Here’s the thing — I won’t delay my thoughts on Severance (2022–Present) with some funny, devastating, or intriguing scene from the show to capture your interest. I won’t waste your time here. You’re already interested, and maybe you already know what I’m going to say.
Severance’s second season is impeccable. It’s better than I imagined it to be; it’s darker and funnier, compelling and confusing, and unwinds another mystery as it answers the questions we yearned to understand from its excellent first season. Kier — the mysterious location where the show takes place — expands in the distance but not entirely in our comprehension of its limits, nor in Lumon’s control over it. The love stories grow richer, and the characters more complex.
Last time I wrote about the show, each of the “innies” — or the personalities of the main characters who “sever” their outside brain from the one that switches on when they descend to Lumon’s “severed” office floor — had just begun to grapple with the consequences of their venture into the outside world. The show’s second season allows the innies to see this outside world again, and indeed as viewers, we get to see more of Lumon’s offices than they do. Yet the story’s compelling core mystery still persists: just how far is Lumon’s reach? Now that Mark S. (Adam Scott) has completed the monumental “Cold Harbor” file, the build-up to which creates the tension of most of the season, what role does his character serve for the future of Lumon?
Within these mysteries, where shall I start? Should it be with Helena’s (Britt Lower) perverse entry onto the severed floor to pose as Helly (also Lower), or Mark’s belief in Helena’s performance? What about innie Dylan’s (Zach Cherry) double life, the heartbreaking letter his outie sends him, and the incredible Merritt Wever as Dylan’s wife, Gretchen, herself a complicated and perhaps unsuspecting piece in Lumon’s manipulation?
I could also talk about Irving’s love for (John Turturro) and Burt (Christopher Walken), his fatherly love for Helly, or his clues for Dylan to find out more about the mysterious “testing room floor”—how Irving became the show’s central force before his dismissal from Lumon almost halfway through. And, of course, there’s Mark and Gemma (Dichen Lachman), Mark S. and Miss Casey (also Lachman), and Helly…our new “love hexagon” as Lower described it.
The idea that love — romantic, familial, and platonic — transcends the severance procedure is not necessarily an unfamiliar one. It’s even an idea that Dylan and Helly jokingly discuss in the first season, yet the emotion and its associated camaraderie is the season’s definitive and most elusive theme, one that shifts our view of the show’s relationships from the melancholic, beguiling tone the first season adopted to that of love as a necessity of survival in this new installment.
The most obvious example is Mark’s driving character arc of saving his wife, Gemma, from Lumon’s grasp. We might also see Helena’s infiltration into the innies’ world as a desire to choose a family that protects itself — a stark difference from the cold relationship we learn she has with her father, the company’s CEO Jame. Helena’s selfish decision, however, challenges Mark’s love for Helly, who herself feels betrayed by Helena’s power, influence, and control over her autonomy.
The resulting complications — among Mark and Gemma, Mark and Helly, Helly and Gemma, and Gemma and the multiple innies she was forced to become on the testing room floor — ruptures in the season’s brilliant conclusion. Mark’s final decision in the episode is an act of sacrifice for survival as much as it is motivated by love. All of these decisions and characterizations expand beautifully on the first season’s themes of alienation and control—here rendered through the compelling perspective that our love for each other can be key to surviving that seeming isolation.
Thankfully, we will continue to see these characters in season three, its renewal shortly announced after the last episode’s premiere. Where we might see it progress, however, is just another mystery we have yet to uncover—and hopefully not one that arrives three years later.
Review Courtesy of Arleigh Rodgers
Image Courtesy of Apple TV+