‘Severance’: Everything to Remember About That Wild Ending for Season 2
[This story contains major spoilers from Severance season one.]
Severance returns to Apple TV+ this week, after nearly three years away from the screen. Don’t remember what happened in Dan Erickson and Ben Stiller‘s riveting drama that combines the mysterious intrigue of Lost with the corporate nonsense of The Office? Well, you should really do something about that! If you don’t have time to rewatch season one (which you’re strongly recommended to do before hitting play on season two), we got you covered. Here’s all you need to remember before Severance comes back online.
Severance focuses on Mark Scout (Adam Scott), a widower who copes with his grief by completely shutting it down for an entire nine-to-five work day. He’s “severed,” which means, a chip in his brain blocks Mark from accessing his memories at work. He clocks in, then clocks out, as if nothing happened at all. Except, something did happen: Mark S. took over. That’s the name of Mark Scout’s “innie,” the term the mysterious Lumon Industries uses to describe the severed employee while they’re at work.
When the series begins, Mark S. is the newly minted manager of Lumon’s Microdata Refinement department, responsible for “mysterious and important” work that so far makes little to no sense to the characters, let alone to the viewers. Mark and his colleagues (including John Turturro’s Irving, Zach Cherry’s Dylan and Britt Lower as Helly, the latest member of their team) spend their work days staring at computer screens, identifying numbers that make them feel scared and submitting them into boxes. Why are they doing this? It’s a central question leaving Severance season one, with no clear answer promised in season two.
You Might Also Like
If Lumon sounds really shady as a business, that’s because Lumon is really shady. In fact, the entire world of Severance is a little off. The story takes place in the unidentified state of “PE,” in Lumon’s small corporate town known as “Kier,” which takes its name from Kier Egan, the company’s much ballyhooed founder who died long ago but is immortalized in the Severed floor of Lumon’s “Perpetuity Wing,” a veritable wax museum featuring all of the most important Egan relatives — and oh, they also sometimes host waffle parties here, and by “waffle parties” I mean orgy-adjacent dance parties with a side order of a waffle. Got all that? Cool, me neither!
There’s the mysterious O&D department, Optics and Design, headed by Christopher Walken’s Burt, who may or may not have presided over the disembowelment of an earlier MDR team. There’s the dude who feeds and raises goats, for reasons entirely unknown. There’s the Wellness Center, headed up by Dichen Lachman’s Ms. Casey, a vacant and almost zombified woman who is vacant and zombified because she’s supposed to be dead? Turns out, Ms. Casey is Gemma, Mark Scout’s wife, who allegedly died in a car accident some years ago, yet somehow lives in the depths of Lumon. If all the various ways Lumon treats its employees wasn’t enough of a red flag, the fact that they have a hold on Mark’s dead-but-not-dead wife should be a positively bloody flag.
Over the course of the season, the innies become increasingly skeptical of Lumon, to the point of outright revolution. The core four refiners stage a daring escape using the “Overtime Contingency,” a protocol that allows Lumon to wake up innies outside of work in case of emergency. We learn about its existence when middle-management Mr. Milchik (Tramell Tillman) activates Innie Dylan at Outie Dylan’s house, allowing Innie Dylan to learn he has a son in the outside world. Normally a dedicated employee, Dylan furiously rebels, biting Milchik’s arm during a music dance experience (you’ve seen the GIFs), and telling his workmates about what he saw. Everyone agrees: Lumon sucks and the Innies deserve a chance at a bigger life just like the Outies, so that’s what they’re going to go out and grab.
In the final episodes of the season, the operation commences. Dylan holds down the fort at Lumon, running the OTC while Mark, Helly and Irving visit the outside world. Mark and Helly share a kiss before things go down, and Irving hopes for some love of his own, as he plans to seek out his office crush Burt. Helly, meanwhile, contends with the startling revelation that she’s an Egan, which means her Outie is likely responsible for her Innie’s suffering in a more hands-on capacity than she could’ve ever imagined. Then there’s Mark, who wakes up at a book-release party for his brother-in-law, Ricken Lazlo Hale (Michael Chernus). Mark’s shocked to wake up face-to-face with his boss, Ms. Cobel (Patricia Arquette), who very much shouldn’t be here at all, but is at the party because she’s been spending the last however long pretending to be a woman named Ms. Selvig, who just so happens to live next door to Mark, because … well, stalker much?
During the party, Ms. Cobel figures out that Mark’s innie is online, and she desperately races back to Lumon to shut the refiners’ excursion down. With any luck, perhaps, she might get hired back by Lumon, having been fired from the company just an episode earlier for her weird fixation on Mark and her equally mysterious fixation with “reintegration,” a theory positing severed employees can merge their two selves. (As an aside: early in the season, Mark Scout learns all about this from Petey, an old colleague he doesn’t know at all; Petey claims Lumon is evil, that he’s undergone reintegration, but ends up dying a few short days later. As a legacy, Petey’s arrival in Mark’s life has led Mark to question Lumon’s practices, even seeing some of their shady dealings up close and personal — including but not limited to murder via baseball bat to the brain. Just normal office things.)
Whether Cobel gets her job back or not, we don’t know. What we do know is she’s able to get word to Milchik, who manages to shut down the OTC, but only after defeating the ridiculously strong muscle man known as Dylan G. The season closes with Irving outside of Burt’s home, pounding on the door; Helly at a gala for the Egans, where she shocks the audience by decrying severance; and Mark with a photograph of his outie’s wife Gemma in hand, recognizing her as his colleague Ms. Casey, and bellowing two chilling words: “She’s alive!”
And scene. That’s it. Nearly three years after one of the most aggressive cliffhangers in recent televised memory, Severance is about to flip the switch again, finally answering the fates of Mark, Helly, Dylan, Irving and the rest. Old mysteries will get solved, and new ones will arrive on the scene, with a small army of internet sleuths at the ready to solve them all. So get comfortable, folks. For the next 10 weeks, we have a lot of microdata to refine.
Severance season two releases with two episodes on Friday. The 10-episode second season drops new episodes weekly, Fridays on Apple TV+.
