the problem with severance is me
Or how I learned to love being the perfect Apple customer.
We're midway through Severance Season 2, and I've lost the plot somewhere between the goat cult and what I can only describe as Bring Your Teen To Work Day: Deputy Manager Edition. My neurons are firing in all directions trying to track secret mothers, second cousins' landlords, and now the precise Kelvin temperature of the perpetually sunny break room. The maze keeps expanding, now with sectors promising "cognitive decompression" that feels suspiciously like further corporate compression, and the cheese remains, as ever, tantalizingly out of reach.
I should’ve seen this coming after that Season 1 finale. The one I rewatched so obsessively I could probably reconstruct the elevator breakdown frame by frame like some sort of grief-induced Zapruder film. When Season 2 finally dropped after three years of theories, I expected we'd pick up right where we left off: Mark's bottomless well of loss, Helly's tailored rage, Irving's artistic fixation with the void. The raw, beating heart that made the mysteries matter.
Instead, we open Season 2 with a six-minute tracking shot of Mark sprinting through Lumon’s sterile halls. But less a sprint for freedom, more a hamster wheel marathon visually reinforcing the season’s new thesis: rebellion itself expands the maze.
I am wading through subplot soup, trying to determine if I'm witnessing a show evolving toward a magnificent revelation or watching it slowly sever ties with its own emotional core. Both feel plausible, which is either brilliant writing or the kind of cognitive dissonance that makes you simultaneously critique something while religiously tuning in every week.
Of course, here I am, still watching, still theorizing. The tension is half the fun, and I'm nothing if not a connoisseur of discomfort (I once sat through an entire New Year's Eve with my ex's family without once retreating to the bathroom to practice my breathing exercises).
Like any good masochist with an Apple TV+ subscription, I'm caught in the gravitational pull of a question that keeps me up at night:
Can Severance keep stacking bizarre mysteries like some kind of metaphysical Jenga tower without crushing the very thing that made us care in the first place—the humanity of the characters beneath all those fluorescent lights?
The cynic in me sees some warning signs. The optimist remembers how Season 1 made every puzzle piece matter.
“the discourse matters more than the ending” is the new entertainment economy
The Season 1 finale of Severance arrived in April 8, 2022, when we were all still emerging from our own strange experiment in bifurcated existence. The endless months of Zoom meetings from our kitchen tables had created a different sort of severance: our professional selves projected through screens while our private lives unfolded in sweatpants just below the frame.
Three years later, that sense of perpetual transition has evolved into something more permanent. We navigate a landscape where uncertainty itself has become our steadiest companion. Our cultural appetite for mystery has evolved from mere entertainment into a kind of existential comfort food. Each new puzzle-box narrative (see: Westworld, Big Little Lies, True Dectective, Russian Doll, The Good Place, Manifest, Mr. Robot, Bodygard, The Leftovers, From, The OA, Maniac, Sharp Objects and endless more in the last few years) offering the seductive promise that if we just pay close enough attention, some grand pattern will finally emerge.
The pleasure isn't in the resolution anymore, but in the sophisticated technology of speculation itself. We've developed an unorthodox fluency in living with loose ends, in finding meaning not in answers but in the elaborate architectures we build while searching for them.
This zeitgeist of perpetual mystery-making feels particularly resonant as Severance enters its second season. The show emerged as a perfect embodiment of our post-pandemic disorientation, but now it's swimming in waters that have grown murkier, more attuned to the pleasures of confusion than the satisfactions of clarity.
severing my own brain to keep watching this show
Five episodes into Severance Season 2, and my engagement feels less like critical viewership. Lumon’s reintegration protocol performed on myself, if you will.
Have I become what the show warns against, a consumer of corporate puzzles, mistaking the act of decoding for actual understanding?
Am I severed from the very soul of the show I initially admired?
In my defense, Severance makes obsession easy. The visual language keeps tightening its grip with those endless corridors saturated in institutional blue, the symmetrical streets under permanent winter, Helly's dresses, the balloons that mock gravity with their perfect stillness.
Ben Stiller directs every frame as if Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch had a baby and that baby grew up to make anti-corporate horror. Severed floor 2.0? Spatial shrink wrap, pure and simple. Claustrophobia, amplified. That Steadicam? Not drift. Stalk. A visual skin-crawl, subliminal itch designed to lock you in place. The sound? Nursery rhyme death marches, basslines from the abyss. Bin the atmosphere analysis. This is sonic surgery, less about feeling, more about a rhythmic lockdown of your…concentration.
But something hit me during the ORTBO episode in particular, that made me sit up from my note-taking stupor. The moment Irving confronted Helena-masquerading-as-Helly, threatening to drown her unless she confessed, I witnessed the exact kind of narrative tension that made Season 1 impossible to shake off. Not just because John Turturro delivered that threat with Richard III level of mania, but because the scene hinged on actual emotional stakes: Irving's desperate need to protect his friends, Helena's mask slipping to reveal genuine fear, Mark's dawning horror at having been deceived. For one electric minute, all the show's elements snapped back into insane focus.
That’s what I want(ed) more of from the show. I find myself missing the elegant simplicity of its first chapter. Surreal cave excursions fill screen time that once belonged to the raw psychological terror of workplace alienation. The mythology is all-domineering. My favorite severed employees who once navigated their fractured existence with urgency now often drift through expanded storylines with strange passivity. As RogerEbert.com puts it, "It's a balance, and the scales are out of whack enough that I too often questioned why I should care – a feeling I never had in season one."
My attachment to the show’s characters doesn’t help. Patricia Arquette and Christopher Walken barely appear in the first half (a waste of two actors who brought such tremendous menace and vulnerability to Season 1). Mark's emotions flatten when facing revelations that should shatter him completely (which is fine but in this case, it feels like an out-of-character move). Lumon faced public exposure last season yet continues operating with suspiciously minimal consequences. Forbes critic Erik Kain describes the season as "more claustrophobic and frightening but also slower and less gripping than Season 1.”
My brain won't let any of the Important and Mysterious™ threads go either: Why does Helly's wardrobe now exclusively consist of various shades of corporate submission? What turned Irving's Outie into an obsessive painter of void-black corridors? Will anyone ever explain why Ms. Cobel owns more cardigans than a Lutheran choir director?
The Zeigarnik Effect explains why I can't stop cataloging these loose threads. My brain screams for closure like a toddler denied dessert but there are times where I feel that Season 2 is, like The New Yorker states, "losing itself in abstract ethical conundrums and rote emotional ones”. When Mark tells Helly post-Helena that he barely recognizes her, I want to reach through the screen and tell him: buddy, I know exactly how you feel.
severance and the iron law of narrative expansion
The Iron Law of Oligarchy sounds like something dreamed up by a German sociologist with an appetite for existential dread, which is exactly what it is. Robert Michels spent years studying socialist parties before dropping his theoretical bomb in 1911: organizations inevitably betray their original mission by becoming enslaved to their own administrative apparatus. The ruling structure mutates into an oligarchy, a self-perpetuating elite more invested in maintaining its power than serving its founding purpose.
The absolute mordancy of Michels' theory is how it manifests beyond bureaucracies: in art, in relationships, in any system that grows beyond its intimate origins. Netflix began as a DVD-by-mail romance for cinephiles before algorithm-steering turned it into the equivalent of a studio executive who thinks "content" is an acceptable synonym for storytelling. WeWork's Adam Neumann preached about elevating global consciousness while turning office space into a pyramid scheme with kombucha taps. Pixar, that bastion of storytelling purity, now churns out prequels and sequels like a content mill with really good rendering software. Form devours function with the impersonal appetite of an amoeba.
Television might be the most susceptible medium to this institutional drift. The demands of serialization, maintaining audience investment, justifying production costs, feeding the streaming beast, create the perfect conditions for narrative bloat.
At Lumon, this manifests in departments monitoring departments, in rituals that exist only to spawn more rituals. The vertigo of analyzing Severance Season 2 through Michels' lens stems from recognizing how a show about corporate alienation might be performing its own version of institutional evolution. The expanding mythology, the multiplication of mysteries, the elevation of style, these could read as symptoms of narrative entropy OR as the most sophisticated critique of institutional bloat ever attempted in prestige television (and you have to hope it’s the latter).
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I've watched enough Haneke films to know when I'm being implicated in my own viewing habits (and enough Buñuel to know when absurdism is actually a scalpel). So what if the show's evolution into architectural perfection (more pristine than Barry Lyndon, more mathematically exact than Mondrian art) is actually a mirror aimed straight at our faces? I have this sneaky suspicion (which is the optimistic version btw!) that Severance might be performing its own version of institutional evolution.
four possible futures for a show too smart for its own good
The thing about institutional evolution is that it rarely announces its destination. One day you're a scrappy startup with bean bags and a manifesto, the next you're Meta-morphosing Instagram into a TikTok clone because the algorithm demands teenage sacrifice. So let's play out some possible endgames for where this narrative oligarchy of Severance might lead us.
Scenario #1: Severance becomes a mind-game fluke
You know that moment in a relationship when you realize you're dating someone who's less interested in emotional intimacy than in making you solve elaborate treasure hunts for your anniversary gift? That’s the darkest timeline scenario of where Severance would end up in. Becoming so enamored with its own puzzle-making that the mystery becomes both medium and message.
Thomas Elsaesser coined a term for this: the mind-game narrative, where complexity isn't just style but subject. The screen becomes a puzzle box, each frame loaded with potential clues, each scene a new layer of reality to decode. Unreliable narrators guide us through shifting timelines while identity splinters across multiple planes of existence.
The perpetuity wing's oddly specific architectural details, weirdly ritualistic movements in O&D's testing protocols, even the way certain scenes mirror each other across episodes —these would not just be world-building flourishes. They would turn Severance itself into an elaborate psychological experiment, making us process information the way Lumon's employees do: without context, without emotional anchors, desperately hunting for patterns in institutional noise. The mystery would metastasize, consuming character development and emotional stakes until we're all essentially severed viewers, obsessing over plot mechanics while forgetting why we cared about Burt or Irving all along.
The cautionary tale here is HBO’s Westworld, which started as a sophisticated meditation on consciousness and free will before disappearing up its own silicon valley mainframe. By Season 2, it had devolved into a labyrinth of timelines that required an advanced degree in Mind Gaming. And while they tried desperately to simplify things in Season 3, the damage was done. The hosts weren't the only ones who lost their core drives. The viewers had already powered down (I know I had).
Unfortunately, it was one of those cases where the show's creators became so intoxicated with their own narrative complexity that they forgot television's first commandment: make us care about the people (or robots) at the center of your story. Watching Westworld's ratings plummet offered crucial insight into how to alienate your audience through pure narrative engineering. The show didn't jump the shark so much as recursively fold it through seventeen different temporal dimensions until viewers needed spreadsheets to track which shark belonged to which timeline.
True Detective's second season walked a similar-ish path. Pizzolatto handed us character wounds gorgeously rendered: Velcoro's bourbon-soaked fatherhood, Bezzerides' knife collection as trauma response. Then drowned them in a plot so impenetrable it felt like a tax code written by Aronofsky. The California noir setting promised sunshine noir but delivered sunshine migraine. I'll still defend Farrell's performance to my death (that scene where he tells his son about seeing his own father killed? Poetry with a pulse). The raw material was there but these human elements got suffocated by plot architecture too elaborate for its own good.
If there’s one risk that Severance is facing, it’s unintentionally evolving from sophisticated corporate satire into the kind of puzzle that makes you miss your stop on the subway because you're too busy diagramming theories about why the break room's dimensions mirror the golden ratio.
Scenario #2: Severance remains a puzzle
The most polarizing path Severance might take? Choosing to end the series without resolving most of its central mysteries. No explanation for the goats. No revelation about Lumon's true purpose. No satisfying conclusion to Mark and Gemma's story. Just another finale that opens into more questions, transforming the show's institutional mysteries from puzzles-to-be-solved into permanent states of interpretative possibility.
This direction gains weight when you consider Season 2's subtle but significant thematic recalibration. The first season fixated on the act of rebellion. But these new episodes subtly invert that focus, suggesting escape itself is the illusion, another elaborate corporate product. The premiere’s relentless tracking shot of Mark, sprinting yet going nowhere, becomes a visual metaphor for this very trap: the harder you run within the maze, the more the maze expands around you.
So if Season 1 was about leaving Lumon, Season 2 proposes that the true battleground is within, a subtle but significant shift that makes the promise of resolution feel increasingly beside the point.
Ronald Barthes developed his theory of the writerly text to explain works that generate meaning not through resolution but through the reader's endless interpretative labor. His framework shows a possible future where Severance reconstructs television storytelling around the principle of sustained theoretical desire. When Devon uncovers evidence of Lumon's global reach, the revelations spawns new enigmas about corporate ritual. Ricken's attempts to decode his book's circulation pattern only multiply its possible meanings. As the season unfolds, truth itself becomes relative, fractured, mirroring the severed consciousness at its core. The show isn't building toward answers but toward a form that weaponizes our very desire for them.
The Sopranos pulled this move (on a micro scale, of course) with its infamous cut-to-black final scene and the discourse still hasn't recovered (the day Tony's fate stops being debated is the day the internet finally shuts down). Twin Peaks: The Return drove its audience into opposing camps by refusing to give Laura Palmer anything resembling closure.
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Gerard Genette's analysis of narrative architecture illuminates Season 2's evolving structure through its three distinct storytelling layers: the events themselves (Mark discovering Gemma lives), the way those events unfold (through severed perceptions and fragmented memories), and the narration that strings them together (shifting between innie and outie consciousness). The show manipulates these layers with increasing sophistication.
Season 2 foregrounds how: with the weaponization of memory itself. Lumon’s curated recall and historical revisionism emerge as structural principles. Mark’s reintegration-induced dreamscapes, unsettlingly informed by neuroscientific consultants, become vivid illustrations of this – memories of Gemma’s death actively rewritten, replaced with sanitized corporate narratives. By actively destabilizing memory, the very foundation of narrative itself, the show severs our ability to grasp a stable, objective reality within its world, mirroring the characters’ own fragmented perspectives.
This path would split Severance's audience like Solomon threatening to divide the baby (except in this version, both sides claim they're the real mother and the baby is actually seventeen babies in a trench coat). Half the viewers would celebrate it as the most high-concept exploration of institutional meaning-making ever performed on television.
The other half would never forgive the Severance team for this decision (the same ones who still argue about whether Inception's top falls). Both responses would prove the ending's success: a finale that makes the audience's desire for meaning its primary text, turning our endless arguments about resolution into the only resolution we're ever going to get.
Scenario #3: Spectacle takes it all
My relationship with American Gods mirrors my brief obsession with molecular gastronomy. Initially seduced by something that transformed familiar ingredients into sophisticated art, only to realize I'd spent three hours admiring foam sculptures when I really just wanted dinner. The show's evolution from intimate story about faith and immigration into pure visual pyrotechnics taught me something about television's relationship with spectacle that feels relevant to Severance's potential future.
Debord wrote about spectacle as a virus that spreads by making us forget what originally infected us. Spectacle creates a self-referential system where the representation of an experience becomes more compelling than the experience itself. The first season of American Gods embedded its visual flourishes within actual narrative purpose. I loved the surreal sequences of Laura Moon's death illustrated her disorientation, or how Technical Boy's digital domains expressed his unstable identity.
Then the spectacle machine achieved consciousness. The visuals stopped illuminating character and started demanding attention for their own sake. Laura's story became an excuse for sequences about metaphysical decomposition. The gods abandoned their grounded conflicts for cosmic battles staged in increasingly abstract realms. The storylines still technically existed, but they functioned mainly as delivery systems for sequences that belonged in either an art installation or a pharmaceutical ad.
Severance stands at this crossroads between sustained critique and pure aesthetic transcendence. So far, it’s been able to balance its visual sophistication with actual emotional weight. But American Gods shows how quickly this balance can tip. One minute you're using spectacular elements to illuminate psychological truth, the next you're staging godly battles that make Joseph Campbell read like TV Guide.
After all, why solve the mystery of Lumon's true purpose when you can simply admire how gorgeously the show frames its own uncertainty?
Scenario #4: Severance threads the needle in exquisite fashion
My certainty about television narrative died the night Lost's finale asked me to care more about metaphysical limbo than six years of character development. But somewhere between despair and spite, The Leftovers taught me to believe in impossible stories again.
A show about the unexplained disappearance of two percent of the world's population had no business making me care more about Matt Jamison's crisis of faith than solving its central mystery. Yet through some unholy architecture of storytelling craft, the show's complexity deepened character instead of replacing it.
Caroline Levine's theory about narrative affordances tells us the following: stories built with architectural sophistication can make their very structure illuminate meaning. The Leftovers built entire episodes around this principle. The episode where Matt gambles his way across the Atlantic on a ferry that transforms into a sex cult's floating kingdom operates as Levine's theory made flesh.
What begins as a straightforward journey becomes the perfect crucible for testing faith because the narrative structure itself embodies the contradiction. The Leftovers consistently deployed these formal experiments: Kevin reading from the Book of Job while hallucinating his dead daughter, Laurie's underwater scream that we hear but characters don't. These are emotional revelations rather than puzzle pieces. Levine's concept of affordances comes alive when the show's most structurally complex moments serve as windows into character rather than narrative dead ends.
Severance walks that same tightrope now. To match what Lindelof's departure tale achieved, Stiller's workplace dissociation fable must recognize that complexity only matters when the architecture reveals the architect.
Some Metacritic reviews claim that the first few Severance episodes in Season 2 have been momentum-killers. While I don’t share this sentiment, I recognize this inflection point where ambitious series either locate their emotional core or spiral into self-reference. When we finally untangle some of the show’s key mysteries, the answers would need to wound us the way The Leftovers did: by showing how mysteries, once solved, change the people who sought them.
i'll follow this puzzle box straight to hell (and back for season 3)
Severance lovers will tell you it's the mysteries that keep them coming back. But narrative complexity demands more than architectural virtuosity. Elsaesser would say adding floors to your metaphysical skyscraper means nothing if you forget about the souls trapped in the elevator. The Leftovers didn't accumulate surreal gestures like some collector of existential curiosities. It wielded each unconventional choice like a scalpel, cutting straight through to the marrow of human experience. Watch Justin Theroux karaoke his way out of purgatory and say to my face you didn’t shed ugly tears in a cold bowl of pasta. Then witness Westworld vanish up its own recursive timeline until even Bernard needed flowcharts to track his emotional arc.
The supreme irony of Severance stares us in the face: Apple, a $3 trillion corporate monolith, financing prestige television about the horrors of corporate servitude. Pure capitalism critiquing itself while charging $9.99 (or £8.99, upon checking my bill) monthly. The snake devours its tail while sending you a receipt.
Apple TV+ has cultivated its own perpetuity wing, a streaming enclave where most “content” undergoes such rigorous sanitization it borders on the clinical. Unlike Severance's bold artistic vision, their typical programming slate maintains the same careful inoffensiveness as their product launch events.
Sugar, Bad Monkey, Palm Royale, High Desert, Roar, Franklin, Lisey’s Story, Lady In The Lake, Suspicion, The Essex Serpent, Truth Be Told — these are all original Apple TV+ show productions I genuinely tried to watch. All ultra expensive, all ultra polished, all lacking the distinctive edge1 that make them worth my time. All sanitized. Just like the severed floor.
Perhaps this is why I’m rooting for Severance so much. It’s not…that. It constructs a meta-commentary on our relationship with digital platforms while functioning as exemplar of platform strategy. We're all innie viewers trying to make sense of fragmented narratives controlled by outie corporations. We refine numbers without understanding their significance. We gather for uncomfortable workplace memorials, applauding watermelon busts of colleagues we barely knew.
What does it mean when corporate rebellion becomes corporate product?
Severance succeeds because it transcends this contradiction rather than succumbing to it. Where Apple's standard fare often feels artificial despite its technical perfection, Severance weaponizes artificiality itself, transforming sterile corridors and antiseptic break rooms into landscapes of genuine existential dread.
Whether it’s been intentional or not, Apple has created a show critiquing soulless corporate systems that alienate workers from their labor.
Apple is a soulless corporate system that turns creative labor into content metrics.
Apple will do everything it can to stretch Severance into multiple seasons to retain subscribers.
Apple is Lumon.
We are the severed employees.
Does acknowledging my own complicity diminish my pleasure? Hardly. The reason I love Severance is for the people behind it. Ben Stiller and his impeccable team hijack corporate resources to create art that interrogates the very systems funding it (get that Apple check, Ben & co!!). But this, weirdly, makes me the ideal Apple customer: engaged enough to maintain subscription, passionate enough to generate free marketing. I've become what Apple's quarterly projections predicted. The perfect severed viewer.
And I’ll keep watching! I'll follow Mark and Helly through whatever metaphysical corporate hellscape they construct! I'll scrutinize every frame for hidden symbols while loudly denouncing capitalism at dinner parties! There is too much artistry in the execution not to! We embrace contradictions! The tension between Severance's corporate funding and its artistic rebellion doesn't undermine its impact! It magnifies it! It creates the perfect trojan horse!
When future media scholars excavate the streaming wars, they'll marvel at how Severance pulled off its greatest illusion, convincing us that mandatory workplace viewing could become voluntary obsession. Every time I renew my Apple subscription, I picture Tim Cook flashing Kier's five-fingered salute in a boardroom while executives in AirPod-white earbuds sort subscriber emotions into digital refinement bins. “Severance viewership up 230% quarter-over-quarter!” they chant.
Yet here I sit, tuning in every week to devour compositions so striking, performances so nuanced, and ideas so audacious that I forget to psychoanalyze how I'm consuming them. The greatest coup? My absolute delusion that my personal viewing habits somehow constitute resistance rather than compliance. Going delulu never looked this stylish. Pass the waffle iron—I've earned my party.
If you’ve made it to the end, you deserve to see the alt version of my intro ∼ fan art ∼:
A final note for people with taste 🫦
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- Sophie x
A footnote for the impassioned defender: Here comes the part where you're frantically composing that comment about how I've criminally overlooked the espionage brilliance of Slow Horses, the ensemble perfection of The Morning Show, the legal depth of Presumed Innocent, the therapeutic humor of Shrinking, the ambitious scope of For All Mankind, or whatever Apple TV+ darling you've personally bonded with. First, take a breath—I’m right there with you. Taste is gloriously subjective, and I'm not here to invalidate your Sunday night Apple TV+ ritual. Some of these shows have moments of undeniable brilliance!
But notice how I'm making a broader argument about aesthetic homogeneity and risk-aversion. The unmistakable corporate sheen that emerges when your storytelling comes from the same entity that sells you $1200 phones with incrementally better cameras every September. Apple and Amazon aren't storytellers at their core; they're trillion-dollar behemoths that discovered ‘original content’ makes a convenient trophy accessory to their actual business of selling you devices and delivering toilet paper to your door. Their shows exist as meticulously designed lifestyle extensions. Much like that marching watchband they convinced you to add to your cart.
The latest episode was actually the perfect through-line that explained a lot for me.
The goats!!! Any guesses!? I just wrote a piece examining the series from a Lacanaian/psychoanalytic framework and reviewed eight different fan theories — none explain the goats!