Suppose you’re a fan of science fiction, psychological thrillers or extremely well-written television in general. In that case, you may have already heard the rave reviews for the Apple TV+ original series Severance. The Emmy Award-winning show, which originally aired its first season back in February 2022, is finally poised to return for its long-awaited second season on Jan. 17. Though the first nine episodes came jam-packed with enough twists and turns to make Lost fans blush, you’d be forgiven for being a little fuzzy on the details, considering the prolonged wait for new episodes. So, let’s take a moment to recap all of Severance season one, including the shocking final moments and prepare both our innie and outie selves for an otherworldly viewing experience as new episodes arrive.

Needless to say, there will be major spoilers ahead for the entirety of Severance season one, so please feel free to bookmark this page and return later if you’re not up to date. Even if you’re normally not concerned with spoilers, this show lends itself to the shock of a fresh set of eyes, so you’d be well advised to avoid any information on the series at all until you’ve seen it in full. Without any further preamble, let’s don our most un-branded attire, throw on some defiant jazz and prepare to descend down the elevator into one of the most mind-bending seasons of television ever produced.

What Is the Premise of ‘Severance’?

As we slowly learn over the first two episodes, Severance follows a handful of employees as they work for a mysterious (and seemingly evil) biotechnology corporation called Lumon Industries. Lumon is said to employ tens of thousands of workers all across the United States, though the bulk of the show focuses on four employees in the macro data refinement department. This line of work is so secret and confidential it requires a controversial medical procedure known as severance. The procedure involves allowing Lumon to implant a chip in the employee’s brain, which is capable of splitting the consciousness of the employee into two distinct versions of themselves.

The work self, or “innie” is only capable of experiencing life and the world around them from within Lumon’s dank underground basement, where their cubicles are located. Meanwhile the “outie” can experience a lifetime of free paychecks, as their brains only remain active outside of the work campus. Supporters of the severance procedure tout the entire ordeal as the perfect solution to work-life balance, while detractors raise numerous ethical questions about the treatment of the innies, as well as the corporate overreach Lumon holds over its severed employees. As the series carries on, we also see that many of Lumon’s employees live in underdeveloped company towns, propped up entirely by the economy of the growing conglomerate in a stark look into the dystopia of late-stage capitalism.

(Dis)orientation

Most of Severance is told through the perspective of a severed employee named Mark Scout, who first took the job a few years before the events of the series kick-off, as a means of compartmentalizing his trauma after the loss of his beloved wife, Gemma. When we first meet Mark, his outie form is crying uncontrollably in his car, as he realizes it’s the second anniversary of Gemma’s death. But, as soon as he heads down the elevator at Lumon Industries, innie Mark takes over, having no idea that he was ever married in the first place. Despite this disconnect, innie Mark still can’t fully escape loss, as he learns that his boss and best friend Petey has quit. Since Petey’s innie is only capable of activating within the office, Mark and his coworkers surmise that his outie’s resignation effectively marks the death of the coworker they once knew.

Mark doesn’t have much time to linger on this thought, as he is quickly told not to ask any questions, and rapidly promoted to fill Petey’s role. As Lumon nears the end of the quarter, they can’t waste any time finding a new fourth person for the MDR office, and quickly task Mark with onboarding a rebellious new hire named Helly R. Like all new employees, Helly’s innie has no memory of her life before waking up in the basement, nor does she recall consenting to a complex brain surgery which condemns her to spend every moment of her known existence in a drab cubicle. Helly’s orientation provides her, and the viewers at home, with a deep understanding of just how far Lumon will go to prevent innies and outies from communicating with each other.

Meet the MDR Crew

Helly is immediately creeped out by her newfound surroundings and demands to issue a resignation. Unfortunately, her outie continues sending her back into the office, unfazed by her apparent discomfort. The building’s elevators are outfitted with so-called “code detectors,” which prevent any written communication from making it to the outside world, so innie Helly is trapped with no recourse against her self-subjugating captor. Despite her frustration, she begins to settle into the office environment and introduces herself to her and Mark’s coworkers, Irving and Dylan. Irving is an older gentleman with a pathological need to follow Lumon’s handbook to the letter. Though he’s a major stickler for the rules, he sometimes finds himself violating company policy by accidentally dozing off in the middle of the workday. Dylan, on the other hand, is the sardonic office jokester, heavily motivated by small workplace rewards such as finger traps and custom beverage coasters.

In the second episode of Severance, Irving is caught napping and sent to the office wellness center for some quick rejuvenation. While waiting for the Lumon counselor, Ms. Casey, to take his appointment, Irving stumbles into a chance encounter with Burt, a severed employee from the Optics and Design department. As we later come to learn, MDR and O&D are intentionally kept separate by management to avoid inter-department fraternizing. Still, Irving quickly hits it off with Burt over a shared love for Lumon’s company history, which is essentially all the innies are allowed to study. Before long, the two are bona fide besties, frequently making excuses to meet in the hallways to discuss Lumon art, Lumon handbook passages and even some budding feelings of romance.

Petey’s Major Malfunction

Early on in Severance, outie Mark is accosted by a strange man who claims to work with him. Obviously, Mark has no recollection of ever meeting this man, though he claims to be Petey, Mark’s best friend from work. As we come to learn, Petey stumbled onto a concerning conspiracy regarding Lumon Industries and opted to have his chip deactivated through an experimental and untested process. Though outie Mark is perturbed by Petey’s ramblings, he ultimately agrees to help him when he sees that the man is suffering from reintegration sickness, and living in a freezing cold greenhouse to avoid the prying eyes of Lumon investigators. Mark takes Petey back to his house and tries to set him up with some basics, including food, water and a hot shower.

Despite his sympathy for his so-called best friend, Mark assures Petey that he actually enjoys being a severed employee, and has no interest in investigating a corruption plot against the company. However, when Mark leaves for work, Petey discovers that Mark’s next-door neighbor is none other than Harmony Cobel, their cold and unforgiving operations manager at Lumon. Cobel, an unsevered employee, has taken on a false persona under the name Mrs. Selvig, in order to spy on Mark’s outie for unknown reasons. When Cobel enters Mark’s house, Petey makes a daring escape, nearly blowing his own cover, only to make it outside and suffer a series of hallucinations wrought by his fractured post-op brain. By the time Mark makes it home from work, he discovers that Petey has wandered away and lost consciousness at a nearby convenience store.

Cobel’s Revolutionary Misstep

While searching for something inside Mark’s home, Cobel stumbles across a book written by his smug but eccentric brother-in-law, Ricken. Perhaps fearing that there may be hidden messages within the obnoxiously written text, Cobel steals the book and brings it into the office. Once she reads it, however, she sees that it contains nothing but trite observations about society, and hands it off to her second-in-command, Seth Milchick. Meanwhile, Mark and the MDR crew take Helly on a tour through Lumon’s Perpetuity Wing in a flaccid attempt to lift her spirits. After attempting to escape from the facility several times and failing, Helly is unmoved by the history of the Egan family, who have run the conglomerate for centuries and unmotivated by glowing customer testimonials scrawled across the walls. Instead, she makes a break for it and tries to bash her way through a reinforced stairwell door.

In all the commotion, Milchick leaves Ricken’s book in the hallway unattended and snatches Helly away from the door before she can make her escape. Cobel and Milchick’s combined failure to secure this contraband ultimately serves as their greatest undoing in the series, as Irving later discovers the book in the hallway while sneaking off to fraternize with Burt. In a hilarious sequence, we see that innie Mark stashes the book and surreptitiously takes it into the bathroom to read throughout the course of the next several days. Though the text is extremely banal, it is loaded with observations about the known world, the condition of work and what it means to exist in a modern society. To a man who has only ever read company handbooks, this document reads like 1984, The Communist Manifesto and the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas combined.

Outie Mark Enters the Game

While his innie is secretly becoming radicalized through the moving power of deconstructionist literature, outie Mark embarks upon a revealing adventure of his own. While disposing of Petey’s belongings, he uncovers a cell phone, which has numerous missed calls from a blocked number. One night, he answers the phone and learns that the caller is ex-Lumon brain surgeon Reghabi, who was working in cahoots with Petey to expose Lumon’s corruption. Mark agrees to meet with Reghabi at a nearby university, though he is shocked to find that Lumon security chief Doug Graner has also tracked the surgeon down while investigating Petey’s mysterious reintegration.

Before Mark can react, Reghabi bashes Graner to death with a baseball bat and explains that he’s the one responsible for harming severed employees as a means of corporate punishment. Mark is justifiably shocked, though Reghabi assures him that he’ll be fine as long as he follows her instructions. She snatches Graner’s security key card and tells Mark to bring it into work with him, suggesting that his innie will know what to do with it.

Helly’s Last Ditch Effort

After trying to bust her way through a reinforced door, Helly is punished with a trip to the “break room.” Unlike a traditional break room, this space is used to punish severed employees with psychological warfare. Inside, Milchick forces Helly to repeat a bizarre and cult-like apology over a thousand times, until her pleas for forgiveness become ingrained within her psyche and come off as wholly genuine. When she is finally released, Helly decides to go nuclear with her resignation, by grabbing an industrial paper trimmer and threatening to cut off her fingers unless she can communicate directly with her outie. A stunned Cobel allows Helly to record a video message for her outie, wherein she demands to be set free from her workplace prison. Unfortunately, her outie responds with a scathing denial, arguing in no uncertain terms, “I am a person. You are not.”

Stunned by her mistreatment from… well, herself, Helly snatches an extension cord and a trash can and attempts to hang herself while taking the elevator back up to the ground floor. This scene, which is one of the most harrowing sequences in the entire season, sees outie Helly waking up while choking to death, only for the elevator to return to the severed floor when innie Mark is preparing to leave. Did Helly truly intend to kill herself? Was she just sending a message to her sadistic alter ego? Either way, Mark just barely manages to save her before it’s too late. Somehow, even with the threat of death, outie Helly refuses to tender her resignation. The rest of the MDR crew are informed that Helly will return once her outie has recovered from the hanging incident, much to their collective awe.

Things Get Romantic on the Severed Floor

As Helly experiences her gambit of horrors, Irving and Burt continue seeing each other in private, eventually sparking a forbidden romance. Irving feels that he’s not ready to embrace Burt with a kiss, but he expresses clear romantic affection for him, while they revel in a hidden greenhouse area inside the Lumon basement. Despite their budding love, Dylan is apprehensive of the entire affair, as he believes that the O&D team are evil. Burt explains that his team was told the very same rumors about MDR, revealing that Lumon intended to divide and conquer its employees by separating their departments with bizarre propaganda. When Helly returns from her medical leave, Mark suggests taking the entire MDR team over to O&D to finally clear the air and work together to understand what’s going on.

Things get even stranger when Mark and Helly take a detour through Lumon’s unmapped hallways while evading the prying eyes of Ms. Casey, who was assigned to maintain 24-hour watch over Helly for the foreseeable future. Together, they find several strange offices, including one room that contains a single employee feeding baby goats out of a bottle. When spotted, the employee meekly explains, “They’re not ready… you can’t take them yet, they’re not ready.” Though Helly is demoralized by her traumatic experience fighting against her outie self, she begins to perk up after this encounter, leading Dylan and Irving to assume she and Mark are having a fling of their own. Dylan privately asks Helly if “baby goats” is “code for sex with Mark S,” while Irving humorously notes that Mark is “sparing with the facial encouragement” when it comes to his male employees.

Milchick Radicalizes the Crew

Mark learns that Ms. Casey was sent to the break room for failing to keep her eyes on Helly, further inspiring him to rage against the Lumon machine. When he finally takes the MDR crew to the O&D office, the teams learns that they have a lot more in common than they initially thought. While Mark is uniting a proletariat class of severed workers, Dylan maintains his skepticism and pockets an infographic card to inspect later. Unfortunately, Milchick breaks up the party and promptly sends Mark to the break room for sewing sedition. He even takes things a step further by insisting that Burt take an early retirement, seemingly just to hurt Irving. Enraged, Irving goes off on Milchick, eviscerating the supervisor with a Shakespearian monologue about the torture of life as a severed worker.

In an even bigger misstep, Milchick wakes up Dylan’s innie after hours, inside of outie Dylan’s home. Milchick demands to know what Dylan has done with the infographic card and asks if he was paid by an outside entity to smuggle it out of the building. Confused, innie Dylan explains that he stashed it in the MDR bathroom to inspect later, before demanding answers about his unfamiliar surroundings. Just before Milchick can deactivate the off-hours procedure, outie Dylan’s young child comes running into the room, embracing his father with a hug. This is a Plato’s cave moment for innie Dylan, who previously had no conception of his life outside of the office. Needless to say, the interaction fully radicalizes him against the Lumon corporation, as he demands to know more about his son and the rest of his family.

Over the course of just a few episodes, Irving has gone from a habitual rule follower to a full-on revolutionary, while Dylan has completely shifted his rewards-based mindset to one that recognizes only freedom. At every turn, Milchick attempts to instill order through punishment, failing to realize that his every move only serves to unite his subjugates against him and against the company at large. By the time we reach the end of episode seven, the entire severed staff have agreed that they can no longer tolerate their meager existence, as Irving chillingly proclaims, “Let’s burn this place to the ground.”

Activating the Overtime Contingency

Dylan reveals that Milchick and the other management staff can wake up severed employees while off the clock, through a process known as the overtime contingency. Together, the MDR crew hatch a plan to activate the contingency for Irving, Helly and Mark, with Dylan hanging back to work the machine. To keep Dylan in the office after hours, however, they first need to complete all of their work before the end of the quarter. This is the calm before the storm, as the MDR team spend a handful of days plugging away at their retro-style computers, feverishly working to keep Lumon’s shareholders happy. Once they complete 100 percent macrodata refinement, Dylan is chosen as the refiner of the quarter and given a “waffle party” for his efforts.

As we quickly come to learn, Lumon has its own twisted definition of a waffle party, which sees Dylan donning a mask of Lumon founder Kier Egan’s face, and engaging with seductive dancers who perform a sensual ritual for his pleasure. While the Dylan of Severance episode one may have been in his glory during this exchange, the newfound family man has other priorities and rushes to the security office on the severed floor instead. Before Mark and Helly depart from the office, Helly embraces Mark with a kiss, lending credence to the idea that there’s something more budding between the two. She bids him good luck, and they each head up the elevator unenlightened to the outside world for the very last time. The penultimate episode of the series ends with Dylan barricading the security doors, flipping the switches and awakening all three of his MDR cohorts in the midst of their respective after-hours lives.

‘Severance’ Ends With a Few Major Surprises

Obviously, the first glimpses at each of the severed employee’s outside lives come jam-packed with lots of major surprises. We learn that Irving is a former military man, which explains his inherent sense of strict adherence to codes and rules. He seems to spend his days walking his adorable dog, Radar, and painting the same image of a shadowy elevator that haunts his innie’s dreams. Once innie Irving awakes, he quickly finds that his outie has been investigating Lumon in some way, as he has a list of employees, addresses and phone numbers stashed in a hidden compartment. Burt’s name and address is on the list, along with a map, allowing Irving to locate and meet with his would-be lover – or at least a version of him. Of course, this comes with its own obstacles, like learning how to operate a motor vehicle and traversing the outside world without distraction.

Helly is absolutely dismayed to learn that her outie is none other than Helena Egan, daughter of Lumon CEO Jame Egan, and heiress to the entire company. She wakes up at a Lumon gala held in her honor, where her outie is meant to give a speech about the benefits of being a severed employee. This explains why her outie is such a cruel and soulless person, who would sooner subject a version of herself to eternal misery than accept that some things are out of her control. It also explains why certain Lumon higher-ups were so overly concerned with the prospect of her innie trying to force her resignation or engage in self-harm.

The Biggest Cliffhanger Comes in the Final Moments

Mark’s innie wakes up in the home of his brother-in-law Ricken and recognizes him as the author of the book which changed his life. Funny enough, the reason Mark is present in the home is because Ricken is holding a book-reading party for that very text. Mark is surprised to see that his boss, Harmony Cobel is also in attendance, posing as his neighbor Mrs. Selvig. He accidentally refers to her as Cobel, outing himself as an innie. Cobel immediately departs from the party and races to the Lumon offices, while frantically calling Milchick to let him know that the overtime contingency has been compromised. From there, innie Mark explains his situation to his sister, filling her in on the mistreatment that severed workers face. She returns the favor, by telling innie Mark all about his outside self, and explaining that he was motivated to take the job at Lumon due to the trauma of losing Gemma.

As Severance builds to its last thrilling moments of the season, Irving makes it to Burt’s door, and pounds away frantically. Helly tells the world that severed employees are mistreated, shouting, “We’re not happy, we’re miserable. They torture us down there. We’re prisoners!” Milchick busts down the door to the security office and tackles Dylan, deactivating the overtime contingency, just as Mark scrambles urgently into the party with a photo of Gemma in hand. Having looked at the photo, innie Mark is absolutely floored to learn that his wife, Gemma, is none other than Lumon’s severed-floor counselor, Ms. Casey. Mark has just enough time to scream, “She’s alive!” at the top of his lungs, before his innie self snaps back into the recesses of his brain, and the season cuts to the closing credits.

Day one fans of Severance have been reeling over this finale for nearly three years at this point, with many wondering how exactly the MDR crew will proceed. Luckily, we’ve got very little waiting left, as Severance season 2 premieres on Apple TV+ on Jan. 17.