In many ways, my experience watching the second season of “Severance” made me feel just as disconnected from reality as the main characters.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the show is pretty good. When I see headlines like “Severance Season 2 Will Blow Your Mind” and “Gripping, Mind-Bending Masterpiece” I get a dissonant feeling. I’ve even seen takes already hailing the show as one of the greatest of all time.
Respectfully, if you think “Severance” is one the greatest television series of all time, you need to watch more television.
In case you’ve forgotten, the show follows a team of Lumon employees led by Mark S who, thanks to experimental technology, have separated their professional and casual lives into two distinct personalities. Whenever they walk into work, their “innie” takes control, and when work is done for the day their “outie” lives the rest of their life. Naturally, this kind of relationship builds to a breaking point, and Season 2 picks up as the Lumon team faces consequences for actions taken during the Season 1 finale.
Right off the bat, the premiere spends most of its runtime reverting the world to Season 1’s status quo. While I understand this creative choice making sense for the sake of longevity, I would have liked to see more consequences based on how Season 1 ended. At the very least, though, it’s hard to imagine them pulling a similar trick for Season 3 considering how Season 2 wraps up.
After Episode 1’s hard reset, the rest of the season spends time introducing disparate plot threads that only occasionally intersect. This is often the case with television, but it especially sticks out once you remember how consistently driven Season 1’s narrative was. In Season 2, the frayed threads feel out of place.
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Another area of concern for me is the mystery. After the Season 2 premiere, I became worried that this show would take a page out of “Lost’s” playbook and just keep introducing mysteries without solving them, theoretically ensuring a perpetual run. The difference is, with “Lost” you get a deep emotional connection to every character, while in “Severance” many characters only have one or two archetypal traits to fall back on.
In other words, a character simply having wife problems can only get you so far.
Bizarrely, “Severance” often reminds me of workplace sitcoms like “The Office” and “Superstore.” Nobody ever seems to get any work done, yet somehow, work gets done.
I wasn’t prepared for the degree to which this season would explore romantic relationships. Due to the nature of the severed employees, one person is essentially two, and this allows for several “love pentagons,” if you will. I suppose you’d be hard-pressed to find another show where that’s the case.
While the first season’s finale was hard to top, I enjoyed the second season’s closing. Mark’s final choice, albeit unsurprising, made sense for his character, and I would be interested in seeing what happens next. Though I wasn’t a fan of the final episode completely neglecting the Burt and Irving storyline that had been building previously.
I’m probably one of the last published writers telling you that “Severance” is worth a watch, but my recommendation comes tempered. I don’t care for every plot point, nor do I believe the mystery elements to be as engaging as they could be, but this is still a well-produced series that, if nothing else, serves as a gateway to much more worthwhile mystery stories.