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

Mar. 15, 2025

As with the show, there’s also a corresponding “outie,” whose at-home consciousness has been split off from that of the at-work innie. The one consciousness has no idea what the other one is up to, is the gist of it all. However, a little birdie told me that my outie is a slob who eats almost nothing but tinned fish and is working on an unauthorized biography of Ella Fitzgerald’s vocal cords. So, you don’t need to worry about him.

On the other hand,Severance, which launches its naggingly engrossing new second season on Friday, Jan. 17 with a single episode, is all about an innie and his outie becoming acquainted in a dangerously haphazard way.

Lumon, it turns out, has a lot of explaining to do after Mark realizes that 1) a colleague, Miss Casey (the gorgeously enigmatic Dichen Lachman), has up and vanished from his daily work life, and 2) in Mark’s outie existence, Miss Casey was actually Gemma, his dead wife. Add as many exclamation points and question marks as you’d like.

Those are the two major plot strands of the new season, which has sacrificed much of the playfulness of season 1 for some terribly complicated world-building that leads, at least, to one mind-bending conversation between innie and outie. But, as executive producerBen StillertoldThe New York Times,“The show has to continue on its journey and can’t stay just doing the same thing.”

The human face of this shadowy enterprise is a just-promoted supervisor, Milchick (Tramell Tillman, giving possibly the standout performance of the season). Milchick can never quite get the hang of balancing a smiling approachability against cutthroat necessity. This makes him, essentially, the worst of the show’s villains. Then again, you have to feel a twinge of pity for someone faulted in his employee evaluation for not using paperclips correctly.

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To go any 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 suggestion of the ancient myth of lyre-strummingOrpheus, who tried to lead his beloved Eurydice up from the realm of the dead. (A botched job, it turned out. If Orpheus had interned for a summer at Olympus — the Lumon of the gods — he might have understood how to follow rules.)

Like most top-drawer series these days, fromSuccessiontoRipley, Severancestarts with a strong concept and then drives it up, into and along 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 perhaps care about their circumstances more than you care about them as individuals. InSeverance,at least so far, it’s hard to sympathize with innie over outie, or vice versa.

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Yet it’s just this strategy — to justify our small lecture — that manages to end the season with a whopper of a cliffhanger. It’s quite the payoff.

source: people.com