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Mark Scout holding a red ball in Severance Season 2

Severance Season 2 Stays Tethered to Everything That Makes the Apple TV+ Series Great [Review]

Apple TV+ sci-fi psychological thriller Severance‘s first season is as close to perfect as high-concept TV gets. As such, series creator Dan Erickson had his work cut out with Severance Season 2.

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And like Mark Scout and his fellow innies’ efforts to bring down Lumon Industries, the odds of Erickson and his cast and crew didn’t look great. There were rumblings of spiraling budgets (each episode reportedly cost $20 million), extensive reshoots, and delays that weren’t entirely strike-related. These were all seemingly signs that Severance‘s sophomore outing was in trouble.

Happily, that’s not the case. While Severance Season 2 is at times more ungainly than its predecessor, its engrossing character work and deftly handled mystery box-style plotting keep it tethered to what made the show so great to begin with.

Severance Season 2 picks up where Season 1 left off. Lumon is in damage control mode after the severed incarnations of Mark Scout (Adam Scott), Helly Riggs (Britt Lower), and Irving Bailiff (John Turturro), managed to temporarily “escape” into the outside world. Meanwhile, Mark, Helly, and Irving – along with fellow workplace rebel Dylan George (Zach Cherry) – are struggling to come to terms with what they learned during their after hours jaunt. To say much more risks spoilers; suffice it to say that what follows revolves around not-dead wives, ominous corridors, and (of course) goats.

Related: All Major Actors and Cast List for Apple TV+’s Severance

If this sounds like more of the same, it’s not. Sure, the six episodes of Severance Season 2 supplied to press contain a lot of overlap with Season 1. Unnerving corporate conversations, striking production design and cinematography, and tantalizing mysteries are still the order of the day. And praise Kier for that; Severance wouldn’t be Severance without them. Yet Season 2 is also far more expansive and chronologically ambitious than Season 1, almost to a fault. The deeper into the second season’s run we get, the more time we spend off the severed floor. One installment early on also functions as an extended flashback, resolving some of the headscratchers introduced up front.

Mark Scout and Helly Riggs holding each other in Severance Season 2

The overall effect is that Severance‘s plot feels fuller – and occasionally, less focused – this time around. It’s not quite as funny, either (although it’s certainly weirder). And, after a dazzlingly propulsive opening sequence, its narrative settles into an even more deliberate pace than Season 1’s famously unrush rhythm (particularly the aforementioned flashback episode). But no matter how crowded, dour, or slow the story gets, Erickson and directors Ben Stiller, Sam Donovan, Uta Briesewitz, and Jessica Lee Gagné never come close to losing us. Why? Because they never forget the fundamental truth of Severance: that work (like Hell) is other people.

Related: Severance: When Does the Apple TV+ Series Take Place?

Season 2 may have a borderline unwieldy number of subplots, but it’s hard to complain when that means peeling back new layers of Severance‘s characters. The more we learn about what makes Mark, Helly, Irving, and Dylan tick, the more compelling Season 2 becomes – especially now that the latter trio’s outies are a bigger part of the equation. More than that, the relationships between them are (as they’ve always been) the beating heart of the show. Seeing new sides of Tramell Tillman’s Seth Milchick, Patricia Arquette’s Harmony Cobel, and Christopher Walken’s Burt Goodman is equally satisfying. Despite (or even because of) Lumon’s best efforts, these folks are unmistakably human.

Lorne holding a Lumon-branded bell in Severance Season 2

Naturally, the cast deserves a decent share of the credit for this, as well. Severance‘s main ensemble is uniformly excellent once more in Season 2. That said, if I had to pick some standouts, it’s probably Lower (who gets the most to play with, dramatically), or Cherry and Tillman (benefitting from more screen time this season). Newcomers Gwendoline Christie, John Noble, Sarah Bock, and Merritt Wever leave a strong impression, too. Collectively, Season 2’s veterans and newbies ensure our buy-in never wavers, no matter how trippy proceedings get. We’re invested in these characters, so we’re invested in their world.

Related: Severance Season 2 Release Countdown: Exact Date and Time on Apple TV+

This personal dimension is also what safeguards Erickson and co. against thematic overreach. Season 2 tackles a lot of big ideas; race, religion, agency, exploitation, identity, and the nature of life itself crop up at various points in its 10-episode run. In the wrong hands, this could’ve resulted in a mess of half-baked musings too weighty for one season of TV to handle. Yet by once again using Severance’s satirically heightened workplace setting as a catch-all for the human condition itself, the writers’ room gives themselves license to weave in more themes than most other shows could sustain.

Miss Huang, Mark, Dylan, Helly, and Irving in Severance Season 2

This doesn’t mean that Severance’s second season lacks a clear throughline. When you boil it all down, Season 2 is still asking the same potent question as Season 1: What makes us, us? Is it our hopes and dreams, our memories, our family and friends, or even our jobs? Or something else entirely? Admittedly, Severance Season 2 doesn’t always pose this question as elegantly as Season 1 did. But everything else about this season – its performances, production values, and sheer emotional oomph – are so damn good, you won’t consider quitting for a second.

Severance Season 2 is currently streaming on Apple TV+, with new episodes dropping Fridays.


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Author
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Leon Miller
Contributing Writer
Leon is a freelance contributor at The Escapist, covering movies, TV, video games, and comics. Active in the industry since 2016, Leon's previous by-lines include articles for Polygon, Popverse, Screen Rant, CBR, Dexerto, Cultured Vultures, PanelxPanel, Taste of Cinema, and more.