Severance is back with season 2 after nearly three years away. And returning to work has never felt so exciting, as the doors to unconventional Lumon Industries prepare to open once more.

Severance secured its position as the jewel in Apple TV+’s crown following its 2022 debut, winning critical acclaim and a desk full of awards, including six Emmys and three Golden Globes.

The drama has also been the subject of endless fan theories about Lumon Industries’ mysterious practices.

And fans will be looking for some serious answers when the show returns on January 17, as Mark S, Helly R and their co-workers face the consequences for blowing the whistle on their employers in the season 1 finale.

As Severance season 2 episodes get set to drop, let’s refresh ourselves on what happened in season 1 - and look forward to what’s to come as we clock on for the new series.

***Warning: spoilers from Severance season 1 ahead***

Why have we waited nearly three years for Severance season 2?

Two years between seasons isn’t out of the ordinary in the streaming age, but the (nearly) three years we’ve been away from Lumon Industries have felt like an eternity.

It wasn’t helped by the Hollywood actors’ strike of 2023, which brought production to a standstill two thirds of the way through the shoot. But an even bigger factor in the delay appears to be the creative team’s desire to get this follow-up season right.

“For me, the writing was the most painstaking part of the process because there were so many ways we could go,” Severance creator/showrunner Dan Erickson told Vanity Fair. “And sometimes we would come up with something that worked perfectly well on paper, and then it wouldn’t be until we got there and we were shooting it that we’d realise: ‘This isn’t quite it.’ We were never willing to let that turn it into something that wasn’t perfect.”

Severance season 1 recap

Season 1 introduced the employees of Lumon Industries. {They’ve} They had gone further than most in the hunt for that elusive work/life balance, undergoing a surgical procedure that ensures their professional selves (“innies”) have no memory of life outside the office. Their counterparts in the outside world (“outies”) are also totally unaware of what goes on at work.

Viewers soon learnt that Mark opted for the procedure to escape the crushing grief of his wife’s death in a car accident. Or so we thought (more on that later).

As soon as Mark and his team entered the lift at Lumon Industries, they forgot everything from the outside world - whether they have kids, are married, or even know each other.

John Torturro’s Irving uncomprehendingly picked black paint from under his fingernails throughout the day, with no clue that his outie spent all evening painting canvasses of a sinister doorway.

Meanwhile, the outies were oblivious to what really happened at work. If they were injured in the work place, they were sent home with a note explaining the mishap.

Shockingly, Helly despised being in the office, cut out from her outer self. In horrifying scenes, she attempted to kill herself to punish her outie who had all the power.

A quartet of office drones (Mark S, Helly R, Dylan G and Irving B) realised that something wasn’t quite right, and spent season 1 trying to figure out what was going on.

Helly’s arrival instigated a shift in perspective. Furious with her new circumstances, she began to ask questions about why she was being forced to stay in the office with no chance for fresh air and no power over her own life.

Meanwhile, on the outside, Mark’s former colleague Petey - who disappeared in mysterious circumstances - tracked Mark down and began to trigger uncomfortable questions.

Within the work place, the team became more rebellious - roaming the offices (strictly forbidden) and attempting to map out the building.

Unfortunately, their hunt for answers was aggressively discouraged by Lumon management.

Terrifying boss Harmony Cobel - who wasn’t severed - physically assaulted Mark in one scene as a warning. And Seth Milchick followed the staff members, even installing new doors to stop them wandering. When they were really naughty, they were sent to the break room where they had to stay for hours on their own.

What do Lumon Industries actually do?

That's not entirely clear, though we do know they specialise in biotechnology. Lumon Industries was founded in 1865 by enigmatic entrepreneur Kier Eagan, still regarded as an icon within the company. Subsequent Lumon CEOs have all been his descendants, while he also lends his name to the town of Kier, PE, the primary location in Severance.

The day-to-day roles of "severed" staff members Mark, Irving, Dylan and Helly are even harder to pin down. Although we know they work in the nebulously titled Macrodata Refinement - and pass their nine-to-five processing numbers on clunky retro computers - their ultimate goal remains a mystery.

Other Lumon departments include "Optics and Design" (previously headed up by Christopher Walken's Burt G), and a room filled with baby goats. Nobody appears to know why.

Severance ending explained: How did season 1 end?

Having spent the season gathering more and more intel on the world beyond Lumon's walls, Mark, Helly, Irving and Dylan initiated the so-called "Overtime Contingency Protocol". This allowed their innie personas to wake up in the outside world.

Mark learned that his Lumon boss Harmony Cobel is also his real-world neighbour, Mrs Selvig. He confided in his sister, Devon, who encouraged him to report Lumon's shonky business practices to the press. We also discovered that outie Mark's late wife, Gemma, looks an awful lot like Lumon wellness counsellor Ms Casey. "She's alive!" were Mark's last words before the series ended.

Meanwhile, Irving faced up to the heartbreaking revelation that Burt, the man he fell in love with at Lumon, is in a relationship with another man. And Helly - who in the real world is actually Helena Eagan, daughter of current Lumon CEO Jame - used her platform at a gala event to tell the audience that the innies are actually unwitting prisoners.

Who's in the Severance season 2 cast?

All the show's big names made the roll call.

That means returns for Adam Scott (Mark S/Mark Scout), Britt Lower (Helly R/Helena Eagan), Tramell Tillman (Seth Milchick), Zach Cherry (Dylan G/Dylan George), Jen Tullock (Devon Scout-Hale), Michael Chernus (Ricken Hale), Dichen Lachman (Ms Casey/Gemma), John Turturro (Irving B/Irving Bailiff), Christopher Walken (Burt G/Burt Goodman) and Patricia Arquette (Harmony Cobel/Mrs Selvig).

There's some consistency at management level, too, where showrunner Dan Erickson has put in some serious overtime to write all 10 episodes. Multi-hyphenate movie star/director/executive producer Ben Stiller returns to call the shots on five episodes.

Also recruited to the Severance season 2 cast are Ólafur Darri Ólafsson (Trapped, The Tourist) and Sarah Bock (as Lumon deputy manager Ms Huang) as series regulars, alongside fellow Lumon newbies Bob Balaban (Mark W), Gwendoline Christie, Merritt Wever, Alia Shawkat and John Noble.

What happens in Severance season 2?

As you’d expect, the series is set to explore the aftermath of those cliffhanger revelations, both inside and outside the office.

Apple teases that “dire consequences” are on the cards for the co-workers who broke the rules, and that Mark will be forced to “confront the true nature of his work… and of himself”.

Episode 1 will reportedly pick up the story from innie Mark S’s point of view, before episode 2 shifts the perspective to his outie.

Questions that Severance season 2 must answer!

Seeing as Severance is essentially one big question, there could be a lot to unpack. But, based on previous form, it seems safe to say there won’t be too many definitive answers in season 2 – and that any answers we do get will simply open up bigger and bigger mysteries of their own. This is the Lumon way. And director Ben Stiller has confirmed they are working on Severance season 3!

That said, top of the agenda is finding out what happened to Mark’s late wife, Gemma, and why she appears to live on as Ms Casey at Lumon. The season 2 trailer suggests Ms Casey will be missing at the start of the season, hinting that this plotline is going to be a particularly big deal – especially as it’s unlikely to be a coincidence that Mark S’s boss, Harmony Cobel, is his outie’s neighbour.

It also seems probable there was more to Helena Eagan’s decision to get severed than good PR for the family business, while there are sure to be major ramifications following Helly R’s spectacular whistleblowing exploits – especially in the wake of newspaper headlines reporting that “Innies blow the whistle”. Are the quartet really “the face of Severance reform” as their supervisor, Seth Milchick, claims?

Then there's the question of what Macrodata Refinement is for, and what Lumon Industries is up to. And that's before anyone's even addressed Severance's true million-dollar question: what is the deal with that room full of baby goats?

And of course we need to know why Petey left, and how he died. Who is the mysterious Reghabi who claims to have installed Mark’s severance chip and performed the first successful reintegration procedure on Petey. Reghabi killed security man Graner with a baseball bat.

After killing Graner, Reghabi said she would handle the body and sent Mark home. She told him: “I'll be in touch. It's going to be okay. We'll finish what Petey started.”

Severance season 2 release and finish

Season 2 is released on Friday, January 17, 2025.

There are 10 episodes in total, and all the new episodes will drop weekly on Fridays at midnight EST before the finale is released on Friday, March 21.

To keep the mystery ongoing, the titles of each weekly episode haven't been released, and all we have so far is the Severance season 2 trailer.

All nine episodes of Severance Series 1 are available to stream now on Apple TV+

Severance series 2 starts on Friday, January 17, 2025. Watch on Apple TV.