Severence Returns

 It's been a long freaking time, but Severence's second season has finally premiered.

Back down in the Severed Wing of the Lumon Corporation's headquarters, we are reunited with Adam Scott's Mark S., in a premiere that focuses entirely on the "Innies." (Maybe.) It has been a while, so to refresh: the Lumon corporation has developed a procedure in which a person can have their memories "severed," essentially partitioning themselves into two people - the "Outie," who has all the memories from their life before this procedure, and who will remember arriving at their office building, getting on the elevator to go down to work, and then will remember coming up the elevator and leaving, the 8-hour workday passing by in an unremembered flash, and then the "Innie," whose first memory is waking up on a conference table in a windowless, labyrinthine, basement office complex, and who experiences only the arrival at work, the work day, and then a departure that immediately transitions back into the arrival for the next day.

Let's do a spoiler cut:

The "Innies" have no real context of the outside world, arriving as a tabula rasa for work. Lumon uses this in order to mold and shape their worldview, creating a cult-like devotion to the company's founder, Kier Eagan, and infantilizing "rewards" and "perks" for compliant behavior that the Innies don't have enough worldliness to recognize as such. Absurd propaganda, like suggesting that other departments are depraved cannibals or mutants, is used to ensure that each small unit of workers only trusts one another.

The abuses are extensive and would violate all manner of labor laws, but because each worker who leaves the building forgets everything that happened that day upon the assertion of their "Outie" personality, they have no reason to believe that anything is amiss.

It's a fascinating premise, and one that creates a conflict within a single individual. Helly, the character whose "awakening" as an Innie we see in the first episode, has a powerful drive to break free of this prison, but we discover that her Outie cruelly disregards any of her feelings, refusing to even view her as a real person. She doesn't experience the pain and confinement - or at least she believes she doesn't because she doesn't remember it.

The first season builds toward a "prison break" of sorts. The main characters - the four members of "Macrodata Refinement" - discover an "Overtime Protocol," which allows the Innies to be activated outside of work. While the notion that this company can control their brains even after they leave the office is horrifying, it also gives them the opportunity to get word out, hopefully to convince their Outies or the people around them of how dystopian the office environment is.

And it is here that a few things are discovered - among the biggest being Mark's discovery that his Outie's wife, whom he had believed was dead (hence inspiring him to undergo the procedure so he could have 8 hours in a day where he wasn't grieving,) is actually alive, and seemingly severed herself, working as the wellness counselor at the office. Helly discovered that her Outie is, in fact, Helena Eagan, an heir to the Eagan family and at the center of the sinister Lumon-Eagan corporate cult.

These revelations, and a few others, are cut short when the jailbreak is interrupted, and the Overtime Contingency is deactivated, and it's a long time before Innie Mark awakens in the same elevator once again.

One of the terrifying concepts of Severence is that, despite the prison-like, dystopian world that the Innies inhabit, they're reliant on it - unable to leave the office (well, except through the OTC) "escape" could potentially mean death. When a severed employee quits, their Innie is never activated again, and thus, leaving the office means going dormant indefinitely.

While Mark S.'s experience from the finale of the first season to the beginning of this one is subjectively instantaneous, he's informed that it was actually five months. And stories about the outside world all come filtered through the bosses at Lumon. The ever-smiling, deeply sinister Mr. Milchick acts as if he is their good corporate buddy, all previous hostilities swept under the rug, and it's from him and him alone that the Innies are given any story of the outside - meaning all those stories are heavily suspect as lies and propaganda.

After Mark is placed with a different team of workers from a different office, he sabotages his work in order to get his old team back, and when they are reunited, Milchick shows them a video that proclaims that Lumon is listening to their Innie workers - addressing their concerns not by any transparency or true movement toward real change, but simply adding new treats and perks to pacify the workers.

They're given the opportunity to quit without approval of their Outies - a far more substantive offer, assuming it's genuine. But again, this is more akin to offering euthanasia than an open door - and once again, one wonders whether the Outies would ultimately be above to overrule this decision anyway.

The only member of the group to seriously consider this is Irving, whose discovery that his beloved Burt is evidently happily married or at least partnered in the outside world was a revelation to him about how the outer world is not theirs. To end his pain, he was willing to end his Innie life, but Dylan's deep fear and grief over this loss apparently convinces him to stay.

Mark still believes he owes it to his wife - or perhaps more accurately the Innie of his Outie's wife - to rescue her and get to the bottom of how Lumon could have a woman who is supposed to be dead, while Helly agrees to stay to help him.

But... what exactly is going on with Helly?

When the MDR team is given a room that, supposedly at least, doesn't have cameras or microphones, Mark shares his experiences in the outside world. Irving is far more vague, but later truthfully reveals what he saw to Dylan. Dylan, of course had to stay behind in order to activate the OTC. But Helly just lies - saying nothing of the gala that her outie was attending as a star speaker, and instead claims that she was just in a boring apartment with a gardener out front (working at night - an unlikely element of the story that Irving picks up on).

It's subtle, but Helly is the last of the team members to go into the office, after a delay. And there are things she says, insisting that Mark's Outie's wife is not his wife. The surface-level interpretation of this would be that Helly, who has developed some kind of romantic bond with Mark, might feel jealous of this connection, but another potential explanation is that this isn't Helly, but is actually Helena Eagan pretending to be Helly - how hard would it be to do such an impersonation when you share the same body, after all?

Now, I'll admit: after spending a good chunk of my 20s watching shows like Lost, I've developed a bit of a skeptical attitude toward "mystery box" shows. But I think there's a distinction to be made: Lost was a show that was all about promising satisfying answers to the questions it raised, and the disappointment of those shows was mostly in how the answers often felt like they came up short.

On the other hand, thinking of the recent passing of the great David Lynch, whose Twin Peaks was maybe the first "mystery box" show (though JJ Abrams had not coined the term yet,) I think there's a space in between to allow such things to exist - if the questions are always presented as the more interesting and focal aspect than any eventual answer.

Honestly, I think Severance is leaning more toward the "we've got big, cool answers for you" model, but there's such creativity in the questions that I'm still inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt. Peeling back the layers of the Lumon corporation, the bizarre painted propaganda, with mystical symbolism that needs no historical basis thanks to the fact that Lumon creates the entirety of history for its severed staff - this is all really great.

And the performances are fantastic. I feel a need to shout out Tramell Tillman's Milchick, whom in this season we see getting promoted to Ms. Kobel's position while experiencing his own very minor (but perhaps indicative) corporate disrespect (the episode's title: "Welcome, Ms. Kobel," is the idle message on Milchick's desk computer.

Given how Kobel's zealous loyalty to the company was rewarded, there's an interesting angle to look at figures like Mlichick, or the bizarrely young new Ms. Huang, a seeming child who has taken on Milchick's old role after his promotion. The corporate hierarchy is one that places the severed workers at the bottom of the totem pole, but I think that the people supervising them aren't actually the masters - they are, themselves, cut off from the corridors of power as well. They're given underlings to feel superior to, but this is what keep them in line. Notably, Mark tries to bypass Milchick and speak directly to the board of the company through a radio in Milchick's office, but he gets no response - and I wonder even if Milchick has the ear of anyone who actually has the power to make significant changes.

Despite coming from one of today's true Megacorporations (and I feel like there's a lot of be written about how today's corporate powerhouses can turn even criticism of their own systems into a feather in their caps) Severance is a potent satire of our own late-capitalist corporate dystopia. Here, we see how an act of true defiance and revolutionary resistance is re-packaged and re-imagined to become part of Lumon's brand. Rather than turning the MDR team into martyrs or even just taboo outcasts, they've instead made them into heroic mascots of the company, allowing Lumon to head off future resistance by turning their rebellion into a story under the corporation's control, sanding down the rough edges and "resolving" the conflict through trivially simple solutions.

(Also, among the new activities the MDR team has earned in the video, I can only imagine that the mirror room and pineapple-bobbing are actually bizarre tortures we'll see in future episodes.)

But, as with many seasons-two, we get a bit of a reset here - the big question is how well the show will be able to keep a forward momentum when they necessarily have to return to starting positions, more or less. I'll be curious to see if the next episode shows us some of the outside world.