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TV review: 'Severance' deepens in surreal, disorienting Season 2

Helly (Brtitt Lower) and Mark (Adam Scott) return to work at Lumon in "Severance" Season 2, premiering Friday. Photo courtesy of Apple TV+
1 of 5 | Helly (Brtitt Lower) and Mark (Adam Scott) return to work at Lumon in "Severance" Season 2, premiering Friday. Photo courtesy of Apple TV+

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 16 (UPI) -- Everything that happens in Season 2 of Severance, premiering Friday on Apple TV+, is a spoiler. The surprises are worth preserving because each development further unravels the show's methodical and deliberate mystery.

Season 1 introduced us to the employees at Lumon Industries, where workers undergo a procedure to separate their consciousness and divide their memories of work and their outside life. In the season finale, Helly (Britt Lower) and Mark (Adam Scott) succeeded in briefly overtaking their outside selves to warn the public about Lumon.

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How Lumon addresses this breach is only the first of many spoilers, as surprising developments have unfolded since Helly and Mark's mission.

Season 2 opens with Helly and Mark trying to make sense of the aftermath while still confined inside Lumon. The pair, however, are at odds with their outside selves, known as "outies," who agree to keep sending them back to Lumon despite their escape attempts.

Their re-acclimation to Lumon is disorienting in new ways, similar to when they first awoke after their severance procedure. Characters discover more of the Lumon building, parts of which are just plain surreal and bizarre.

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Each weekly episode reveals enough to entice viewers back the next week, while still maintaining the mystery.

Meanwhile, Lumon does damage control after the "innie" employees publicly sound an alarm about their well-being. Lumon's reaction captures the way real-life companies claim to be reforming, only to sell superficial benefits with insincere corporate-speak.

Lumon's solutions only serve the business and create more problems for workers. In many ways, Lumon behaves like a cult that responds to skeptical questions with a circular logic that doesn't provide any real answers.

Season 2 also introduces new characters, many of whom are excited to be at Lumon. This, in turn, makes it more challenging for Mark to circumvent the protocols that keep the parts of his consciousness severed.

Even returning characters like Irving (John Turturro) and Dylan (Zach Cherry) react differently to the new complications, because every human being is unique. The actors achieve a complex nuance in their performances.

While there is no real-world equivalent of severing one's consciousness and memory, the actors commit to their characters' attempts to comprehend this split in a very real way.

Severance is a provocative science-fiction metaphor for work-life balance, literally separating the employee from their home life. Season 2 explores both the metaphor and the narrative logic to provocative new extremes.

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Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.

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