I’m not going to spoil anything because the new season of Severance doesn’t premiere for 10 days. But I want to be clear — the first season of the sci-fi thriller wasn’t a fluke. The Apple TV Plus series burst onto the scene in 2022 with a story about tech workers who were forced to live in purgatory thanks to an experimental procedure that split their brains in two: one who lived a normal life outside of the office, and another who could never leave. It was tense and strange and downright horrifying — and also benefited from largely being a surprise. But even without that, season 2 hits just as hard as the original, pushing further into the dark, weird edges of the Severance universe, while expanding it in fascinating new ways.
Spoilers for the first season of Severance to follow.
As a little refresher, Severance is centered on a tech giant called Lumon Industries, which developed the mind-splitting procedure so that employees can work on sensitive projects in its basement with no concerns about that information getting out of the building. The severance procedure is dictated spatially: as soon as a severed employee gets in the elevator and heads downstairs, they, in essence,...
