With numerous streaming services, on top of countless television channels, constantly producing TV series at a pace seemingly never seen before, it may be difficult for some shows to develop an audience, or even just have their existence recognized. Severance seemed to be one of those shows, yet another of the poorly advertised Apple TV+ programs on a good streaming platform with a surprisingly low amount of members (though that has certainly changed after their original film CODA won the Best Picture Oscar, boosting Apple’s membership by 25%).

The most common phrase associated with Severance was “What’s that?” for a short while. However, the final few installments of the nine-episode first season have generated more appropriately glowing sentiments, like “TV’s best new show,” according to IndieWire, TV Guide, Games Radar, and many others, especially after it’s season one finale from April 8th. This isn’t hyperbole — Severance is a sparkling rarity in a sea of similar series, a unique hybrid of comedy, suspense, art films, dystopian sci-fi, and satire.

The Severance Premise and Anti-Capitalism on Apple

Severance began with a fascinating premise, one which presents a labyrinthine maze that creator Dan Erickson, director Ben Stiller, and the co-writers navigate with curiosity, tension, and humor. The central idea is that a procedure is available which can neurologically separate people from their work selves, so that they never have to experience the doldrums and tedium of their nine-to-five life (or potentially any boring or painful experience).

A chip is implanted inside one’s head; at a certain place within the architectural behemoth of Lumon Industries, when a person (the ‘outie’) is going into work, the chip activates and the person (now the ‘innie’) is suddenly their work self, and never the twain shall meet. The problem is, this essentially creates an unending hell of slavery for the innie, who literally never does anything but work while they’re conscious.

This might sound delightful to some people who relate to hating their job, though that delight and attraction exposes a terrifying question in the economic system — why are we doing things that we hate so much that we’d rather forget them? This happens every day in reality outside of Severance; the chip in the show could very well be replaced by excessive alcohol or television binge-watching, or anything else people do to forget. This is one of many conversations about capitalism that Severance provokes (which is a tad ironic, considering it’s from Apple, one of the most blatantly capitalistic and massive conglomerates).

Related: Is ‘Severance’ on AppleTV+ Firing the Workplace Comedy?

Of course, someone more supportive of the capitalist system (or simply resigned to fatalism) might retort by saying, “That’s just the way it is. Everybody has to work. Nobody likes their job; that’s why they call it a job. Toughen up.” Some people, however, don’t think it has to be this way, and Severance is an excellent manifestation of this exhaustion with the modern state of employment and dissatisfaction with the economic system, the same thing which is causing the so-called Great Resignation in the Western economy and a large worker shortage (which is fortunately producing more unions, such as within Amazon and Starbucks).

While the board and executives of Apple might disagree, the Severance premise creates an intriguing framework with which to deconstruct contemporary careers and capitalism. It’s also practically a psychoanalytical show, bordering on the Lacanian, and delves into the division of the human subject, (“The subject is nothing but this very split. …A speaking being’s two ‘parts’ or avatars share no common ground,” as the Lacanian Bruce Fink writes), but that’s another story.

The Severance Story So Far

Severance begins with the introduction of a new innie, Helly, and the sudden departure of an older one, a friend of Mark’s. Mark thus finds himself managing the four-person Macrodata Refinement department and the new hire along with Dylan and Irving. Helly never warms up to this life of work like the boys do; it’s all they know, but Helly is immediately terrified of the existential nightmare she has found herself in. She rebels continuously, even attempting suicide, but to no avail.

Throughout Severance, her rebellion slowly inspires Mark and the others, with the assistance of a self-help book from the outside and a hand-drawn map of Lumon Industries that Mark’s friend left before mysteriously departing. That friend attempted something called reintegration, which brought together his innie and outie into one whole person again in an attempt to take down Lumon Industries. He goes to Mark’s outie, a depressed alcoholic who has never gotten over his wife’s death. Mark begins a gradual journey to uncover the mysteries behind his severance — what is Macrodata Refinement, and what is Lumon really doing?

Severance grows its characters beautifully throughout this first season, though Mark and his boss Harmony Cobel (an intimidating Patricia Arquette) are the only characters we really get to see outside of work, at least for a while. Mark is perfectly played by Adam Scott in dual performances which tap into each great aspect of his career; he explores his darker and more melancholic work (The Vicious Kind, Tell Me You Love Me) as the outie, along with his sweeter and funnier performances (Parks and Recreations, Little Evil) as the innie.

The rest of the cast is largely explored as innies, with John Turturro giving a subtle performance that veers expertly from comedy to tragedy as Irving, a rule-follower who ends up falling in love with Burt (a great Christoper Walken performance… this show is amazing). When we finally see Irving as an outie, he is a decorated veteran living a lonely existence in a small apartment with his dog, obsessively painting the same disturbing dark hallway (the infamous ‘break room,’ in which employees are tortured and brainwashed) again and again.

Zach Cherry is hilarious as always, playing Dylan here, the inappropriately overconfident employee who prizes his ‘perks’ and performance bonuses, like finger-traps and pencils. Dylan has a startling change when he suddenly wakes up as his innie during an ‘overtime contingency’ (an emergency measure Lumon can use to switch the innie on after work hours) and discovers that he has a son. This overtime contingency (OTC) is the catalyst for the incredible season finale.

The Severance Season Finale

By the eighth episode of the show, these four ragtag office worker outies are disgruntled and disillusioned enough to have developed a plan to use the OTC to wake up as their innies. Dylan stays behind to operate the analog controls for the contingency, while each outie awakens in their respective innies’ lives in order to get help. After the OTC is initiated at the end of episode eight, the season finale opens with the knowledge of limited time hanging over everything, and a constantly pulsing musical background keeps the tension building.


Ben Stiller does a brilliant job directing the finale. The previous episodes were much more visually stagnant in order to match the sterile office environment and depression of Mark’s outie life, with slower editing and longer takes. In the finale, however, the camera moves more than it ever has, and a fluttering editing technique bounces the narrative back and forth from Dylan in Lumon Industries, eventually warding off an attempt to stop him, and the different lives of the outies as they try to find help in their innie forms.

Related: Severance Offers a Chilling Message About Office Horrors

Mark is ultimately able to tell his sister about his terrible existence as an innie, Irving drives to his beloved Burt’s house, and Helly, in the biggest shock of the season, wakes up to realize that she is a daughter of the Eagan family, the people behind Lumon Industries. She is (a little too coincidentally) set to give a big speech, an obvious propaganda ploy as one of the wealthy leaders of the company who decides to undergo severance (as essentially a political gesture) and is now supposed to lie through her teeth about how great and harmless it is, and how wonderful Lumon is.

There are so many moving parts to this masterful finale that it’s difficult to track them all, and you should undoubtedly watch them for yourself if you haven’t seen it or Severance yet. However, there are some huge events and questions which occur in this episode that sets up the recently-announced second season wonderfully, leaving Severance on a practically painful cliffhanger.

Severance Season 2: Mark and Gemma

There is obviously something important about Mark; why else would the big boss at Macrodata Refinement literally live next to Mark’s outie and pretend to be a different person, spying on him all the while? It could simply be that she’s worried Mark will learn too much, especially after his friend’s illegal reintegration. However, Cobel goes so far as to pretend to be a nanny in order to get hired by Mark’s sister, and does just about everything she can to ingratiate herself into their lives. She watches him fastidiously in his wellness session with Ms. Casey, in a way that far exceeds basic suspicion.

The eighth episode ended with her firing, which led to a very real breakdown, but when she becomes the only person to realize the OTC has happened, she feverishly tries to stop it as if she was trying to get her job back. She is obviously devoted to the ’cause’ of Lumon Industries, whatever that may be; she has a shrine to the Eagans and their cult-like company mythos in her home. Whether she’s a true believer or simply wants her job back remains to be seen.

After she races out of the house, Mark is left to talk to his sister and ask for help. He eventually discovers a picture of his deceased wife, a woman named Gemma who just so happens to be Ms. Casey, the ‘wellness counselor’ for the severed innies who has always walked and talked in a kind of daze. The big question is how Mark’s dead wife became a very alive employee working with him at Lumon, and what this signifies about the motivations and endgame for the nefarious corporation. The finale ends with Mark’s innie screaming, “She’s alive!” to his sister before Dylan is tackled and the contingency fails.

Severance Season 2: Britt Lower is Helly Eagan

The surprising reveal that Helly was actually an Eagan the entire time certainly creates a lot of questions. It seems as if her outie put the ‘ploy’ in employment at Macrodata Refinement, her severance possibly being a marketing move about politics in 21st century corporate culture, akin to a CEO eating or drinking their own company’s product. Britt Lower really gets to shine here as Helly, finding her innie waking up in an incredibly tense and nerve-wracking situation but confident enough to keep her cool until she can lose it. Lower was so wonderful in one of the most underrated TV shows, Man Seeking Woman, that it’s a real delight to see her headlining here and doing such an excellent job.

Coben tries to stop Helly from making her speech, threatening her that Lumon will keep her three friends and co-workers alive but torture them endlessly. What Helly’s brief but provocative speech means for season two is a big question at this point; will this result in the sort of unending punishment that Coben suggests? Will Coben get her job back for preventing any further leaks or damage from the overtime contingency? What does this mean for everyone’s outie? Are they (and Mark’s family) now a threat enough to Lumon that they need to be eliminated?

Severance Season 2: What’s Next With the Rest?

The Severance finale sets up some potentially explosive situations for season two. It ends with Irving banging on Burt’s door; Burt has recently retired, and once Irving’s outie comes back in control, neither of them will have any idea who the other one is. Nonetheless, these Lumon employees and lovers have found each other on the outside, and with Irving waking up presumably with no knowledge of how he got there, interesting developments are bound to happen.

Dylan never got to live as his outie, aside from the brief moment in which he was hacked by the OTC in a previous episode. He ends the season being tackled by Milchick, played deviously by Tramell Tillman. There are probably guaranteed negative outcomes for Dylan, so it doesn’t look good for the show’s funniest character. Perhaps he will go where Gemma went, wherever that is; Mark’s wife was taken off their severed floor and relocated somewhere nobody is privy to. Maybe this, and how the supposedly deceased wife got to Lumon, will be explored. No matter how many questions fans may have, or situations they want to see resolved, director Ben Stiller and creater Dan Erickson are aware of the responsibility they have to bring answers and resolutions. As Stiller told Deadline:

I think it’s important for fans of the show to know that the unanswered questions do need to be answered at some point. It’s just, I think we feel this responsibility to do it in a way that is both responsible and entertaining. Part of the fun of the show, I’ve found, is that people have so many different theories and ideas and thoughts about it, so there’s a responsibility you have, and one thing I can guarantee you is that Dan Erickson has thought about this, and thought about it a lot over many years.

In this binge-crazy world stuffed with spoilers, people often want instant gratification for everything. As Stiller says, a prominent aspect of Severance, along with many great shows, is the sense of mystery and unanswered questions which creates a community of fans frequently theorizing and pontificating over the show they love. Whatever answers Severance brings or doesn’t, one thing’s for sure — this was one hell of a season.

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