Kafkaesque Avant-Garde or Simply Gratuitous—Decoding Severance Season 2

Severance (2022-2025) is a puzzle box of a show—cold, hilarious, and deeply unsettling. It unfolds in a world where a metaconglomerate, Lumon, “severs” a worker’s consciousness into two, separating their work and home life. What begins as a dystopian critique of American cubicle culture morphs into something strange and capricious: a maze of Kafkaesque horror, dark humor, and surrealism as the severed employees attempt to unravel the enigma of Severance itself.

The show’s first season was lauded as an artistic masterpiece, rejecting regurgitated tropes in favor of something bold and original. However, Season Two has drawn far more ambivalence. It picks up after the heart-pounding cliffhanger of Season One, only to deliberately slow down. While the show deserves praise for their risky yet deliberate choice of unconventional pacing, bizarre symbolism, and expansion of societal critiques, this season feels alien to the style of Season One. Its deep dive into bizarre motifs threatens to drown audiences alongside it.

That said, Season Two embraces the show’s darker elements beautifully. Lumon becomes far more sinister, less of an Amazon and more of a bureaucratic monstrosity straight out of Infinite Jest, so vast and insidious that its intentions seem unfathomable. The company commits acts of eerie, unexplained cruelty, leaving audiences confused and disturbed as the psychological toll weighs heavily on beloved characters. The surrealism turns oppressive: Episode Four, “Woe’s Hollow,” features a nightmare sequence with a gaunt monster, eerie doppelgängers, and disturbing myths surrounding Lumon’s founder.

The show’s signature humor has shifted too. What was once quirky and lighthearted has become satirical and strange. This descent into the bizarre has sharpened the social commentary of the show. Where the first season critiqued dehumanizing corporate cubicle culture, Season Two tackles notions of monopoly, corporate worship of the wealthy, and contemporary racism. One scene encapsulates this well: an African American manager is handed paintings of the company’s founder, a white man, stylized with blackface—a sublime satirization of contemporary microaggressions within the workplace and performative inclusivity. Furthermore, the eerie reverence for the company founder, Kier Eagen, borders on religious fanaticism, mirroring corporate America’s idolization of billionaires and the wealthy as visionaries. The company’s omnipresent force raises questions about unchecked monopolies and their ceaseless ambition. 

Yet not all choices feel as purposeful. Office rooms filled with goat men and mounds of dirt or the strange and intricate surreal torture of Mark Scout’s (Adam Scott) wife seem designed to confuse, not reveal. Severance has always leaned into the eccentric, but its sophomore season bombards audiences with overbearing symbolism and heavy-handed themes that undermine character development and plot dynamism—often feeling superfluous. 

That is not to say Season Two lacks craft. It has a masterful control of cinematography and mood, with its seventh episode, “Chikhai Bardo,” being the visual pièce de résistance of the season, turning what could have just been a simple introduction of the protagonist’s mysterious wife into a work of art. The episode’s cinematographer, Jessica Lee Gagné, shot the episode on film, conjuring a nostalgic softness even for new characters. She masterfully blends this nostalgia with surrealism, using strobing lights, jagged memory shifts, dark rooms, and a kaleidoscope of colors—creating a lingering sense of emotional unease. 

While the show’s artistic triumph is evident, it’s also an attempt to mask the underlying plot problems that mar Severance. The show’s breadth and emphasis on the bizarre have come at the expense of the plot, sidelining beloved characters and the familiar four-man band, Helly (Britt Lower), Mark, Irving (John Turturro), and Dylan (Zach Cherry). The show attempts to compensate with intricate subplots, from exploring the relationship between Burt (Christopher Walken) and Irving to Dylan’s struggles with the notion of family, but these subplots only seem to tangle an already dense narrative. 

The greatest flaw of Season Two is the pacing. The early episodes are slow but promise a rewarding conclusion. Just as the story starts to move, Episodes Seven and Eight grind the momentum to a screeching halt. They are visually stunning, yes, but narratively stagnant. These episodes don’t grab your attention; they feel listless and disorienting, so much so that clicking “next episode” feels more like a chore than a treat on a Friday night. 

And yet, the finale. 

It was that crescendo: that point of catharsis after senseless plot slowdowns—the myriad of intricacies the show cultivated seemed to culminate in an extravaganza of color, action, violence, and emotion. The final scene of the show is perhaps the best I have seen in a show. In a tragic celebration that screams of Byronism, Mark S. (the innie) chooses to run off with Helly rather than follow through with the plan to escape. He chooses selfhood, defying not only Lumon, but reason. There is no way for their love to have any permanence, but he refuses to be a pawn as he runs down the sterile white hallways, noble in his Byronic ruin. The finale is Severance at its finest: ridiculous, shocking, and drop-dead gorgeous. 

In recent years, popular media has been saturated with just as many unoriginal plots, endless remakes, and action films as it has arthouse movies that reject traditional plots and financial motives. Severance’s Season Two has fallen on the latter half of this spectrum, choosing art over accessibility. As the show plunges deeper into the experimental, it teeters on the edge, walking the fine line between brilliance and collapsing under its own artistic weight; showrunners should remember a show is not a Kafka novel: audiences come first, regardless of what “art for art’s sake” claims. If the show can internalize these sentiments, its succeeding season could be a triumph that finds its balance.