Listen, we’ve waited for 983 days. The first trailer for Severance season 2 is here (yes, I counted the exact number of days since the season 1 finale)—so scroll down right now, watch it, and let’s dive right in.
Okay! So Apple TV+’s stingy teaser from a few months ago showed us Mark S’s inevitable RTO after Mr Milchick tackled him in the season finale. The trailer seemingly picks up right after that; Mark S wakes up in the Lumon elevator still in a panic. He rushes through his office space, only to find out that… he has new coworkers! (Is there anything more horrifying?)
Milchick, brandishing a brand-new blue turtleneck, walks into the room and says, “Mark S… Been a minute.” I’m interpreting this as a classic stroke of Milichickian humour because Mark probably perceives the time between his confrontation with Milchick and this moment as a literal minute. God, I missed this show.
Elsewhere in the teaser, a photocopier is making MISSING signs of Mark’s wife. Did his sister understand the message after all? And there’s another melon party! The centrepiece is Irving’s melon-y likeness, so you have to wonder if Lumon is celebrating his return or his retirement. Don’t forget that Harmony Cobel is sniffing around as usual.
The new season will premiere on 17 January, 2025 but in the meantime? Watch the trailer a hundred more times because I’m still noticing new odds and ends. (Is that a Kier Eagan trinket on New Dylan’s desk?)
Now, team Severance has been tight-lipped on potential season 2 plot reveals but honestly? It feels like a small miracle that a trailer even exists. At one point, as a result of the WGA strike and rumours of drama behind the scenes, production on the show was halted indefinitely, according to Deadline—forcing audiences to sit with the first season’s amazing cliff-hanger.
Plus, in April 2023, director Ben Stiller shut down rumours of drama between series creator Dan Erickson and co-executive producer Mark Friedman. The two partners “ended up hating each other on the first season, per multiple sources,” according to The Town’s Matthew Belloni, with Apple TV+ going through several rewrites for season 2. “No one’s going to the break room,” Stiller responded on Twitter. “Love our fans and each other, and we all are just working to make the show as good as possible.” Lumon Industries, I’m sure, is furious about the lack of efficiency. Those numbers aren’t going to sort themselves!
Now that talk around the Lumon watercooler is officially heating up, here’s a quick rundown of everything we know about season 2 so far.
Who Will Star on Severance Season 2?
Considering that just about every major character was left in the lurch in the season finale, it’s safe to assume that all your favourite stars will return, including Adam Scott, Patricia Arquette, John Turturro, Christopher Walken, Britt Lower, Tramell Tillman, Zach Cherry, and Dichen Lachman. As for new faces, the series has added a stacked cast of players, among them Bob Balaban, Robby Benson, Stefano Carannante, Gwendoline Christie, John Noble, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, Alia Shawkat, and Merritt Wever.
For season 3 and beyond? Severance’s creative team is shooting for the moon, with Erickson saying that he hoped to pitch Barack Obama about a guest role at the Emmys (where the former president was nominated for outstanding narration for the Netflix docuseries Our Great National Parks). “If he is [there] I’m going to see if he wants a role on this show,” Erickson said. “I think he’d be really good; he’d bring some gravitas.” Jen Tullock, who plays Mark’s sister, Devin, joked, “If we could get Barbra Streisand to come around, I’d pretty much give you every American dollar I’ve got in my bank account.”
Stiller, for his part, has more realistic expectations. “For me, there are a lot of people like Christopher Guest; I kind of imagine, ‘Wow, that would be amazing if someday he might be a part of the show,’ ” he said. “It’s fun when you have a show like this where it allows for people to maybe come in for an episode or two but also fit into the world of Severance.”
What Will Happen in Severance Season 2?
We don’t know much about season 2 beyond the new trailer but Erickson offered tantalising hints in our conversation with him following the season 1 finale. “There’s definitely going to be some expansion of the world,” he teased. “Within Lumon, we’re going to see more of the building and we’ll see more of the outside world, too.” He went on to comment on the storytelling architecture of the entire narrative:
There’s an overall plan for the show. I have an end point in mind, and I intentionally didn’t plan it season by season, because I wanted it to be flexible enough that we could get there in two seasons or six seasons. I want to allow us to be surprised by where the show goes. There’s a sense of what Lumon is trying to do and the role that our main characters are going to play in that, and where it all will culminate. It’s really exciting to think about taking the next step on that trip.
The first season ends with a spectacular cliff-hanger: Mark, Irving, and Helly manage, with great difficulty, to bring their innies into the outside world. The consequences of their subterfuge are enormous: Mark finds out his supposedly dead wife is in fact his coworker, Irving discovers that his Lumon lover is married, and Helly learns of her Eagan heritage, then announces to a gala of industry bigwigs that the severance procedure is torture. Dylan is apprehended by Mr Milchick but as Stiller pointed out to Deadline, Dylan has already seen the Matrix, back when his innie discovered that he has a child.
“Obviously, that’s a huge question and something that really is important to be dealt with, because their whole perception of the world has been altered by having this glimpse,” Stiller said. “That’s going to be a lot of what the second season has to deal with—a big part of the engine of the second season’s beginning.” Similar conflict abounds for Mark, whose revelations will cause strife in his love life. “With Innie Mark, we’re starting to root for him and Helly, but now we also want to root for Outie Mark to find his wife,” Stiller said. “That’s an interesting juxtaposition and conflict we’ll explore in the second season.”
Though season 1 centred on Mark and his perspective, meaning that we got scant few glimpses of his colleagues’ outies, Erickson promises that everything is about to change. “In season 2, we’re going to be showing all of these people on the outside,” he told EW. “Similar to Mark, they each had their own reason for getting this procedure, and they’re all at some stage of a healing process for one thing or another.... Being able to take what Adam did in the first season—with the differentiation between his innie and outie, and how they feel like the same person but with this vastly different lived experience—seeing the other three characters’ version of that dichotomy is, I think, the most exciting part.”
Mark’s outie is under near-constant surveillance by his boss, Harmony Cobel, who moonlights as his kindly neighbour Mrs Selvig. Mark now knows the truth about Cobel’s double life, but Erickson teases that we haven’t seen the last of her schemes. “I think that she does have some special attachment to Mark,” he told Polygon. “And I don’t think it’s entirely Lumon-based. That’s what I’ll say. I think that she’s—without giving away too much of what we’ll see—there’s a professional interest for sure. And obviously, we’ve seen that there’s some sort of experiment or something happening with him and his wife, and sort of observing them. But I think that you can see it in her eyes that it’s become about more than the job."
If you really can’t wait for season 2, mosey on over to the Severance subreddit, where fans have already posted thousands of compelling theories. Many latched onto a comment made by Helly’s father (“One day, you will sit with me at my revolving”), postulating that the Eagan family members upload their consciousnesses to a computer and become part of the board that so tormented Harmony. Could Kier Eagan still be alive in the ether, by that logic? Another fan suggests that Irving, an ex-military man, may be an undercover operative who underwent the severance procedure to investigate Lumon, judging by his obsessive research and documentation about its employees.
“What if the severance procedure was initially developed for use in war?” one Redditor wonders. “You have enlisted soldiers that are easily indoctrinated to do your will and they have no recollection or PTSD after their tour is complete. Irving would have been involved with this severance program as a soldier and it explains why he’s so interested in secretly tracking down other people.” In a recent Reddit AMA, Erickson nodded at this theory, saying, “One of the nice things about opening up the world a bit is that we’ll get to see other applications of the technology. Other ways society willingly ‘segments’ itself from unpleasant truths.”
And what about those damn goats seen wandering around Lumon? Theories abound, with explanations ranging from cloning to brain experimentation. Erickson isn’t saying much, but he assures viewers, “I don’t think we have seen our last goat on the show.” In an interview with Variety, Stiller confirmed that we’ll learn more about the goats in season 2, saying, “There’s no way the goats are there for no reason.”
Erickson’s AMA confirmed some season 1 mysteries and teased what’s to come in season 2. One thing’s for sure: “The office is real. It exists physically, and everything we see there is actually happening (except the black goo, which is Irv’s dream).” If your money was on the good old “it’s all a simulation” theory, you’ve lost your bet. Erickson also hinted at another season 2 mystery: Just why did Helena Eagan conceal her innie’s suicide attempt from the board? “Good question. I think more of that will reveal itself in season 2!” he replied.
Alas, until season 2 makes its debut, there’s not much we know for sure. As Erickson told IndieWire, “It turns out it’s easier to ask interesting questions than answer them.” We may not have many answers, but here’s one thing we can do: trust Ben Stiller. In an Esquire profile of Stiller, Severance star Patricia Arquette said, “He’s merciless. He never stops. He never stops rewriting, he never stops thinking. Weekends, holidays—you’d get phone calls late at night, you’d get phone calls early in the morning. Ideas. New things. He has incredibly intense focus on everything—every little set piece, every little wardrobe thing. I’ve never seen anybody so focused on everything.”
While we wait, there’s still a lot to chew on. Fans who want to delve even deeper can check out the Lexington Letter, a free supposed “tell-all” book from former Lumon employee Peggy Kincaid, which Erickson confirms is, in fact, canon. We may soon have another book to enjoy, if his tease from the AMA is anything to go on: Replying to a fan who asked if Ricken’s The You You Are would ever make it into print, Erickson said, “I think the chances are pretty good it will happen...” Praise Kier!
