Severance Season 2 Review: Apple TV+ Thriller Goes Deeper, Darker and Wilder — and What's with All Those Baby Goats?

If you are a fan Severance payAn Apple TV+ dystopian corporate fantasy series, you might want to know at the outset that this Season 2 review is written by innie: the bright-eyed, responsible, disgruntled employee of this website’s publisher. And as an innie, I can which are counted on to avoid spoilers. You wouldn’t like them!

As with the series, there is a corresponding “outie”, whose consciousness at home is separate from that of the innie at work. One consciousness has no idea what the other is up to, that’s the essence of everything. However, a little bird told me that my old slime who eats almost nothing but tinned fish and is working on an unauthorized biography of Ella Fitzgerald’s mouthpiece. So you don’t need to worry about him.

On the other hand, Severance paywhich launches its annoyingly engrossing new second season on Friday, January 17 with one episode, about how innie and his friend meet in a dangerously accidental way.

Severance pay Season 2: All About Sci-Fi Thriller Starring Adam Scott and Patricia Arquette

Mark (Adam Scott), whose innie is a respected employee of the mysterious numbers-crunching corporation Lumen Industries, is rocked by a brief but intense spark of reconnection with his other self.

Lumen turns out to have a lot of explaining to do after Mark realizes that 1) a colleague, Miss Casey (a wonderfully enigmatic Dichen Lachman), has up and disappeared from his daily work life, and 2) in Mark’s existence outside the home, Miss Casey is actually was Gemma, his dead wife. Add as many exclamation points and question marks as you want.

That leaves management facing a gift-wrapped human resources crisis that becomes a public relations nightmare when the public senses that the already controversial innie-outie program is deeply flawed in its performance. HQ sets to work to clean up the problem and get Mark back to work on the project known as Cold Harbor. Meanwhile, Mark is determined to solve the Gemma/Miss Casey issue and rescue one or both (preferably both) from Lumen’s maze of corridors and conference rooms.

Those are the two main plots of the new season, which has sacrificed much of the playfulness of the first season for some terribly complicated world-building that leads to, at least, one terrifying conversation between Innie and Outie. But, as executive producer Ben Stiller said The New York Times, “The show has to continue its journey and it can’t just do the same thing.”

Fair. There’s still plenty of funny if disturbing work to be done involving (among other things) an office retreat that looks as miserable as a winter border in Returnee; a department of a secret company that houses baby goats, presided over by a sort of shepherdess (Gwendoline Christie); and the new manager (Sarah Bock) so young that she could have been employed by her Club of babysitters. And someone keeps whistling “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

Adam Scott on Severance. Apple TV+

Severance pay Season 2 trailer: Lumon ‘tightens the leash’ on his inies as they search for the truth about their mysterious employer

However, what you’ve learned about governance is sinister, devious and not fully understood – at least not until the end of the 10th and final episode of this season. It is like an invisible loose chain, filled with poisonous comments from higher ups, and accidentally shared with you, the lower one. Lumen, as you can tell from a quick look at the boardroom business, seems to have grown out of some sort of prairie religion or cult. Its history is represented (and revered) in gruesome large-scale office paintings and the occasional peculiar ritual, such as commissioning a commemorative cast fruit bust for an employee funeral lunch.

The human face of this dark enterprise is the newly promoted superintendent, Milchick (Tramell Tillman, who is arguably the best of the season). Milchick can never quite manage to balance smiling approachability and raw necessity. This essentially makes him the worst villain in the series. On the other hand, you have to feel a twinge of pity for someone who made a mistake in evaluating their employees because they didn’t use paper clips correctly.

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Tramell Tillman as the supervisor everyone loves to hate.

Apple TV+/ Youtube

Going further with the plot risks giving too much away. But we will say this: Mark’s determination to retrieve his wife/colleague from the corporate underworld has a nice hint of the ancient myth of the lyre-playing Orpheus, who tried to bring his beloved Eurydice out of the realm of the dead. (It turned out to be a botched job. If Orpheus had interned for a summer on Olympus—the Lumen of the Gods—he might have understood how to follow the rules.)

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Besides, it’s not a criticism Severance pay point out that very few of the many characters are actually likable, except for the wife of one of Lumen’s employees (probably because she’s played by the utterly empathetic Merritt Wever). But even she commits something that amounts to serious betrayal.

Like most top series these days, from Succession to Ripley, Severance it starts with a strong concept and then builds it up, and with an even stronger narrative. Everyone in this story is given enough of a psychological, motivational nugget to propel them from season to season, but ultimately you may care more about their circumstances than they do as individuals. IN severance pay, at least so far, it’s hard to sympathize with an innie over an outie, or vice versa.

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(L-R) Adam Scott, Zach Cherry, John Turturro and Britt Lower at Severance. Apple TV+

Severance pay He debuts his first shot of Season 2 showing Adam Scott running through the halls of Lumon: ‘Welcome back!’

Nevertheless, it was this strategy — to justify our little lecture — that managed to end the season with a huge success. That’s a good payout.

You couldn’t ask for more from the performers, especially Patricia Arquette as disgruntled manager Harmony Kobel. Speaking in a low, muffled, menacing voice, he sounds like he’s trying to order a hit job while eating a bagel of all kinds spread with cream cheese. And watch out for Robby Benson. He appeared colorless and strangely intense, like an undertaker preparing to place a satin pillow under a corpse.

Severance pay premiering Friday, January 17 on Apple TV+.

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Source: HIS Education