Imagine a world where you get to enjoy life and process its many griefs without the burden of having to worry about work. But in this same world, a part of you is perennially trapped at work — always waking and switching off but never escaping the clinical confines of your mysterious, windowless office space.

Created by Dan Erickson and directed by Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle, the dystopian thriller Severance explores this very horror while making a commentary on the modern maladies and drudgery of the workplace.

The first season of Severance became a sleeper hit last year and might arguably be Apple TV+’s most anticipated show right now. Certainly, no one is sleeping on the second season anymore. Far corners of the internet are already rustling up the craziest fan theories and Patricia Arquette (who plays Lumon loyal Harmony Cobel) has warned us to be “very afraid” about what’s to come in the second season.

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Severance Season 2: The Plot

     Apple TV+

One of the biggest mysteries on the show — excluding all the baby goats, of course — has to be the very nature of the work the four protagonists of the show are meant to do. Mark, Dylan, Helly, and Irving are macrodata refiners at the fictional biotech mega-corporation Lumon Industries. The work they do is allegedly so confidential that they have to undergo a procedure called “severance” to separate their work consciousness from their outside selves, meaning they have to cut off their innies from their outies. Despite this, the actual work is further coded to safeguard it against theft, so much so that it seems nonsensical.

In season two, it might just be revealed that the work is truly meaningless, and the entire thing is an experiment to gauge human compliance. Keeping in line with Erickson’s revelation that the initial ideas for the story came to him while he was working a terrible office job and depressed, this can also be read as a metaphor critiquing the condition of bullshit jobs (as per a theory proposed by anthropologist David Graeber) plaguing the crumbling atmosphere of late-stage capitalism.

If indeed the protagonists were simply test subjects, it will be interesting to see how the rebels navigate life from the events of that season one finale and what steps Lumon takes in retaliation. It will be especially interesting to see what role Helly takes in this whole juggernaut after finding out that she is the daughter of Lumon CEO Jame Eagan and that her outie self underwent the severance procedure to garner public support to legalize it. Will she go against her family’s wishes and legacy now that she has gained a perspective on how barbaric it is to essentially enslave a part of who you are for the sake of productivity (or something far more nefarious)?

The expanding world of Severance will have to solve a few more puzzles. After Mark’s cryptic disclosure to his sister Devon that “she’s alive,” will they be able to connect the dots and figure out that the reason he underwent severance, Gemma’s death, might have all been an elaborate lie? It also raised the question as to why Lumon went to the extent of fabricating someone’s death and how many similar victims there might be. This definitely shatters the facade that Lumon has built about every participant consenting to undergo severance.

Office romances/situationships are nothing shocking. So was Gemma put in Mark’s path as Ms. Casey to further extrapolate some data about this whole human experiment? Was Burt kept away from Irving for the very same reasons? Will Dylan fight harder to see his son again? Will any of these characters come back to work in the macrodata department after the shocking revelations they have all made about their external lives?

The show will hopefully be providing answers to all this and more in the upcoming season.

Severance Season 2: The Cast

     MGM Worldwide Television and Digital Distribution

Adam Scott (Mark), Britt Lower (Helly), Zach Cherry (Dylan) and John Turturro (Irving) will be returning along with Patricia Arquette (Mrs. Cobel), Tramell Tillman (Mr. Milcheck), Dichen Lachman (Ms. Casey/Gemma). Jen Tullock (Devon), Michael Chernus (Ricken) and the iconic Christopher Walken will be back to resolve all the cliffhangers they left us on as well. But that is not all. A star-studded new cast lineup awaits us in season two.

Game of Thrones and Wednesday star Gwendoline Christie will be joining the many players with stakes in Lumon. Joining her will be Bob Balaban (a Christopher Guest and Wes Anderson regular), Alia Shawkat (Arrested Development, Being the Ricardos), John Noble (Lord of the Rings, Fringe), Robby Benson (the original voice of Beast/Prince from Disney’s animated Beauty and the Beast), Merritt Wever (Godless, Roar), Ólafur Darri Ólafsson (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Lady Dynamite) and Stefano Carannante (888, Mirabilia).

Britt Lower had echoed fan excitement and told The Hollywood Reporter at the Golden Globes red carpet that she is geeking out about the new cast, “They’re really dynamite.” But that’s not all. Dan Erickson also teased that he would pitch a role to Barack Obama, “I think he’d be really good, he’d bring some gravitas,” he told THR.

Release Date

A show with the caliber of Severance cannot be rushed. Shooting for season two started in October 2022 and since then we have seen a few behind-the-scenes snippets. As confirmed by Stiller, the shooting schedule is supposed to stretch out till at least May 2023. A seven-month shooting window does not seem surprising, given that the first season took 11 months to complete. So a fully formed, significantly worth-the-wait season might hit the screens sometime later this year, if not early 2024.

Till then, you can rewatch Severance season one, which is currently streaming on Apple TV+.