Tramell Tillman’s work as Milchick is really extraordinary, isn’t it? To be blunt, this kind of self-consciously quirky character would normally make my skin crawl with cringe, but Tillman makes his every throwback styling choice, every unnecessarily stiff and formal sentence, every bit of tendentious bullshit, every deeply weird thing he does (including authoring the entire “kindness reform” for the severed floor) feels like the product of a three-dimensional (if cartoonishly deranged) person’s mind. Contrast this with Patricia Arquette as Cobelvig, a collection of Disney-villain quirks that never congeals into anything solid. 

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

She doesn’t get caught because she gets overheard plotting with the Board. She doesn’t get caught because she accidentally lets slip that she knows something she couldn’t possibly know. She doesn’t even get caught because she invented a “night gardener” as a shoddy alibi regarding her time on the outside, or because Irving B. has a weird prophetic dream when he sleeps rough in sub-freezing temperatures. 

No, it’s simply being a little bit too mean that gives this impostor away. “What you said to me last night, it was cruel,” Irving B. tells her, his suspicions confirmed by this behavior. “Helly was never cruel.” Indeed, the way “Helly” deflects Irving B.’s accusations by bringing up his heartache over his loss of his office romance Burt G. stands out like a sore thumb in the moment, even before you think through what it says about who she really is. It’s the kind of emotional manipulation we saw Milchick use to get Mark to come back to work just a couple episodes ago — straight out of the Lumon handbook, perhaps even literally.

Shows that try their hand at mystery-box storytelling would do well to follow the example set by Severance in “Woe’s Hollow” (Season 2 Episode 4). It’s much more compelling to let the nuances of performance and writing reveal a character’s layers over time, the way they do in a regular drama, than to constantly pull rabbits out of hats like a stage magician. 

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

Well, that was fast! It was probably inevitable that Severance would, at some point, un-sever Mark and Mark S., the outie/innie pair at the center of the series. But if it went anything like everything else on this show goes, the process would take several painstaking steps over several hour-long episodes, during which time any number of other pathways would open up and get walked down before we made our way to our appointed destination.

Instead, Mark learns he can be reintegrated, agrees to do it, then gets it done in a grand total of two back-to-back scenes at the very end of this episode. Zero to 100, just like that, in defiance of the way this show has told its story since its inception. It’s a surprise that works on more than just an entertainment level, too: If your show is about the tyranny of routine, it’s a good idea to break from routine now and then.

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

But the main benefit of an episode like this is to take us out of the, for lack of a better word, zany world of the severed floor. Down there, Mark S., Dylan G., and Irving B. are basically empty shells, or maybe characters in a one-panel gag cartoon about office life. (Helly R., who never buys into the bullshit for a second, is considerably more vibrant.) Up top, however, Mark is a real guy, a guy who hangs out with his sister a lot and gets real angry about his wife’s death. Irving seems to share his innie’s vocal pattern, but his military background, music taste, obsessive painting of a secret location in the basement, and potential link to anti-Lumon activities mark him as a very different guy from his lovesick but largely comical counterpart. I wish we weren’t being kept in the dark about Dylan and Helena’s lives at home, but at least there’s some dark to explore. I’m interested in these people, not the meticulously constructed world around them.

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

There’s something happening here; what it is ain’t exactly clear. Since it began, Severance has relied on obfuscation as a load-bearing element of its storytelling. Created by Dan Erickson, the show is many things at once — a dystopian thriller, a sci-fi satire, a workplace dramedy, a black comedy about cults, an anticapitalist broadside, an on-again off-again meditation on what we owe the people we love. But it’s stuffed all of those things into a Lost-indebted mystery box, and every time one of its mysteries is solved, you get another three or four mysteries as a perk, or a penalty.

I’m covering the widely beloved show Severance for Decider, starting with my review of the Season 2 premiere.