New Apple TV+ thriller/comedy Severance takes a visit to a motivational museum this week. Actors Adam Scott, Britt Lower, Patricia Arquette, John Turturro and Yul Vasquez continue to do amazing work with their offbeat characters in this satirical study of the depressing nature of punching the clock.
Severance’s unique look and science fiction premise continue to pay dividends rich enough to get over some of the hurdles the show occasionally throws at the rational part of your brain.
Severance recap: ‘In Perpetuity’
In this week’s episode, titled “In Perpetuity,” Mark (played by Adam Scott) has a problem on his hands. His co-worker Petey (Yul Vasquez) has found him after going AWOL from their employer, Lumon Industries.
Petey’s got a wild story about Lumon, the business that forces employees to undergo a procedure that splits their consciousness in order to make more devoted workers. Petey, like Mark, underwent the severance procedure, which splits the brain in half.
When employees are at Lumon, they live one life; when they leave work, they live another. Petey fled when he realized what Lumon was really doing. He tried to have the severance procedure reversed, but it didn’t really work. Now, half the time he doesn’t know where he is and thinks he’s still at Lumon.
Petey tries to explain the sinister things he’s learned, but his brain isn’t at full capacity. And that doesn’t help him sound like he’s really uncovered something about Lumon.
Mark doesn’t want to have his full brain space back, either, so he would kind of prefer it if Petey was crazy. Mark needs the time at Lumon because it’s time he’s not grieving over his wife, who died in a car accident.
Meanwhile, back at the office
Mark’s got his hands full at work, too. Newest office drone Helly (Britt Lower) is still hell-bent on escaping Lumon. Irving (John Turturro), the oldest of the employees working on Mark’s floor, suggests that the thing to improve Helly’s morale might be a trip to the Egan Museum.
You see, Lumon founder Kier Egan (Marc Geller) had something like a shrine built to him on another floor of the building. Irving thinks Helly will be inspired by seeing the company’s origins and the house in which the founder grew up. So Helly, Mark, Irving and Dylan (Zach Cherry) head to the Perpetuity wing for some inspiration.
On the way, they run into Burt (Christopher Walken), another employee from a different sector that Irving met last week while waiting for therapy with Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman). Mark finds it interesting that Irving has a friend in another department. Lumon employees usually don’t interact with anyone but their direct co-workers. Irving senses a similar sort of melancholy in Burt, but they can’t come out and say it. This is supposed to be fulfilling, right? Well, to everyone but Helly.
Helly’s mutiny couldn’t come at a worse time for Mark’s bosses, Milchick (Tramell Tillman) and Cobel (Patricia Arquette). They’re being chewed out by corporate for Pete’s escape and their perceived lax attitude toward their subordinates. Petey defected on their watch, after all. And he could be out there doing god knows what.
It turns out that Petey’s having a meltdown, bleeding out of his nose from a brain trauma, and going to the hospital because he, in a daze, wandered onto the road. He gets picked up at a convenience store. Mark drives by in time to see him loaded into the ambulance. Maybe Petey was onto something after all….
I don’t want to work here
The visit to the Perpetuity wing is a triumph of Severance’s crisp and astonishing art direction. This show’s design is purposely spare for the most part, showing off how little separates the empty spaces that Mark and his family and friends occupy and the sterility of Lumon.
Writer/creator Dan Erickson‘s show isn’t especially subtle, but these aren’t really times that call for subtlety. And frankly, I’m so starved for television shows that look as interesting as their best ideas that I’ll fork over suspension of disbelief for something this gorgeous.
The lighting captured by Severance cinematographer Jessica Lee Gagné‘s camera remains unbelievably opulent for something meant to be depressing. We see director/executive producer Ben Stiller’s trademarks at work here. Even when building prisons (as he did in Escape at Dannemora), Stiller can’t help but make them the most impressive possible specimen of their type.
Every department works overtime here to make Lumon and the lives of its protagonists a kind of magnificently upsetting experience that you just don’t see often on TV. (Look at the Comedy Central show Corporate for a similar effort.) Even the office on The Office wasn’t half as grim as it should have been.
Helly’s strange obsession
The stuff that still commands the most attention (and especially will going forward, since Yul Vasquez is about to be relegated to flashbacks, if I’m correct) is Helly’s demand to be set free.
It doesn’t fully track that there was such an embattlement in Helly’s soul/brain that she would agree to the severance program in her waking life but her work self would so hate confinement that she’d swallow a Sharpie cap with a secret message inside so her “outie” would find it in the toilet and start asking questions.
As with all high-concept sci-fi, you have to buy it or there’s no show. Still, Britt Lower is an incredibly captivating performer. Her commitment to the part is quite enough to get me to look past the tears in the show’s fabric.
Watch Severance on Apple TV+
New episodes of Severance arrive Fridays on Apple TV+.
Rated: TV-MA
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
