Life is life. Work is work. Lumon Industries promises the perfect work-life balance for its employees. But their personalities are split with implanted brain chips: Outies enjoy all the leisure amenities, while Innies are trapped in dreary, windowless rooms, a never-ending office life and a cult-like corporate culture.
With this clever concept and tons of puzzles, Severance became an ingenious, funny and disturbing series insider tip in 2022 that made it straight onto our list of the best sci-fi series of the millennium. Starts on January 17, 2025 After an almost three-year break, finally the second season.
After a first impression of the opening episodes of season 2, I can now proudly announce: The 10-part return of Severance is a masterful sequel, which is already a place among the best series of 2025 is safe. Why? You can read about it here without spoilers.
Sci-fi thriller with 1000 mysteries: Severance Season 2 wastes no time
Severance left us with two huge revelations three years ago into an agonizingly long pause. Helly R’s (Britt Lower) Outie not only revealed herself as the heir to the throne of the Eagan empire. During overtime mode, Mark (Adam Scott) was also shocked to discover that the enigmatic wellness counselor Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman) is actually his outie’s wife, who was believed to be dead.
Fortunately, Season 2 doesn’t waste a second exploring the direct consequences of the monumental “She’s Alive!” cliffhanger. In the best Severance style, the season opener takes the Innies’ perspective completely for the first time, while episode 2 is only dedicated to the experiences outside the MDR office.
Even though the mysterious company Lumon Industries pulls out all the stops to restore the status quo in the Macrodata Refinement team and put Mark happily back at work, Severance Season 2 is anything but a mere repetition of the previous recipe for success. With great ambitions and a surprising number of answers Series creator Dan Erickson expands his grotesque narrative world with new settings (inside and outside the company building), characters (including Gwendoline Christie as a menacing goatherd!) and ideas, while from now on the lives of the innies and outies increasingly mix.
Severance gets a lot darker in season 2. But don’t worry, because new episodes await you again numerous bizarre WTF moments and bitter corporate satire. So Lumon twists the MDR team’s rebellion for propaganda and answers harsh criticism of its own system with the promise of comprehensive reforms: Everyone should be happy with new flavors in the snack machine and pointless office games now, right?
Severance gets more complex and better with Season 2
In the second season of Severance the Mysteries more complex and the character relationships especially more complicated. What remains outstanding is the acting ensemble, which now largely has to embody two different and complex roles and can brilliantly ground all the sci-fi madness on an emotional and human level. The only downside: Patricia Arquette’s diabolical Kier fanatic Harmony Cobel unfortunately gets far too short, but is allowed to return with full force on the home straight.
Right from the start, the focus of Severance is on questions about consciousness, self-determination and the self, to which exciting – and in the best sense of the word – perfidious new levels are added in season 2. Conflicts between two opposing personalities who have to share a body are brilliantly negotiated here, for example when Mark, Helly, Gemma and their respective multiple personas an infernal love tragedy find each other again or the dichotomy of a character triggers unexpected marital problems.
The first season already scored points with a sophisticated production that led us through the labyrinth of office absurdities. Season 2 also impresses again with fantastic image compositions, wild camera games and impressive montages. A A special visual highlight is a later standalone episode. With grainy and warm film footage, a bygone time of happiness for the Scout family becomes a devastating contrast to the soulless and sterile hell in which Gemma is trapped at Lumon.
Severance becomes a masterpiece among mystery series
Severance certainly has no shortage of central mysteries, and for three years now, fans have been racking their brains in endless Reddit threads over questions like “What does Macrodata Refinement actually do?“, “What are Lumon’s true intentions with his Severance program?”, “What’s on the ominous Testing Floor?” and “What the hell is with the baby goats in the office?”.
So-called mystery box series often tend to drag out answers to their own mysteries season after season, overtaxing the audience’s patience. It is all the more refreshing that Dan Erickson shows a better way and surprisingly solves numerous central mysteries in season 2 a confident roadmap towards a possible endgame can be seen – but only in the second half of the season.
When one elevator door closes, a new one opens. Severance proves that a mystery series can solve its biggest mysteries without losing any of its mysticism and inscrutability. Because With every resolution comes countless new questionswhich continues to inspire fans to analyze every detail, look for clues and come up with the wildest theories.
Anyone who thought that the finale of the first season couldn’t be topped in terms of intensity and shock value should brace themselves: with season 2, the sci-fi thriller series delivers again a powerful finale that will get your pulse racing, jaws hitting the floor and have you screaming for a third season straight away. Fortunately, this is already in the works and will hopefully not take another three years to arrive.
The 10 episodes of Severance Season 2 will be released weekly on Apple TV+ on Fridays starting January 17, 2025. The entire season 2 was viewed for the series check.