Why you should watch more Severance
What’s more fitting for your January viewing pleasure than watching people struggle against a corporate hell of soulless lighting, bare sets, and grippingly offbeat performances? The science fiction psychological thriller Severance, a show that began in 2022, has finally begun releasing its second season.
The show follows four people who have had the “severance” procedure—a brain implant that makes them forget everything about their lives outside of work when on the job, and vice versa. Throughout the show, this is revealed to be just one of the many ways that Lumon Industries, their employer, controls the lives of their employees. When I first watched the original season, I was drawn in by its talented performers and tense storyline. I reviewed the first nine episodes last year—let’s pick up where we left off.
Season one of Severance ended on a cliffhanger in which the “severed” versions of the main characters finally escape Lumon to warn their loved ones about the nightmare that they went through under Lumon’s unforgiving leadership. The first episode of season two picks up five months later, with the main character, Mark Scout, waking up back in Lumon, running through the empty white halls in a disorienting three-minute scene.
The set design is as creepily eccentric as it has always been, taking the mundanity of modern architecture and upping the scare factor to eleven. The perpetual cold lighting of the show also serves the atmosphere well, washing the actors out on purpose to fit the dull aesthetic. Set against the warm lights of the real world, the contrast is stark and strongly supports the distinction between Mark when he’s severed and unsevered.
A few things caught me by surprise in this first episode. For one, my personal favorite actress on the show, the lovely Patricia Arquette, has yet to show up in her role as deranged supervisor and stalker Ms. Cobel; she is entirely absent from this reintroduction to the series. The design of Lumon and the overall feel of the company has also gotten stranger than it was in the last season. This episode introduced a nine year old supervisor, a bunch of balloons with Mark’s face printed on it, and a stop motion sequence that pays homage to classic Rankin/Bass Christmas movies, which especially caught me off guard.
Ending with all four main characters choosing to stay at Lumon to take it down from the inside, rather than returning to the outside world, this first peek at Severance’s return has officially roped me in for the remainder of its weekly episodes—at least to see Patricia Arquette.