Severance Season 2 Was a Let Down
Someone has to say it
(Should go without saying, but major spoilers for all of Severance. There’s also a minor Breaking Bad spoiler, randomly enough)
Nobody wanted to be blown away by season two of Severance more than me. I was blown away when I watched the first season all the way back in 2022. It felt like they had caught lightning in a bottle. The show was stylistically singular and lusciously crafted, thematically dense and rich, and above all else, tight. It exhibited original storytelling that fired on all cylinders. It was a perfect mystery, a perfect build of tension, about as close to perfection as you can get, even with three years of hindsight.
The prospect of season two was always exciting, but felt fraught. The three year wait between seasons—due to some reasonable delays (the 2023 strikes) and some less reasonable delays (purported conflicts amongst the show’s creative team)—grew to feel obnoxious. The first season finale left us with such a juicy cliffhanger and myriad other intriguing clues and threads that I was desperate to pick back up as soon as possible. But the longer the wait went on, and the more catastrophizing the show’s relatively small audience did that it may never come back, I started to wonder if I would be content with just the one season. After all, what made that season so exciting was the novelty of it. I’d never seen a show grapple with the theme of depersonalization under capitalism quite this way, and the questions of identity, autonomy, and grief that lie therein. As a pure mystery, season one felt far from complete, but as an exploration of these themes, it was so full and self-assured. I always think of the scene where Helly’s outie rejects her resignation request, telling this version of herself who is trapped in this fishbowl, through a screen, that she’s not a real person, that she doesn’t fully have control of her body, that she’s at the mercy of this strange, antagonistic mirror self. It’s an incendiary scene, one that still sends chills down my spine, and it perfectly encapsulates the driving philosophical quandaries of the show’s premise.
Another reason I was content to preserve season one was the sense of tension that comes with “mystery box” shows like Severance—shows that hinge on mysteries and thus incite mass theorizing about said mysteries—which is that it’s basically impossible to deliver satisfying answers to those mysteries after viewers have pored over every detail. For every tweet or post admiring the above scene and breaking down its complex layers, there are ten posts debating the purpose of the goat department, or what exactly MDR is doing, or why Lumon has kept Gemma alive. Questions that elide so much of the rich character-driven thematic content of the show in favor of cracking some code, which I find to be ancillary.
So that brings us, finally, after three years of waiting and insurmountable expectations, to season two. I’ve already given the game away a bit, but, yeah, this season disappointed me.
I want to be clear that this is not a scathing repudiation of the season as a whole. I still love this show, and there were a lot of things about this season that I found satisfying. In fact I think this season deepened so many of the show’s themes and took them in exciting new directions. As an examination of the self, of identity, and of bodily and emotional autonomy, this show is still head and shoulders above most others. But in terms of its storytelling, and some of the choices the writers did and did not make, this season left a lot to be desired.
It started to nag at me around halfway through, but I think the best way to structure my critique would be to walk you through my experience of watching the season. The first two episodes, while a little slow to start, did a good job of resetting the chess pieces, getting all the characters back to square one under plausible circumstances.
Episode three felt like it was treading water, mostly setting up some of the season’s impending threads. In particular, this episode was the start of innie Dylan’s courtship with his outie’s wife and Mr. Milchik starting to grapple with his position as a Black man in Lumon’s superstructure. Both of these storylines were immediately promising and compelling to me. Dylan discovering the personal stakes of his employment at Lumon was one of the most exciting reveals from season one, and the storyline here with his wife was a brilliant new twist of the screw in the ethics of severance in this world. If innie Dylan kisses his outie’s wife, is it infidelity? Is there not something sort of romantic about his wife falling in love with this unburdened version of Dylan? Who is betraying who in this supposed love triangle?
I also found Milchik’s storyline to be bracing, mostly for the sheer fact that I appreciated the show contending with Milchik’s race head on rather than going the colorblind route (which season one seemed to tiptoe around). Even though this storyline mostly hit one note throughout, it deepened Milchik as a character, served as commentary on symbolic visibility, and gave Tramell Tillman the opportunity to take his performance to new heights. If I have one MVP of the season, it’s surely him. What he’s able to convey with just his eyes, agony, humiliation, resentment, obsequiousness, menace, all at once, it’s marvelous. (Not to mention his incredible physical acting; see below)
But the big headline of episode three was the ending, when Mark decides to reintegrate. As a piece of filmmaking, the reintegration sequence goes hard. A stunning display of editing, detailed and precise acting from Adam Scott, and a culmination of the distinct language that this show has cultivated. The prospect of Mark being a reintegrated character going forward was thrilling; there was a self-assured audacity to the show playing a trump card like this so early on, and it seemed like shit was really about to go off. And then it sort of… didn’t. Mark’s reintegration played a laughably small role throughout the rest of the season. The writer’s left the rules and processes of reintegration just vague enough so that innie Mark could see flashes of outie Mark’s life when the plot demanded it, and then a hard line could be drawn between the two’s psyche’s when the plot of the finale demanded it. I don’t think this show is craven or desperate enough to do anything purely for shock value, but the writers taking such a big swing so early and then doing basically nothing interesting with it was disappointing, and indicated to me a general lack of direction.
Then came episode four which, clearly, felt like a big event. It was hyped up by the cast in press and quickly had lauding it as one of the best episodes of TV of the year. I was a bit more skeptical. I love what the episode ultimately accomplished, and in theory I liked the idea of a change of pace and scenery. But I had this nagging feeling that the conceit of the “ORTBO” (an acronym which, to be clear, I love), and changing the visual language of the show so drastically was a little too cutesy, a little too grasping. It was so transparently an attempt at a “very special episode”—down to the fact that it traded in the iconic opening credits sequence for a melodramatic single “SEVERANCE” title card—rather than a natural progression of the story that I had a hard time buying in. But still, it was effective in the end. The sexual politics of Mark and Helly/Helena’s relationship that this episode introduced, Irving’s stunning dream sequence1, the Helena reveal and innie Irving’s denouement, these are all among the best things the show has come up with. So while I remain a bit skeptical of the format of this episode, I can’t deny the impact it had.
Now would be a good time to bring up the whole Helena-assuming-Helly’s-identity thread which drove this season’s first half. This was one of the highlights of the season for me. This could have easily felt like a twist for twist’s sake, like a contrived wrinkle in the story that served no purpose other than to keep viewers on their toes, but I appreciated how the writers really sunk their teeth into this twist. Helena very quickly became just as compelling and idiosyncratic a character as Helly, and the push and pull between those two characters for control over their shared body was one of the most interesting ways this show has delivered on its central premise. I have my misgivings with how this season turned into the Mark and Helly show, reducing particularly Helly’s storyline to that romance, but as an exploration of identity, consent, of how a relationship changes you or how you may contort yourself into something new for a relationship, it was really fantastic.
Episode six, my personal favorite of the bunch, explored love in the time of severance and the many configurations it can take. Between Dylan and his wife, Mark and Helly, even Burt and Irving, this episode was the strongest and most cohesive collection of individual scenes that the season delivered. Still, there was a palpable lack of rising tension. I was enjoying the ride but I didn’t have any sense of where this was going. Some shows thrive on these little moments between characters and how interpersonal dynamics themselves can feel incredibly high-stakes (like White Lotus), but Severance has conditioned us to look for clues and to expect revelations.
It may surprise you, then, that episode seven, maybe the most climactic and revelatory episode of the whole series, didn’t work for me at all. This episode seemed primed to be The One. The one it had all been building toward. We were finally finding out what was happening to Gemma. And when this episode aired it was widely praised, with people hailing it as the best work this series has produced thus far; the best writing, directing, editing, performing. I wasn’t so sure when it aired, and I’m still not. I can’t deny that this episode was a technical achievement. But then, it felt like such a blatant technical achievement, like they were trying out everything all at once for yet another “very special episode.” It was too hat on a hat, too mish-mash, too much that picture of things that look like nothing. All in service of an episode whose revelations didn’t warrant 50 minutes. This was the point at which I started to grow very weary of how seemingly auteurish Severance has become, and weary of people leading every conversation about the show with “technically marvelous.” I caution to describe anything about this show as style over substance, because as I’ve laid out so far, I think this show is brimming with substance. And yet I found the substance of this very stylish episode to be surprisingly empty and heavily reliant on tropes. The scenes of Gemma and Mark’s marriage are quintessentially “Dead Wife Montage.” The only new thing we really learn about Gemma is that she struggled to get pregnant and had a miscarriage. And then everything that takes place inside of Lumon on the testing floor is basically unintelligible. I suppose we learn that Lumon is testing the severance chip’s resistance to unpleasant and traumatic human experiences2, but still, this is the only bombshell of the episode and it has basically nothing to do with Gemma and everything to do with Lumon.
And to be quite honest, I’m just plain sick of seeing yet another female character whose writing amounts to struggles with infertility. In real life, infertility and struggling to get pregnant is a deeply personal and emotional thing. I can’t imagine how heavy that must feel for every person who has to go through it. This can be portrayed beautifully and sensitively in fiction, or it can be used as shorthand to create traumatic circumstances for a character who is required by the plot to be traumatized in some way. Unfortunately, I think Severance does the latter. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing when I had the realization that this all boiled down to infertility. It seemed like that was all the writers could come up with for their female character who, up to this point, was essentially a blank slate.
That’s not even to say that fertility can’t be explored meaningfully in the world of Severance; it absolutely can. In fact, reproduction is a major theme throughout the show. I don’t know how deep we wanna get into Lumon/Egan lore, but there’s a thick stench of eugenics over the Egan family, and there’s the “she’s one of Jame’s” line in the finale which insinuates a sort of spreading of the seed that the current Lumon CEO is doing. Not to mention severance itself is coded as a form of birth/rebirth. Just like romance and consent, pregnancy and birth are fascinating concepts to consider in a world where severance exists (see the woman in season one who severs just to give birth). And yet, in this episode, the topic was presented in the most boring and predictable way. Gemma miscarries and it leads to strife in her marriage with Mark. I would be moved if I haven’t already seen this story a million times before and if I felt like the writers had anything interesting to say about it3.
In fact the more I think about it, Gemma and Mark both represent the two most played out depictions of grief and trauma for women and men in fiction respectively: this female character is overcome with grief because she can’t have children, and this male character is overcome with grief because his wife died. The way that the show explores that grief is unique, yes, but for a show that can be incredibly layered, I find this to be such unoriginal, first-thought dreck. Not to get ahead, but I let out an incredulous chuckle when it was revealed in the finale that “Cold Harbor,” this thing that everyone had been ominously alluding to all season, the final trial that Gemma has to face and overcome in the hellish maze of her greatest fears, pains, and traumas, is simply an empty white room with a crib at the center. Equally schmaltzy and self-important.
Even when you zoom out, the details of Gemma’s imprisonment within Lumon, such as how she ended up there and what exactly she thinks she’s doing there, are completely glossed over. The reason I found myself lost in this episode is because it seemed more like an exercise of individual ideas and concepts—like severance functioning as a way to weed out painful experiences; like a creepy and predatory Lumon authority figure who seems to be leading the trials on Gemma; like a gauzy, soapy snapshot of Gemma and Mark’s marriage before tragedy strikes—rather than a cohesive story. The labyrinthine testing floor may even serve as a good visual metaphor for the season as a whole. We wander through the twists and turns, through the doorways that lead to nowhere, only to discover fragmented pieces of a larger story, a mosaic that obfuscates more than clarifies the further back you pull.
If episode seven stunted the season’s momentum, the dismal episode eight brought it to screeching halt. But I think rather than criticizing this one episode for being so mind-numbingly boring, for being so laboriously pared back that it circles back around to being overly-affected, for spending forty minutes building to a reveal that a) amounted to only a few minutes of screentime and b) had literally no bearing on anything to come at all, I will dovetail this into a larger observation: I think this season became subsumed by Ben Stiller’s stature.
Season one made such a big impression because of its compelling character writing, penetrative psychological and philosophical inquiries, and fresh take on life (and grief) under capitalism. Season one was clearly a passion project of the show’s creator Dan Erickson, who, unsurprisingly, conceived of this story while working a humdrum 9 to 5. The first season felt so much more precise in its aims. Ben Stiller, the show’s star producer and director, whose name recognition has been an asset of Apple’s marketing campaign and who imbued the show with that signature auteurish quality, has been a wealthy Hollywood celebrity for many years. Let’s just say I felt the presence of a flashy Hollywood figure in this season much more than that of a clear-eyed up-and-coming TV writer who is first striking gold. That’s good in some ways—it’s certainly gotten more eyes on the show and has allowed the show to take bigger risks. But the overall effect just feels emptier.
In no episode was that emptiness more evident than episode eight, aka the Ms. Cobel episode. Don’t get me wrong, it’s also just plain bad writing; the writers clearly had nothing to give Ms. Cobel this season and, while the reveal that she was the inventor of the severance procedure was exciting and shed new light on her character, it’s not like that led her to contribute meaningfully to the finale. Like… at all. But this episode (directed by Ben Stiller) was just dripping in that sense of self-importance, and I found it to be so transparent. Between episodes seven and eight, I was feeling less like these creative choices were being made for the sake of economical, concentrated storytelling, and more like they were trying to give the audience things to talk about, tweet about, theorize about, get viral moments out of. It was a lot of flashy filler; expensive fodder. I found the experience of watching episode eight to be pretty dreadful, and it’s the truest case of style over substance in the series.
The finale brought some great things to the table. Innie and outie Mark bickering through the video camera was such a great concoction of writing, even if that scene dragged on a bit. The marching band sequence was ridiculous in all the right ways, even if it was a very obvious attempt to recreate the irreplicable magic of season one’s Music Dance Experience4.
But the undeniable, no strings attached masterstroke of the finale is innie Mark’s final decision. It tied together the major themes of the season, and then exploded them. The show, in essence, is an exploration of identity and the self (exploring and deciphering “The You You Are”). But I love how this season leaned more into the question of autonomy. What rights are innies entitled to? Not just rights as employees, but rights as human beings with bodies and emotions? Are innies allowed to be selfish and self-indulgent? To act on impulse? Do they have jurisdiction over their own bodies? Of course, their employers at Lumon wouldn’t think so; they wouldn’t regard them as whole humans. Their only purpose is to work. In the finale Helly even refers to her existence as “half a life.” So while innie Mark’s final decision—to run into oblivion with Helly rather than turn himself over to outie Mark’s relationship with Gemma which would effectively be suicide—immediately registers as selfish… surely he has earned the right to selfishness, no? And while it may be jarring to see Helly, who has always led the charge against Lumon’s injustices, taking Mark’s hand as she locks eyes with a desperate and pleading Gemma, has she not earned an ounce of selfishness, too? After everything she’s been through? And really, “selfishness” feels like the wrong way to frame it. I don’t think they were being selfish as much as they were being autonomous, not ceding to their outies, taking control of their own emotions and bodies, laying claim to them for the first time ever.
In the immediate aftermath of the finale, I didn’t conclusively feel like the season was bad. The finale, specifically Mark’s decision, paid off so much of what was set up throughout the season and did so in pulse-pounding fashion. One of the high points of the season for me was the adrenaline rush that came with the second half of the finale and how much it left me with to chew on. Because of this, could I be sure of my overall negative feelings on the season? Was my judgement being clouded by a few clunky episodes? Did it all come together in the end? After taking a little time to sit on it, I’ve decided that: no. It didn’t come together. Or rather, like, one or two things really came together, and the rest totally fell to the wayside. I’m still scratching my head at what the writers did with Irving this season, who has always been my favorite character. The Dylan storyline, while captivating in its own right, had very little bearing on the finale to the point where it was jarring to see him and Helly in the same room again. The Milchik storyline was carried almost entirely by Tramell Tillman’s soulful performance since it didn’t have much of a material payoff. Ricken only showed up like twice. Cobel was a damn mess. So what gives?
In an episode in one of the later seasons of Breaking Bad, there was a random plot line concerning Marie Schrader, Hank’s wife and Walt’s sister-in-law. It follows her, in a bout of kleptomania, swiping silverware and tchotchkes at an open house. By this point in the show, Marie had been pretty sidelined in the story, and since Breaking Bad was so good at tying everything together, I was excited that they finally gave this character something to work with and to see how it would pay off in the grand scheme of things. But that storyline was contained to that one episode and had basically no bearing on the rest of the season. Ultimately it just felt like the writers remembered this character existed at the last minute and needed to give her something to do that wasn’t solely tied to her husband’s story. If I had to boil it down, Severance season two felt like a whole lot of these Marie storylines. Little excursions for characters that we love and care about, which felt in line with their characterizations and provided interesting thematic fodder, but ultimately had nothing to do with the grand design of the season.
This, for me, is the biggest difference between seasons one and two. I mentioned this word above: season one was tight. Every storyline was indispensable. Dylan’s discovery of his home life, Burt and Irving’s romance, Ms. Cobel committing “lactation fraud”, even Ricken’s buffoonery played a crucial role in the innies’ self-emancipation. It was the kind of rising action that plays so perfectly because you can’t feel the gears turning while you’re watching it. Season two never could have replicated this formula, and I wouldn’t have necessarily wanted it to. But what I did want is to feel like these storylines were going anywhere, like they had any bearing on the story beyond just the thematic level. Like they were being written with an end goal in mind. It felt like in the end, the only characters that mattered were Gemma, Helly, and Mark.
Which brings me to perhaps my biggest gripe of the season, the thing that tips out of simply being disappointing or underwhelming and tips into being laughably implausible, the thing that makes season two so much less convincing than season one, which is the revelation that Mark is essentially Lumon’s Jesus.
This is another example of the high concept Hollywood storytelling machinery overtaking the pluckiness of season one’s economy. We’re to believe all of a sudden that Mark is this figure of Christlike significance, who Lumon has selected to lead them to the promised land by perfecting Gemma’s severance chip… I think? Again, the details are muddy. All I know is that when season two kicks off, suddenly the whole world revolves around him. Suddenly he’s Neo. It’s a little obnoxious to me. It raises new convoluted questions that the show continuously elides. It undermines the alchemy that made season one work: the growing bond between the members of MDR as they all start to wake up to the reality of their situation. The realization that your coworker isn’t just your coworker, but a person with compulsions and desires and baggage that they bring to work every day. The messaging of that is so much more potent and authentic if Mark is just another interchangeable worker who starts to understand the degree to which his employers have exploited his humanity by discovering that he is capable of humanity in the first place. Mark and Gemma being these divine, chosen test subjects (on top of the myriad more plot-relevant questions that it raises and then quickly shoos away) takes the human element out of it completely.
But that’s not to say that the season was devoid of humanity. The human behavior of most of these characters is keenly observed and penetrating, and has been throughout the whole series. I mostly enjoyed the experience of watching this season week to week. I think I just felt the need to come out swinging so hard against this season because I’ve grown a bit tired of the effusive, uncritical praise. The stakes for season two were astronomically high because of the wait; no one wants to say that a show that took three years to come out turned out bad. And it didn’t turn out bad! Just… underwhelming. Incredibly effective in parts, downright shattering in parts, hooking me to the screen in parts. But the overall effect was underwhelming. I still love this show, and I certainly think season three can go up from here. In fact season two felt a bit transitional, like the writers resetting the game board before barrelling towards the show’s endgame. I just wish the story in between was as compelling and carefully crafted with as clear a purpose as season one.
Which made me shed yet another tear for David Lynch.
But then, what the fuck was up with those MDR doppelgangers in the weird dark green office?? This is another gripe I have with the season as a whole: for every question that is supposedly answered, we get like ten more questions, to the point where it feels like they’re trying to elude us more than they’re trying to convey a cohesive story.
By the way I’m aware of how insensitive and insane I sound right now. I’m really not trying to be, and as long as we’re comparing this show to other shows everyone is watching right now, The Pitt just executed a storyline about a character dealing with a miscarriage in a way that I found incredibly moving and sensitive. I promise I’m not a soulless monster! These things are very real and certainly have a place in fiction.
For my money still one of the greatest television scenes of this decade, maybe this century, so far. Even just looking at gifs of it gives me chills, it was an ingenious invention!