world. And his whole world revolves around Helly. So he runs to her and they run through the hallways that is their world. Their faces bright with smiles as alarms blare throughout.
And its another sort of narrative collapse but not the one that was threatened. This is the collapse where the show is over and while it may not be the ultimate end of the story that could be told, it is an end to the show. And it was clearly designed that way in case they did not get a third season. Oh sure, there is more that you could tell but you don't have to. If this was the end, then it is definitely an end, there is no question about that. The severance of Mark has been fully actualised.
His love for Gemma is tested, in the way that the severance barrier is tested for Gemma by making her relive the wound at the centre of the collapse of her relationship with Mark. And they both pass the test. Outie Mark's love for Gemma in no way crosses the severance barrier. Gemma does not even flinch at the sight of the crib. The severance technology has been perfected, and that means that innie Mark will always choose Helly. Gemma is no one to him. Just a fragment of a life that he never lived.
I expect this will frustrate some but I must admit that for all the season's flaws, this is actually an almost perfect moment.
And I will not hear a bad word against it
The season certainly has its flaws. It is by no means perfect. It may not be flawed in the way season one was but there are issues. Elements are introduced but never really lead anywhere of note. Mark's reintegration in particular drives the narrative for a number of episodes and then kind of seems like it just isn't really a thing by the end (and if it was then you'd be robbed of the dueling videos of innie and outie Mark).
There are elements that are just kind of there but its hard to see what value they bring with them. And some of the reveals are the sort of thing where in the moment they feel like everything has changed and you can't believe that you had no idea it was coming but then don't really stand up to scrutiny post moment. In particular the reveal about the goats is kind of just a thing, even if matters around the goats end up being critical (it's weird, and kind of at once one of those really bizarre Lumen corporate things, and at the same time a real failure of narrative clarity).
Like all shows that play in the mystery box space, there is also the annoying storytelling trick of hiding information from the audience for no good reason except to hide information from the audience. So characters will often speak in non sequiturs and riddled dialogue so that the reveal is held back until its time for the reveal to happen.
There is an art in doing that and not showing the seams so the audience knows you're actively hiding things from them (or worse yet, artificially holding information from them because you don't trust your narrative). In a lot of ways, this season isn't particularly good at it. There are too many times where the audience just has to throw up their hands and go "Yeah, I get it, you're not going to tell me yet!"
Also, Ms Cobel designed the severance technology. I'm not sure that actually makes a difference and I'm not sure it was a question the audience was crying out to have answered.
But it can be outrageously funny when it wants to be. And the performances by all remain incredible (Britt Lower is the MVP this season for the subtle physical change she brings to the performance when she's Helena vs when she's Helly but as always John Turturro remains a national treasure).
And for all it can lean a bit too hard into the twists and the games it plays at times, it always, always, always goes back to that emotional core of the characters, who they are and the question of our pain. Season two plays a trick on the audience that is audacious and so unbelievably confident that I couldn't quite believe I was watching it. It maybe wasn't to the level of the final of The Curse but it is doing things at a level of storytelling that I'm not sure many people would even consider trying. And that may mean that some of the audience comes away frustrated. So be it.