Earlier this month, Ben Stiller stopped for an interview on the Dolby Theatre red carpet as he made his way into the Oscars.
If you’ve ever watched a red carpet show, you are perhaps familiar with the concerted lack of tricky questions in these affairs, which function as a final, smiley bit of promo time for award candidates before the envelopes start getting opened onstage. The questions rarely diverge much from “What are you wearing?” and “Isn’t your project just the best?”; the stars placidly nod, their jewels sparkling.
But when Stiller arrived, Access Hollywood’s Zuri Hall wanted to know about something that wasn’t up for an Academy Award: Severance, then midway through its just-concluded second season and which Stiller executive-produces and directs. Turning to Stiller, Hall asked, “Do you guys have it all mapped out? Like, do you know how you want this thing to end, or are you taking it season by season?”
You could almost see Stiller’s jaw tighten. A fluffy question this was not: Throughout this season, the Apple TV+ series was dogged by comparisons to Lost, a fellow mystery box show that infamously failed to land the lore plane, leaving in its wake a mass of unresolved questions and infuriated viewers. Stiller deadpanned that they “improvise each episode”—a make-it-up-as-you-go technique that really was employed in the Lost writers room—before clarifying that, yes, there is in fact a plan, and the conversation moved on. But it was a telling moment.
Severance’s sophomore season has been divisive. For all its highs—Adam Scott and Tramell Tillman shone throughout, and the weirdo sterile beauty that defined Season 1 prevailed, from the team-building trip to the tallest waterfall on the planet to Milchick’s marching band vamp-fest in the finale to the farewell melon party for Irving—there was much that landed less effectively. While Season 2 notched a slightly higher aggregate IMDb score than its predecessor—8.5 versus 8.3—that number was helped substantially by the sky-high scores of two fan-favorite episodes: the finale and “Chikhai Bardo,” a long-awaited exploration of what’s been happening to Gemma at Lumon Industries all this time. But it’s the misses, more so than the successes, that point to some cracks in the foundation—which Season 3 would be well-served by addressing.
During Season 1, Lumon Industries was a mystery—but a more unobtrusive one. There were abundant hints that something sinister was at work, from the creepy cards in the optics and design department to, uh, the unwitting double life of Mark’s supposedly dead wife. (Not to mention, you know, the experimental brain surgeries and semi-imprisoned workforce.) But those puzzles were a secondary concern to the dynamics between the MDR four—Mark, Helly, Dylan, and Irving—and the conflict between Mark’s innie and outie lives. It was, essentially, a workplace drama—a razor-sharp satire of American corporate life with a dystopian twist. The series’ name, after all, is a play on a layoff eventuality (assuming your particular hedge fund–fueled cost cutters are generous, anyway).
Season 2 had some of that. But mostly the show was interested in exploring the greater Lumon lore: the full-episode exploration of Harmony Cobel’s Lumon-y upbringing, the goat room developments, and all the extra time spent with Lumon’s executive and middle management. Some of that worked well—Miss Huang, the pint-size assistant to and monitor of Milchick, was a delightful addition and exactly the sort of record-scratch what? Lumon practice that makes Severance great. But much of the rest felt confounding for confoundingness’s sake, a persistent elbow to the ribs to say: See? It’s all connected! Even, or especially, if those connections are largely or wholly unexplained, with many seeming likelier and likelier to defy any reasonable logic. It’s perhaps no coincidence that the season’s highest-scoring episodes on IMDb, “Chikhai Bardo” (9.3) and “Cold Harbor” (9.6), were the two that substantially resolved lingering mysteries. “Sweet Vitriol,” on the other hand—that Cobel bottle episode, in which the onetime head of the severed floor digs into her childhood and reveals Lumon to be less a corporation than a full-on cult—sports an audience score of 6.7, by far the lowest in the series’ entire run. That’s also the episode that launched a fresh wave of Lost comparisons.
More From the Severed Floor
The fan base, meanwhile, has gotten … edgier. It’s not surprising that a mystery box show would draw a particularly eager and interactive breed of viewer. One subreddit devoted to the show boasts more than 700,000 members; there, users have obsessively pored over theories and Easter eggs. (At press time, the group had just surpassed the size of The Bachelor’s subreddit.) But it’s a fandom that’s increasingly enthusiastic about shouting down any criticism of the show and, particularly, its mystery elements. That’s a trend that isn’t helped by Stiller’s own avid participation in the discourse; he seems to be keyword-searching on social media in order to offer snarky responses to random people with even middlingly critical takes—an action that flags his reply for his followers and has the effect of prompting many to jump in to blast the original poster. (Celebrities, please think carefully about techniques perfected by Barstool Sports!)
One strange aspect of this season was its propensity to shed characters. Sure, Irving was destined to find himself distanced from the primary plot after he was dismissed from Lumon in Episode 4, but at a certain point, it felt like he really might have set sail on that elongated cruise voyage. The same goes for Ricken, whose kooky solipsisms were a highlight of Season 1 and who scarcely appeared this time around. I’ll admit that I was too confident that the three MDR replacements who kicked off the season—a crew that included perpetual scenery chewers Bob Balaban and Alia Shawkat—were locks to return after their own dismissals. Instead, only Balaban made it onto multiple episodes, and just for a moment. I love a cameo, but this felt like an opportunity to delve into another office and the weird dynamics therein. Instead, we never heard a peep, and even innie Mark declined to wonder about his erstwhile colleagues’ fates. Even the so-called shadow people, who appeared as near-twins of the core MDR team during the waterfall retreat, never came back or, indeed, were even treated as real human characters. Gwendoline Christie’s oddball goatherd character, Lorne, got her early-season introduction tied up with a bow in the finale—but she was the exception, not the norm.
It’s a good sign that Severance used the finale to answer some of the big questions: namely, what exactly MDR has been doing with the numbers all this time and what the names of their projects refer to. And series creator Dan Erickson has seconded Stiller’s Oscars-night insistence that all those enigmas are there for a reason—beyond, presumably, just befuddling viewers. “I promise the show will not literally turn into Lost,” Erickson told Variety in January, noting that he recognized the “need to reward people’s patience and faith.”
More of that in Season 3, please!
