Josh Reviews Severance Season Two

I was bowled over by the incredible first season of Severance, hooked in by the boldly original story and tone and the wonderful characters, not to mention the top-notch production values — incredible set design, brilliant direction, a memorable score… it was the complete package!  Then it was a long, long wait for the second season.  It took almost three years from the season one finale to the premiere of season two.  Obviously the lengthy strike interfered, but this is an extreme example of what’s become a huge problem, in my opinion, with streaming shows: an insanely long wait-period between seasons.  I was desperate to watch season two when it finally launched, but first I had to go back and re-watch season one, because I had forgotten so much of what happened.  Could season two meet our expectations after such a long build-up?

For the most part, yes!  Severance season two is unquestionably another spectacular season of television.  I was pleased by how smoothly we were able to re-enter the story at the start of the season, despite the long gap.  And each of the ten episodes this season (and I’m thrilled this season is one episode longer than the first season, even while I still wish it was longer!) was thoroughly entertaining and exquisitely well-made.

As I’d hoped, this season dug deeper into the mysteries of Lumon and the crazily bizarre world of Kier and the Eagans and whatever the heck is going on down there on the severed floor (not to mention the mysterious basement below)!  We got some answers, and also lots of intriguing new questions.  The complex dynamic between the “innies” and the “outies” grew even more fascinatingly complex, as the two versions of characters like Helly and Dylan, and most especially Mark, grew further distinct from one another.  The writing on this show is sharp, and the performances by these actors are all magnificent.  The way the show is able to toggle between absurd comedy and wrenching drama is very impressive.  I am deeply hooked into this show, these stories and these characters.

I’ll also acknowledge that, as the show’s storylines and scope has expanded, a little wobbliness has crept in.  Season one felt to me like a perfect clockwork contraption — especially upon a rewatch — with the story unfolding and the characters developing at what felt to me like a perfect pace.  But here in season two I must admit I started to get a little impatient.  I’m starting to get afraid that, like Lost, this show won’t be able to answer all of the wonderful and fascinating questions and mysteries it’s created.  (In the season finale, the show answers a big question: what is the “Cold Harbor” project that Mark has been working on?  But that answer left me with a billion more questions.  Do the show-runners think they have satisfactorily answered that mystery?  I hope they don’t, but I’m a little worried they have.  I understand the show can’t answer ALL its mysteries, but I’d have liked a little more concrete information in this case.  The show also has shown evidence of the classic Lost problem of characters not asking each other the obvious questions that they would and should ask, all because the writers didn’t want to answer certain questions for the audience.  At the end of the season, I was screaming at the screen for Mark and Devon to demand that Harmony tell them more than the cryptic responses she was dribbling out, while the three of them seemingly hung out together in the woods ALL DAY — PLENTY of time for Mark and Devon to properly grill her on all the questions they, and we the audience, have.)

The show also suffered a bit from the problem — not unusual in this sort of serialized show — of separating its characters.  Much of the magic of season one was in the interactions between the foursome on the MDR team: Mark, Helly, Dylan, and Irving.  But they were separated for much of the season, and that was a drag for me.  Irving in particular was barely present in the season in the last four or so episodes (and was entirely absent from the season finale).  Harmony Cobel was also gone for long stretches of the season.  (The show tried to make that up to us by giving Harmony a spotlight episode late in the season, but that was the least interesting episode of the season for me.  Harmony works best when she’s interacting with the characters we already know.)  I also really missed Ricken this year!  He was such a great source of comedy in the first season.  I’d thought he’d have more to do here in season two, after the revelation that the innies revered his book like the Bible; but instead, we hardly saw him.

So I have some quibbles, and some fears about whether the show will be able to answer all the questions it has so entertainingly asked.  (I am deeply scarred by the total collapse of Lost in the final season.)  But I don’t want to suggest those fears overwhelmed my deep enjoyment of these ten new episodes of Severance!!  I am all-in for this show, and I can’t wait to see more.  (Please lord don’t make us have to wait years for season three…!)

Shall we dig in a little deeper?  Beware SPOILERS ahead!

I thought the season started off with a bang with the first two episodes, cleverly structured so the first episode told things from the innies’ point of view, while the second episode caught us up with the outies’ point of view.  I was impressed with the story choice to have all four MDR innies actively choose to stay on the severed floor and continue working for Lumon.  I was glad they addressed head-on why any of these characters would go back to work after the events of the end of last season.  (Though one of the strange things with the storytelling this season is how we hardly ever saw these four working.  After the steps Milchick took last season, basically locking them in their work room so they wouldn’t get distracted wandering the halls, I was surprised by how the foursome seemed to have free range of the severed floor this season, and we hardly ever saw them actually working!)

I was shocked that the end of episode three saw Mark undergoing the dangerous reintegration procedure (R.I.P. Petey) — I’d expected that might happen down the road, but not so soon!  That was an exciting surprise, but it wound up being the first narrative misstep of this season, because the end of episode three left me feeling like reintegration was happening… but the next episode walked that back immediately, and by the end of the season it still hadn’t happened.  I was really thrown when episode four, “Woe’s Hollow”, picked up with the innie Mark seemingly unchanged.  It was a huge disconnect for me — not only did that episode not pick up from the end of episode three (with Mark apparently reintegrating), but I was unclear when “Woe’s Hollow” was taking place or how it connected with what came before.  How would outie Mark, now undergoing reintegration, agree to his innie having all this extra time existing out in the world, and on this outing?  It didn’t make any sense to me, and my disconnect over that clouded my enjoyment of “Woe’s Hollow”, which was a very interesting and exciting episode.  Had the end of episode three better led into it, I think I’d have enjoyed it a lot more.

The notion that outie Helly had been pretending to be innie Helly all season long — and that she was the one who had sex with innie Mark!! — was a huge surprise to me!  I loved that twist, and I thought this was a cool and logical development; it was exciting to me that the show went there, emphasizing how little control the innies have over their bodies and their lives.  There were all sorts of great, weird little touches on the ORTBO this episode, from the particular look of the Lumon marshmallows to Milchick’s ridiculous claim that they were looking at the tallest waterfall in the world.  (There’s so much to unpack in that statement, and in the casual way that Milchik and Lumon distorts the reality of the world for the innies.)

I loved that Irving was the one who saw through Helena’s masquerade, though I was sad to see the end (for now at least) of innie Irving.  I wanted more of John Turturro this season!  I wasn’t expecting to see Christopher Walken return, but I was thrilled he did, and I enjoyed the sweet/strange relationship that developed between outie Irving and outie Burt.  (And I LOVED John Noble — Denethor from The Return of the King! — as Burt’s husband Fields!)  I was intrigued by the hints that Burt was lying about how long he’d worked for Lumon, and what he did for them.  I’d have liked to have learned more.  And I really wish we’d learned more about what outie (and innie) Irving was up to all along.  (We learned in season one that outie Irving was investigating Lumon, but we didn’t get to learn anything more about how or why.  And with the revelation that Innie Irving knew the location of the mysterious black elevator, it suggested that maybe innie Irving was also up to something more… but for now we just have questions…)

I loved the introduction of Miss Huang this season.  Sarah Bock played this role beautifully.  What classic Lumon weirdness to have this child seemingly in a position of authority!  I loved the way her rivalry with Milchick played out over the season.  I also loved the replacement MDR group we saw in the premiere, including Bob Balaban and Alia Shawkat.  I wish we’d seen more of them!!

Also in that “I wish we’d seen more of them” category: Gwendoline Christie (Brienne of Tarth herself!!) as the strange woman working in “Mammalians Nurturable”!!  I LOVED her beautifully strange first appearance early in the season… and then I was so sad that we didn’t see more of her until the season finale!  (Though her return in the finale was spectacular.)

One of the most interesting developments this season was the exploration of Milchick.  The scene in which he’s gifted paintings of Kier as a black man blew me away.  What a clever way to establish how condescending these rich white Eagans are.  I love how Tramell Tillman played Milchick’s reaction to this, in just the tiniest micro-expressions on his face and in his eyes.  Amazing.  I loved how this colored Milchick’s behavior throughout the back half of the season, culminating in his “devour feculence” put-down of Mr. Drummond towards the end of the season.  That was a great moment.  Speaking of the hulking Mr., Drummond, Darri Ólafsson was terrific as this new Lumon villain here in season two.  I yelped when Mark accidentally killed him when shifting between personas in the finale!!  What a funny/gross moment!  (Back to Milchick, I also loved his awkward banter with the animatronic Kier late in the season… and I was thrilled he got another big dance/musical number in the finale, with the marching band!!  So great!)

While the Mark/Gemma/Helly love triangle was a main driver of the show, I loved the unexpectedly complicated and emotional storyline given to Dylan this season, in which innie Dylan gets to spend time with his outie’s wife Gretchen (Merritt Wever, who was incredibly sweet and emotional in the role).  I loved that Gretchen found herself in a love triangle between innie and outie Dylan!  That was fascinating (and so sad).

But of course I loved the Mark/Helly stuff — their growing bond has been the main through-line of the show since the beginning, and the show always sings when these two are together.  It was interesting to see the huge monkey wrench thrown into their relationship when it turns out that outie Helly slept with innie Mark.  I felt the episodes that followed didn’t quite give enough weight to the trauma that would have meant for both of them… though on the other hand, I was happy to see them back in a good place together in episode six, “Attila”, and their moment of coupling in a makeshift tent in one of the abandoned office spaces was very sweet.  I also LOVED the weird and tense encounter between outie Mark and outie Helly in that episode!!  So creepy!!

Episode seven, “Chikhai Bardo”, was a huge departure for the show and an incredible episode.  We spent the episode focusing on Gemma; we explore her backstory and the arc of her relationship with Mark, and we also discover the horrifying reality she’s living now as a slave being brainwashed into multiple different personas.  (Weirdly, Gemma’s life under Lumon’s thumb strongly resembles what was happening on Dollhouse, the Joss Whedon show from about 15 years ago, which is the first time I ever saw Dichen Lachman on screen!!)  This was a very important episode, because it’s critical that we the audience invest in the Mark-Gemma love story despite having barely seem Gemma for much of the show up to this point, whereas we’d been fully invested in the burgeoning Helly/innie Mark relationship ever since the beginning.  (Once I saw where the show went in the final moments of the season finale, the wisdom of this episode became even more apparent.)  (Also: I loved seeing Sandra Bernhard as the nurse who’s shepherding Gemma!)

So I thought that episode was brilliant.  I was far less taken by episode eight, which was yet another off-brand episode spotlighting a supporting player: Harmony Cobel.  On the one hand, it was fascinating to dive into Harmony’s past and her youth (in the cult of Lumon), and the episode was filled with all sorts of weird bits of business that interested me.  But the episode made me impatient, because despite the huge amount of narrative real-estate given to this story (an ENTIRE EPISODE in a short season), I felt we didn’t actually learn much of significance.  It felt like too much time wasted for too little gain, and I started to question how much time this season kept us away from the main MDR foursome.

I was back in love with the show with the final two episodes, though, which were packed full of fantastic moments, and which raced by at a thrilling pace.  I was breathless all the way through.  All of the character stuff was fantastic.  My only complaint, which I’d alluded to above, was that the answers we got about Cold Harbor were far outweighed by my questions.  What’s so special about Gemma?  How did she wind up in this position?  Why is Lumon doing any of this?  What is their ultimate goal?  How does the weird numbers stuff that MDR was doing connect to creating a new consciousness?  If Mark was the one needed to complete this process, because of his connection to Gemma, then what were the other three MDR workers doing?  We’ve seen that they all “felt” the numbers too, back in season one… so if that’s the case, why was Mark so important this season, while the other three MDR-members weren’t?  I didn’t actually understand any of this, and that was frustrating.  We’re at the point where I want the show to start providing some more substantive answers.  (I’d be interested in getting a clue, from the makers of this show, as to how many seasons they see it going.  I’d like to know how close or far we are from the ending.  That’d be helpful in gauging how much I should be expecting to get answers to all the show’s questions.)

There were lots of great moments in the finale.  The video camera-assisted conversation between outie and innie Mark was a highlight.  I was also thrilled by the succession of Mark-Gemma pairings we got in the episode’s climax: 1) outie Mark and an innie version of Gemma 2) outie Mark and outie Gemma, tearfully reuniting in a very emotional moment 3) innie Mark and Ms. Casey, and finally 4) innie Mark and outie Gemma.  I loved the final sequence, with innie Mark caught between Helly and Gemma.  His choice of Helly, and to continue existing (even if only for another few minutes) made perfect sense to me; it was both satisfying and heartbreaking.  This was a fantastic end to the season, and a great beat from which to propel us into season three.  As was the case at the end of season one, I have no idea what’s next for the show or these characters!!  I love that!

So while perhaps the show showed some narrative seams here in season two that weren’t present in season one, I still deeply love this ambitious and compelling show.  I want more!!  I really hope we will get season three next year…