Despite being Apple TV+’s most talked-about show, Severance has not been renewed for a third season, and this second outing was dogged with rumors of behind-the-scenes disputes and difficulties during its multiple-year production. So let’s say Erickson set out to do what many showrunners have done before him, and crafted a season finale that could make a pretty solid series finale if need be. Frankly, I’m not sure he could have done any better.

I reviewed the season finale of Severance for Decider. It was good!

There’s only one episode left in this season of Severance. Isn’t that a pip? Of the nine episodes that have aired so far, fully four of them broke the mold of the show entirely: The cast is on an outdoor excursion, or Harmony Cobel travels to her hometown, or we get lost in Gemma and Mark’s memories, or we pretend Bob Balaban and Alia Shawkat are on the show now for an hour. All of this has been varying degrees of fun. 

But it might have been more fun than it was wise. This week’s penultimate episode of Season 2 really makes you realize just how much you haven’t learned about what’s actually going on, and how much you haven’t seen the core cast interact, and how much it isn’t like the first season that brought the audience of Apple TV+’s most buzzworthy show to the dance. I’m not sure it’s a tradeoff I’d have made, is what I’m saying.

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

Clocking in at exactly 36 minutes long, not counting the closing credits — there are no opening credits this week — Severance Season 2 Episode 8 (“Sweet Vitriol”) is essentially a three-hander that finally catches up with Ms. Cobel. Our girl Harmony has returned to her hometown of Salt’s Neck, an icy coastal village that appears ready to fall into the sea. Once a Lumon company town — it’s where Kier Eagan met his future wife in the ether factory — it’s now a no-company town: As Hampton (James Le Gros), Harmony’s estranged childhood boyfriend and a dedicated Lumon-hater, sarcastically parrots back to her, “With the market readjustment and fluctuating interest rates, there was a retrenchment from some of the core infrastructure investments.” In other words, fuck you, Salt’s Neck, Lumon has moved on and left you behind.

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

Maybe you want to give the lion’s share of the credit to Dichen Lachman, the strikingly telegenic actor who plays the severed and stranded Gemma Scout/Ms. Casey. Maybe you want to tip your cap to Adam Scott, who traces his character Mark Scout’s progression from happy college professor meeting cute with his future wife to widower finding out the terrible news for the first time. Maybe you appreciate the work of Sandra Bernhard as a scowling Lumon technician, or Robby Benson as Dr. Mauer, Gemma’s torturer and would-be lover during her multiplicitous, mysterious severed simulacra of life.

I submit to you, however, that the real star of “Chikhai Bardo,” an episode destined to go down as one of Severance fans’ favorite Severance episodes, is Jessica Lee Gagné. Believe it or not, but as best I can tell, this swirling, tumbling, brilliantly filmed and assembled episode marks the veteran cinematographer’s directorial debut. From the flips and fades and segues and other weird tricks that mark scene transitions to the high-stakes performance she coaxes out of the actors, it’s hard to imagine a more auspicious debut. 

So why do I feel so frustrated?

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

This is a nice, simple episode of Severance. I mean it! Despite major advancements being made in the storylines of almost every character, there’s very little that’s inscrutable this time around. No mystery men whose faces you don’t see, no new rooms with bizarre new people, no hints at vast reams of new Lumon/Eagan lore. It’s just a bunch of people going through a bunch of stuff and reacting accordingly. At its best, this show is always a drama to be watched, not a code to be cracked. 

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

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.