It Was Worth the Wait

Photo: Apple TV+

All second seasons carry the weight of prior expectations. In the case of Severance, the burden is especially heavy. Many of the shows that have premiered in the last several years have been excellent, poignant, and ambitious; none of them has had the lightning-bolt sensation of crackling, thrilling creative force that came with Severance’s first season. It had the too-rare science-fiction concept that unravels something otherwise inexpressible about contemporary life: characters who “severed” their work and home consciousnesses, intending to create pure separation between those two parts of their lives but actually creating two entirely separate people. There was the totality of the show’s visual conceit fully united with its thematic preoccupations, an interior corporate world that looks otherworldly and bizarre yet more tangible and alive than life in the cold, dark outside. Most enticing, there was a palpable impression of confidence in the storytelling, a calm self-assuredness underneath the superficial oddities. But then there was the long wait for a post-cliffhanger return, an unusually extended hiatus even given the intervening Hollywood strikes. Pressure built up like a whistling tea kettle. That sense of explosive, longed-for release shapes the season-two experience more than may be good for a show previously known for its bolt-from-the-blue arrival.

Viewers who want answers — who long for definitive, clear-cut explanations, for explicit expositional lore drops and puzzle-box plotting — will be pleased, and disappointed, and then intrigued, and very likely flummoxed, on and off throughout the season’s run. But viewers who show up mostly for the impressionistic Severance, who appreciate it from scene to scene rather than for the big What Does It All Mean conspiracies, will find the show back in full force. It has endless unnerving winter landscapes and equally chilly corporate interiors. There are bursts of surprising color, often colliding with violence and emotional upset. Vital for both the plot-heads and the vibes bros, there’s a clear idea of what the show wants to be about, of the specific tensions and unreconcilable conflicts it wants to present for our consideration. And if all the threads don’t entirely come together, and some of the revelations are more muddled indication than meaningful twist, it’s still Severance. There will be sudden offices full of goats where no one would ever expect goats to be.

The greatest relief of the second season is the simple pleasure of arriving back in the world of the show and finding it still exists. Season one had such a specific, dreamlike vertigo to it; any time away from the severed floor creates worry that somehow it won’t exist in quite the same way when you return. But there it all is again, the meticulously crafted four-way desk, the carpets, the disconcerting lighting, the pervasive sense of panic barely papered over with a thin layer of corporate impersonality.

The end of season one gives season two plenty to start from: Its Innie protagonists have finally broken through into the bodies of their Outies, desperate to tell the world about their inescapable nightmare lives. Mark (Adam Scott) found himself at a party and realized the wife he thought had died is actually still alive, somewhere in the dark bowels of Lumon’s severed levels. Irving (John Turturro) has gone in pursuit of his retired love interest, Burt (Christopher Walken). Most dramatically, Helly (Britt Lower) wakes up in her Outie body and realizes that she’s not some nobody corporate drone; her exterior self is Helena Eagan, daughter of current Lumon CEO Jame Eagan. The series, thankfully, is eager to deal with the immediate ramifications and fallout of those events. There’s very little coy footsie business with flashbacks or brand-new characters designed to withhold the stuff viewers actually want to see, and the story moves briskly, even when it’s intercut with a static scene of someone standing outside in the cold, waiting or contemplating or fretting or deciding something.

Severance continues to operate on a level that insists its viewers follow along without too much handholding, a mode that’s relatively rare on TV at the moment. In the first half of the season especially, it pays dividends. Surprises hinted at come to the fore quickly rather than simmering endlessly for a late-season reveal. Intriguing new ideas are introduced in the first half of the season, particularly involving Merritt Wever as a new recurring character. A thread that barely appeared in season one shows up again in full force as a major driver of season two. Fair warning, though: Severance sets a higher bar on what it expects its audience to recall from season one than seems entirely warranted. At least once, a season-two development sent me immediately back to season one, searching for whatever the hell I’d forgotten about that was now presented as vital and obvious. It’s been three years!

One of the season’s best qualities is that it understands how to use an episode, and as a result, a few of its hours are extraordinary. There’s one in particular that’s an instant best-of, and its production alone would justify season two’s existence even if the rest of it were a complete mess. (For what it’s worth: This season contains zero bottle episodes.) But that episodic structure also means some of the season’s wobblier bits tend to clump toward the later half, where standalone-ish installments don’t always nail the balance of character development and plot momentum. As the season continues, it sometimes falls into the trap of over-explaining elements of the story that didn’t need quite that much explanation and under-explaining things the show should really be more explicit about, which leads to a confusing sensation of not knowing when or whether things are muddled on purpose. Disorientation is delicious when it’s deliberate and immensely frustrating when it’s ambiguously accidental.

Through to the end, the series remains at its best in short sequences and individual images, even when the underlying logic of the thing starts to shift and buckle. After the ecstatic culmination of season one, the squishy uncertainty is frustrating at the end of season two, but it doesn’t drag the whole thing down. It just forces more weight onto the parts of Severance that were always more interesting anyhow: its extended metaphor for enslavement, its fascination with what makes life meaningful, and its obsession with what elements of a person are indelible, and what can be wiped away.