Severance season two review: Trippy workplace drama deepens its mysteries

The idea that you can achieve a work-life separation is a lie.

It’s yet another thing that we can all feel bad for never achieving, as if somehow there is a better version of your life where you never take your work home with you and you leave your personal issues at the door the moment you log on.

Yet, wellness preachers persist with this furphy that there can be some kind of detachment, and that we could be happier if we just worked at little harder at reaching it. Pffft.

We are who we are. Or, more accurately, we are the whole of who we are, and compartmentalising aspects of ourselves is unrealistic and unhealthy. Sure, maybe that means we bore our friends with our no-context minutiae of some work thing, and we TMI our colleagues about something that happened the night before.

Severance exploited those anxieties and created an extreme, nightmare version of what would happen if someone actually tried, for real, to achieve 100 per cent work-life separation, and who that really benefits. Spoiler alert, it’s not the workers, it’s never the workers.

What’s remarkable is that what could’ve been an idea big enough for one episode of Black Mirror was able to sustain itself for the long haul.

The series returns for its second season this week after a three-year hiatus. You may need to watch a recap video on YouTube to remember all the twists, turns and baby goats from that first block. Especially as those kids come back, and this time, attached to Gwendoline Christie.

The quick recap is that Mark Scout (Adam Scott) is a “severed” worker whose consciousness is cleaved in half so that he has an “outie” and an “innie”.

The “innie” exists only at work – he enters the elevator to leave at five and the next moment he’s back at the office at nine the next morning. The “outie” and the “innie” know nothing of the other’s lives, thoughts and memories.

Mark and his colleagues in the macrodata refinement unit – Helly R (Britt Lower), Irving R (John Turturro) and Dylan G (Zach Cherry) – move around numbers on a screen and is sometimes rewarded for their productivity with timed dance parties and a melon spread.

It’s the epitome of inane, engineered workplace culture, one of the ways Severance has smartly captured the absurdity of the office in a way few have since Mike Judge’s Office Space.

There is something more mysterious going on, and much of the first season involves a slow unravelling as Mark digs deeper, until the final episode when big revelations serve as a jumping off point to where we are now.

The second season is just as, if not more trippy. It has more story and character beats to work with, and Severance is more than happy to swim in those strange waters.

In the first six episodes made available for review, the mystery deepens as Mark returns to Lumon’s severed floor with a specific mission, but can’t actually tell his innie what he needs to do. Conversely, his innie knows something outie Mark needs to hear.

We discover more of Dylan’s outie life and his innie’s desires (which, not surprisingly, extends to more than just a waffle party reward) while Irving struggles with reconciling his separation from Burt G (Christopher Walken).

The question of what Lumon is really up to remains the engine of the piece but the more interestingly elements has always been whether the innies are half a person or if they are whole in themselves, forever doomed to wander the maze of those sterile, fluro-lit hallways, except in one episode this season in which they go on an excursion to an artificial snow-covered environment.

There’s something philosophical about that exploration of what makes us who we are if we deny, forced or not, parts of ourselves, our experiences and our memories.

Severance is taking the long, ambling way around and there may not even be an answer at the end. But, damn, if the journey isn’t a curious, visually arresting and engrossing one.

Severance season two is on Apple TV+ from January 17 with new episodes weekly