Severance: Season 2

It should perhaps be said right from the start here that I love Severance. It's not like that for everyone. While some may feel that the show holds back too much with key revelations about the most crucial elements of the plot, or are turned off by the suspenseful mix of pitch-black humour and at times almost Lynch-like atmosphere, the overall package, the entire first season, stands as one of the strongest TV series of recent years for me personally.

The second season is currently a handful of episodes of the way through, but I finished the season last night with my girlfriend, who is as big a fan as I am, and as the end credits rolled on the final episode, it was once again abundantly clear that Ben Stiller's dystopian, bizarre, creepy, and funny pseudo-Hitchcock universe is still one of the most compelling you can come close to.

Without giving too much away, Severance's second season picks up right on the heels of the hair-raising finale of the first season. Mark and company finally managed to briefly break down the barrier between their "innie" and "outie" personalities, and spent those few minutes warning everyone they could about what working conditions are really like in Lumon's closed Severance section, where the lift down directly separates employees between a private and a work personality - two distinct versions of the same person, separated by a small device in the brain.

This means that, yes, the first half of the second season is spent almost entirely handling, processing and iterating on the season finale, a move that can typically collapse even the most finely tuned narrative pace. It happens here too, a little bit, and a few episodes in you wish Stiller and company were moving at a slightly more brisk pace. Thankfully it doesn't stay that way, and as the season moves towards the climax (I've only watched six out of seven episodes) we again approach an abyss, rewarding the viewer with a slightly more hair-raising pace.

But most of all, Severance "wins" by giving us a stay in the strange, urgent, and utterly compelling world that gets its central drive from the mysteries that remain unsolved and out of reach. Of course, it can't go on like this, and as the season draws to a close there are still crucial questions about what's really going on. It doesn't seem similar to a Lost-like situation where the narrative structure teases with the illusion of answers, only to drag on a little too long. Quite the opposite. Severance is far more elegant with its narrative bread crumbs, and that elegance weaves itself seamlessly into every dialogue exchange, and across every episode of the new season, too.

That's the show's big draw in general - elegance. Every conversation simmers with suspense, every scene drips with identity and tension. Where we go from here, I simply have no idea, and that's the whole point. It's impossible to say whether Stiller and company can capture "lightning in a bottle" three times in a row, but they've certainly done it again, and Severance remains Apple TV+'s strongest card.