Severance (Season 2, Ep 1)
I'm going to try and recap episodes of one of my favorite shows on television. Hopefully it doesn't suck like season two of "House of the Dragon."
Hello!
I recently visited the offices of Vulture, and we heard some of their wonderful writers and editors talk about their tradition of TV recaps. This conversation inspired me to try and recap every episode of one of my favorite shows, which returns this week: Severance.
I wrote about Ben Stiller’s sci-fi show in the early days of this newsletter. You can go back to my thoughts on the first season here if you want a refresher. I find this show to be a thrilling and delightful meditation on one’s relation to technology and work. Plus, I love a series that reminds me of 1970s sci-fi.
Before I get to this TV update, I want to mention I’ll be having a post that comes out about David Lynch, who passed away on Thursday.
Anyway, here’s what I got for you today.
Severance, Season 2 Episode 1
The show comes back with a vengeance as Mark (Adam Scott) runs around like a maniac around Lumon’s white halls. Once he reaches his office, he finds a whole new staff — played by Bob Balaban, Alia Shawkat Stefano Carannante and Sarah Bock as the manager. It’s certainly a playful twist to start the new season off after ending on a cliffhanger.
Once the old team has reunited with Mark, we start to run through some of the same motions as the first season. My biggest fear of this season of Severance was that they were going to write themselves into a corner with the innies now aware of the outies and vice versa.
We’ve been told five months have passed and the characters still remain stuck. We only see the innie versions of the characters, so there is definitely some mystery of what happened on the outside, especially with one of the primary antagonists of the first season — Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) — now seemingly out of the picture.Instead, we get more of Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman), and how he is in charge of the Severance Department of Lumon. Tillman can bring so much menace with a smile and a passive-aggressive slight toward Mark and the others.
But the biggest part of the episode was KEANU FUCKING REEVES showing up and providing narration for a stop motion propaganda video, recapping the season one event from Lumon’s perspective.
Aside from a reference to the Heat Miser and Reeves voicing a stop-motion building being so fucking funny, I felt the "Lumon is Listening" video served as a clever message from Stiller and writer Dan Erickson about how people can force meaning on a certain object of pop culture to serve an agenda. It was very funny and it gets me excited for the rest of the season, even as parts of the first episode dragged a bit.
That’s all for today!
Cheers!