Summary
Severance Season 2 returns in Episode 1 with the same compelling mystery-box approach and an undeniable level of quality.
The most obvious disconnect between the audience and the characters in Severance’s Season 2 premiere is that for them it has only been few a seconds since we left, and for us it has been almost three years. That whiplash-inducing quality is very much acknowledged in Episode 1, “Hello, Ms. Cobel”, despite the macrodata refinement crew reuniting to discuss what happened, in their view, only moments before.
It makes for a genius opening sequence in which Mark S, frantic from his last-minute discovery that Ms. Casey is his outie’s dead wife, discovers not only that the wellness department is now completely missing but that Mr. Milchick has taken over as the head of the Severance department and his macrodata team has been replaced by a new trio of more compliant innies. The knowing “It’s been a minute” line is for the audience’s benefit, not Mark’s.
Already, Season 2 of Severance is dealing with a completely different premise. Thanks to Mark and his team triggering the overtime contingency and allowing their severed personas moments of lucidity in the outside world, Lumon can’t exactly proceed as if none of this happened. But they have to retain some kind of normalcy, which mostly manifests as Milchick acknowledging changes without explaining them, allowing Mark – and the audience – to ponder why Ms. Cobel is no longer with the company, why certain departments are missing, why a child named Miss Huang has taken on Milchick’s former supervisor role, and what can possibly be done about all of these things.
This is obviously the hook of Episode 1. It’s an overload of information with a thousand unanswered attendant questions delivered through the new lens of Lumon blending bits of truth from the outside world with the carefully managed façade of Lumon’s Severance floor. Neither the macrodata team nor the audience have any idea what’s true and what isn’t; whether the guys really are the new face of severance reform, which is reiterated by The Kier Chronicle and then, later, a Claymation propaganda video detailing how the Macrodata Uprising led to countless “positive” – but largely horrifying – changes.
In a very clever touch “Hello, Ms. Cobel” keeps the perspective rooted entirely on the Severance floor. When Mark’s shift ends, we catch back up with him when he returns to work, because it’s obviously an extremely compelling question why his outie would keep coming back despite, or so he’s told, all of his former colleagues having decided not to. And it’s clear immediately in Episode 1 that Severance Season 2 is not interested in answering very many questions this early on.
Instead, a fair amount of time is spent on introductions to the new crew – Mark W. (Bob Balaban – The French Dispatch, Condor), Gwendolyn Y. (Alia Shawkat, who seems to be cropping up in everything since her great work in The Old Man; she also voices the alien owl in Star Wars: Skeleton Crew), an Italian guy credited simply as “Italian Employee” and played by Stefano Carannante, and, perhaps most intriguingly of all, Miss Huang.
John Turturro and Zach Cherry in Severance | Image via Apple TV+
Mark S wastes no time in trying to sabotage his new employees. He isn’t playing a long game, pretending he’s totally onboard with the new status quo; he’s openly rebellious from minute one, which is another smart decision since it fast-tracks the return of his previous team and gives the option Milchick provides them, whether to remain here or leave, a bit more urgency, since we know they’re all well-aware of the things they saw and heard when they woke up in the outside world.
It’s testament to the brilliance of Severance, which doesn’t seem to have been lost in Season 2, that there’s so much character and emotion bundled up in how everyone deals with this. Mark is open about everything, especially about Ms. Casey being his apparently dead wife (though he elects not to mention what Milchick told him earlier about Ms. Cobel having apparently been fired for trying to get both innie and outie versions of Mark in a throuple.) Helly makes up a cover story rather than reveal she’s really an Eagan. But Irving struggles the most.
Irving, you’ll recall, discovered that outie Burt was already in a relationship with another man, and this has torpedoed his entire worldview. It’s up to Dylan, of all people, to sensitively talk him around, and this is a great, low-key scene that imbues the very strange proceedings with real human heart. It’ll be a real shame when poor Dylan inevitably discovers that Milchick’s plans for an outie visitation suite where his innie can see his outie family is a ruse.
Needless to say, the macrodata team get right back to work, though with the intention of continuing to figure out what’s going on, where Ms. Casey is, and how everything is connected. After such a long wait to catch back up with them, we should have expected nothing less.
And Another Thing…
Here are some more details from Severance Season 2, Episode 1 that didn’t fit into the main recap:
- While he’s looking for the wellness department, Mark is being monitored by an unidentified man who’s watching him from the hallway.
- Irving tells Dylan that his outie self has obsessively painted images of what we know to be the testing floor, but he doesn’t recall its specifics. So, we know that Irving has presumably been taken to the testing floor at some point, but he can’t remember it. The last person we saw being taken there, in case you need a refresher, was Ms. Casey. So, this is gonna be pretty important.
