Severance Season 2 review: back to the office

This review contains a spoiler for the Severance Season 1 finale, and also contains mention of suicide.

War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.

No, it’s not Elon Musk/Donald Trump’s latest social-media meltdown but the doublespeak mottos of the Ministry of Truth, the propaganda machine to which cog in the totalitarian machine Winston Smith is shackled in George Orwell’s all-too-prophetic novel, 1984.

Try as Winston might to resist, Big Brother is watching, with both his abortive attempt to overthrow the Party and his illegal dalliance with Julia doomed to fail.

And yet, resisting the grinding inevitability of dystopia’s despairing engine by embracing hope, however foolish, is the stuff great dystopias are made of, from Orwell’s rat-encaged nightmare to Margaret Atwood’s patriarchal horror story The Handmaiden’s Tale.

Beyond the pitched battle for their protagonist’s freedom, they’re also frighteningly real because they’re far too recognisable, a dual element embraced by Severance showrunner Dan Erickson, who, alongside his exemplary writing room (101), grasped that your standard office’s toxic politics were ripe for the exaggerating.

What would happen if you could escape nebulously oppressive business goals, forever encroaching on personal space by creeping into our homes well after (or before) hours, achieving the mythical work-life balance via an invasive surgical implant designed to split our consciousness in two?

Severance: collegiate quartet

The insidiously mundane Lumon Industries’ macrodata refinement team, a mostly collegiate quartet of coworkers, have acquiesced to this body-horror MacGuffin. As such, their ‘innies’ perform mindless number-shuffling work, the purpose of which they have no more understanding of than their supposedly free ‘outies’, who in turn remember nothing of their working hours.

Only separation has exacerbated the problem as this morally questionable firewall faltered and the team slowly but surely gleaned that the alternative’s not all its cracked up to be. Grieving widow Mark (Adam Scott), realised that his late wife Gemma may or may not be who he thinks she was, that the person who held his role last has been ‘disappeared’, and that his fuddy-duddy neighbour also happens to be his big, bad boss, the ironically monikered Harmony (Patricia Arquette).

While drawn to the more spirited resistance of Britt Lower’s Helly, she struggled with the day-to-day amnesia. A fraying reality fractured by the discovery, after almost taking her own life, that she is none other than the nefarious Lumon CEO’s daughter.

Zach Cherry’s potty-mouthed goofball Dylan just wanted to know more about his young family, while John Turturro’s adorably grumpy Irving fell head over heels for Christopher Walken’s Burt in the corporations’ considerable art collection – a fascination they share with many fascists – only to have his heart broken on both sides of the divide.

Winding towards a jump-out-your-seat jailbreak attempt in the season finale, battling Tramell Tillman’s smiling assassin of a passive-aggressive manager, Milchick, for the truth, it all wound up a lot like Winston’s dilemma. Can you truly beat the system?

Severance: mystery box

There’s always a risk, with a tightly wrapped mystery show halfway between The Office and gloriously oddball ‘60s UK show The Prisoner, that you’ll fast run out of places to go, a bit like Mark’s Doctor Who-like sprint through endlessly repeating corridors at the open of season two.

Thankfully, the six episodes we’ve had a chance to see – half of which are directed by Ben Stiller – avoid the pitfalls of Lost by answering just enough to keep us satisfied while spinning what we do and don’t know into intriguing corners.

Severance: doppelganger

A fun dive into doppelganger territory presents Mark with an all-new team – Alia Shawkat, Bob Balaban and Stefano Carrante – but only fires his determination to get the original gang back together. A demand Milchick seethes at having to facilitate.

Tillman is brilliant at exuding urbane menace even as neither he nor Arquette’s icy Harmony has total control. Or, as Helly’s nepobaby outie puts it, ‘I think you’ve overestimated your contributions and underestimated your blessings’.

There’s a particularly grim tete-a-tete between Milchik and the unseen but oppressively ever-present board’s go-between, Natalie (a delightfully devious Sydney Cole Alexander). He’s perturbed by the board’s gift of art that essentially paints his Black face onto the company’s decidedly white and deified founder, Kier.

Tentatively feeling out if Natalie might be an ally, as a fellow person of colour, only underlines that neither can afford to take a stand, with a timely barbed swipe at the cacophonous DEI battle raging in the US.

The menace of corporate claptrap and the playing off identity is further magnified by the unnervingly grinning presence of Sarah Bock’s Ms Wong, assuming the horror movie form of a preternaturally smiling child as Milchick’s unwanted and overtly underage intern, a running gag. Beware what spills from the mouths of babes …

Severance: banality of evil

An immaculate pairing, Scott and Lower raise the stakes of their putative romance and the curly consent complexities of navigating that via split personalities. Thanks to Helly’s last season outburst, the outside world now sees their innies as front-page news, with Mark’s sister Devon (Jen Tullock) determined to figure out the truth of her brother’s other life.

It’s an unexpected situation that does not please the Lumon board, offering supposedly better working standards on one hand while engineering maniacal punishments on the other, attempting to sandbag the crumbling walls of their malevolent prison.

Underdeveloped in Season 1, Cherry’s Dylan has more to do here as management leans into divide-and-conquer mode, dangling an irresistible carrot that may peel him off from the clan. But it’s Turturro who steals our hearts again, even more so for the megawattage of Walken dimming into the background, leaving Irving’s heart aching.

This all-too-cruel separation is amplified by the surreal scenario of Mark and Helly’s bond, brutally undercut by her unwitting both-sides-now treachery on the outside. Bit by bit, the surreal normality of their over-lit surrounds give way to Lumon’s increasingly dark corners, inching us towards a precipitous drop to its true folk horror heart – watch out for Gwendoline Christie one-upping her Flux Gourmet wildness on that front.

Who will fall on which side when it’s drawn? What’s the end goal, and where do all Lumon’s creepy corridors lead? Where’s Ms Casey (Dichen Lachman)? Was the escape attempt worth it and what’s the ultimate cost? We’re punching our time clock, waiting to find out if they can one-up Winston’s fate in the devastating thirteenth hour.

Severance Season 2 premieres on Apple TV+ on 17 January 2025.

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