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Apple TV +

In May I posted that I had begun watching the Apple+ series Severance. It’s about a group of workers for the vast and powerful Lumon corporation who toil under a condition called ‘severance’ where their work-selves, called ‘innies’, exist with no knowledge or memory of their lives outside of work, called ‘outies’, and their ‘outies’ have no memory or knowledge of anything that their ‘innies’ experience.

At the time I wrote that post, I had watched two episodes, and now I have watched the entirety of seasons one and two. I had commented that the series, while stimulating my intellectual curiosity, hadn’t really grabbed me emotionally. While my emotional investment has grown, it has never reached the levels that it has with other genre programs. I remember dreading the ending of Andor because some of my favorite characters are never mentioned in the film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and therefore would likely end up dead by the end of Andor. Severance is fascinating and the characters have grown on me, but I think this division of their nature, central and essential to the show, is also creating a barrier to full engagement.

That said, I do not regret watching and have thoroughly enjoyed the ride that is Severance. The show’s creative team is also doing a bang-up job handling what is in essence a mystery show. The first season ended with a massive revelation for the viewers and the characters that created a cliffhanger, which I despise. I watched season two dreading what sort of cliffhanger they would craft for this ending.

And they did not.

Oh, they certainly did not wrap up all the various storylines and threads. There are a ton of things to propel the show into a third season, but there was also resolution to the reveal from the first season, some clear explanation of some of the strange and mysterious work that the corporation commissioned from the severed, along with expansion of the world and the characters. Instead of another stupid cliffhanger, they properly teased the next phase of the story without making it feel as if they were never going to resolve the issues already raised.

Well done.