Severance Season 1 Recap: Mysterious Work

The sci-fi workplace thriller Severance comes to Apple TV+ for its second season on January 17. Catch up with a recap of Season 1.

Note: This recap for Severance Season 1 includes spoilers. You can watch season 1 in its entirety on Apple TV+.

The work-life balance. Various life coaches stress its necessity. And it’s something that most of us chase in our daily lives. In Season 1 of the Apple TV+ sci-fi thriller Severance, the mysterious Lumon Industries has discovered how to make that happen.

We first meet Mark Scout (Adam Scott, Madame Web) sobbing in his car before heading to work. Upon entering, he changes his shoes, his security badge, and his watch. He leaves his cell phone and wallet behind in his locker and, before entering an elevator, is scanned with a security wand. He rides up the elevator, but right before we hear the ding that indicates he has reached his floor, his entire demeanor changes. Because Mark is a severed employee.

Severance introduced a new technique that allows participants to divide their minds in such a way that the time spent at work is completely cut off from time outside of the office. Employees who undergo this procedure essentially have two parts: their “innie,” who exists only inside the Lumon facilities, and their “outie,” who lives the rest of their normal life.

Mark, who chose severance after the sudden death of his wife, works in Lumon’s Macrodata Refinement department. He works alongside Dylan (Zach Cherry, Fallout) and Irv (John Turturro, The Batman). His former co-worker, Petey (Yul Vasquez, Russian Doll), has unexpectedly left and is being replaced by Helly (Britt Lower, Darkest Miriam). 

The office is run by the tyrannical Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette, Boyhood) and the far more affable Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman, Sweethearts). Positive progress is met with rewards like finger traps, a melon party, or the coveted waffle party. But do something wrong, and you may end up in the Break Room.

Life outside is less free than it might appear. In season 1, we discover that the team, who lives largely in housing provided by Lumon, is still being surveilled. Mark lives beside his kind neighbor, Mrs. Selvig, but by the end of episode 1, we discover that the sweet older woman who bakes cookies and forgets if she’s supposed to take out the garbage or the recycling is Harmony Cobel. 

Mark’s primary contact outside work is his sister, Devon (Jen Tullock, Spirited). They have a close relationship despite Mark disliking her husband Ricken (Michael Chernus, Patriot), a self-styled lifestyle guru.

The two worlds of Severance begin to collide due to two events. The atmosphere in the office is disrupted by Helly joining the team. She feels like a prisoner and begs her outie to release her. When her outie refuses, she threatens to harm herself, ultimately attempting suicide in episode 4. But no matter her threats, her outie refuses to stop coming to work each day, leaving Helly to endure a relentless loop of macrodata refinement. Nevertheless, her unhappiness leaves a stain on the office, stirring up negative feelings among the rest of the staff.

The other primary force bringing the two worlds together is in episode 1, when Petey finds Mark on the outside and explains that he was reintegrated, restoring his brain to how it was before he underwent severance. While Mark’s innie is unable to remember meeting Petey on the outside, he does have a sense that something is wrong, and that, combined with Helly’s discomfort, causes him and the rest of the office to try to figure out what they are actually doing at Lumon, beyond work that is “mysterious and important.” 

Severance Season 1 is filled with brilliant performances throughout. Because we spend the most time with Scott both inside and outside of the severed floor, we see the difference between his “outie” and “innie” the most starkly. The other standout is Cherry. In one scene, his innie is “switched on” while he is outside the office, and the glimpse of his outie’s world, including meeting his son, creates a pain that he cannot contain, leading to one of the most explosive scenes in the show in which the happy-go-lucky Dylan attacks Mr. Milchick.

Because of Dylan’s experience, the team knows that they can see the world outside of the severed floor of Lumon, and they devise a plan to do that. Dylan offers to stay behind and help them see what is going on. So Irv, Helly, and Mark all end up on the outside, seeing what their outie’s life is like. 

The finale is intense in a way that few shows can pull off. There are gorgeous match cuts between the three as they go about their life on the outside. And the finale offers us a number of questions for the next season.

We see that Irv has been working for Lumon for a long time, and his outie has compiled lists of other Lumon employees, including what departments they are in and where they live. He takes that and goes to find Burt (Christopher Walken, Dune: Part Two), the man he fell in love with on the inside. 

In the finale, we discover that Helly is part of the Eagan family, and she is at an event where she is about to tell the shareholders the benefits of severance. Her plan is about to be thwarted by Cobel who showed up just as Helly was about to go on.

The reason Cobel knew that this was happening was because of what happened with Mark. She was at a gathering with him for a reading of Ricken’s newest book. Everything seemed normal until Mark called her Mrs. Cobel instead of Mrs. Selvig, the name that his outie knew her by. That slip alerted her to the fact that the innies were on the outside. 

In the final moments of the season, Mark sees a picture of his supposedly dead wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes) who he recognizes as Ms. Casey, a very much alive woman who works as a kind of therapist on the severed floor of Lumon. The last words Mark shouts before Mr. Milchick finds Dylan and shuts down the experiment are, “She’s alive!”

The season finale is tremendously satisfying, but there are a number of questions left unanswered at the end. The situation with Mark’s wife Gemma is very much in question. What is the larger goal of Lumen? What is with the cult-like worship of the Eagan family? And what the heck is going on at the waffle party?

But despite these unanswered questions, Season 1 of Severance is a thought-provoking and fascinating television show. It deals with themes of grief, corporate greed, and even the idea of self. It asks the audience to think about how we may choose to disconnect from people around us. It asks us to ponder how companies require loyalty while controlling aspects of our lives that we may not consent to handing over. It asks us to consider how much of ourselves we truly control. It has moments of incredible humor, confusion, and straight-up terror. It is mysterious and important, and I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Season 1 of Severance is now available to watch on Apple TV+. Season 2 will debut on the streamer on January 17, 2024, with episodes streaming weekly. After you’ve read this Severance Season 1 recap, check out our review below!

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