Apple TV’s ‘Severance’ Season Two: Mysterious and Important
The following article contains spoilers of the TV show ‘Severance.’
In 2022, the psychological corporate mystery, “Severance” season one premiered on Apple TV. The show is based on the severance procedure, which represents the idea that people have always longed for: separating your work life and your home life. This total separation of work and home life is all at the cost of making the workers at the company, Lumon, have no memory of the work they do there. When the employees at Lumon separate their minds between their “innies,” which are who they are when they enter the severted floor of Lumon, and their “outies,” which are who they return to being outside of Lumon in their day-day lives, they start to wonder what’s really going on in the other half’s life. While season one includes the very discovery of the severance procedure and the start of the uprising of Lumon workers in the Micro-Data Refinement (MDR) department on the severed floor to figure out what their outties lives are like, season two ties together the now consequences of the employees’ journey to leave Lumon. The second season of Severance explores the theme that a person’s innie is a person just as much as their outtie is.
The second season immediately jumped back into the cliffhanger of a finale, with characters, Mark, Helly, and Dylan all using the “Overtime Contingency” lever in order for them to be their innies in their outties body, experiencing their lives outside of Lumon for the first time. Each innie that went into the body of their outties, experienced mind altering events, such as Mark figuring out that his supposedly dead wife was actually on the severed floor, Helly finding out she’s the daughter of the creator of Lumon, and Irving’s quest to find his love interest from the severed floor. These absolutely dramatic and long-awaited scenes in the last episode felt like it was ripping at the seams, slowly unraveling the truth, only to reveal that there’s even more challenges that the workers of MDR have to deal with. This reveal of the innies meeting the outies lives is just the beginning of the things that MDR will find through going deeper into the severed floor in season two.
The second season opens to just Mark, no other employees returning to Lumon a few months after the incident of the overtime contingency occurred, being informed that the workers in MDR were all fired because of the “Macro Data Refinement Uprising.” Mark is immediately told to return to work and attempt to forget all his friends whom he worked with before in MDR. This scene emphasizes how stale and dehumanizing working on the severed floor is through the lack of empathy Milchick approaches the situation with for Mark, as his feelings lacked to be accounted for losing all his friends. Instead of approaching the situation at hand with a conversation with the employees in MDR, Milchick just sheds light on that they did a bad thing, and are now punished for it by killing off all of the fired employees.
The new season continues with themes from the previous season of self discovery, but also the need to take a look into who their innies really are, and vice versa. In episode four, “Woe’s Hollow,” Helena Eagen, the daughter of the owner of Lumon industries, puts herself in the place of her innie, Helly, while they go on an adventure to the outside world. Fans really don’t know how long she had been her outie, and some have tried to decipher her cruelness and distaste for fun with Helly’s usual likeness. This “Outdoor Retreat and Team Building Occurrence” was meant to help the employees on the severed floor feel more meaning in their daily work lives by giving them another taste of their outings, but it also had the audiences see sides of the innies they had never seen before. Within season one we never saw the outside world, just as much as the employees on the severed floor don’t. This season humanized the innies so much more, and made them seem like they were people just as much as their outies are.
This Wilderness trip ends up becoming incredibly unorganized, with Helena in place of her innie, Helly, sleeping with her colleague, Mark. With the writers including the romance between Helly and Mark increasing throughout the season, this seemed incredibly anticipated, but when it’s revealed Helly is actually her outie, Helena, audiences feel Mark’s confusion and misunderstanding. In season one, the characters would flirt with each other, and had one kiss scene that was brought up super often in scenes, so it was not surprising to see it expand this season. The moment the two shared was incredibly close, and you almost feel so much more sorry for innie Helly because her love with Mark was overtaken by her outie. The episode itself makes characters even more complex than before, seeing as viewers feel the pain of wanting to escape Lumon with the employees. You can feel the hurt and agony of the walls of the Lumon hallways everytime you watch the scenes, almost haunting you like some sort of force of emotion.
In episode eight of the second season, “Sweet Vitriol,” Cobel takes a visit to her aunt's house with an old coworker of hers to search for the paper’s that later reveal that she created the severance procedure, and that James Eagen took credit for her work. Cobel’s attempt to destroy Keir and Lumon showcases a side of Cobel we rarely see. This scene was expected for Lumon to take credit for someone else’s work, as they also push down the feelings of their employees on the severed floor so they can’t quit. The fan base expected Lumon to be snarky in that way, so it’s not that surprising that she stayed with the company for that long and stuck it out to stay with her creation. It is especially surprising that we see Cobel outside of Lumon, and it makes audiences view her as someone with feeling as well. The entire episode felt like a fever dream, with so many of the scenes being Cobel going manic you feel as though you're right there with her.
The final episode of the season was incredibly highly anticipated throughout the fan base and was titled the phrase that all the board members had been talking about Mark completing for months: “Cold Harbor.” Cold Harbor was revealed to be Mark completing each room that his wife, Gemma, who was on the testing floor below the severed floor, would go in and become a different innie within each room.
Each and every scene in the finale was filled with information about things that audiences had been waiting to occur, or theories that they expected to happen in season two. The ending scene after Mark rescues his wife was a pivotal moment in the season, with that very occurrence being exactly what outtie Mark had longed for for so many years. Gemma escaping into the hallway and becoming her outie in the final scene, and seeing her husband run away with some ‘random woman’ was extremely devastating for the finale, but fans hope for Gemma to receive the happy ending in the next season that she deserves.
The season was truly a masterpiece and had little to no moments that were not filled with rooting for the innies to escape severance. Ben Stiller is a film genius, and his care to detail is shown in each and every scene.