The severing knife seems to lack a point

We've now watched the first two seasons of Severance. Season 1 was easily the best thing I've seen on Apple+. Everything else has been some combination of mediocre and/or tiresome. But Severance was compelling. It was an obvious metaphor for the disdain that most American corporations actually hold for the people doing the work that keeps them in business, as well as an examination of the ability to separate work lives and home lives, the question of how much work should dominate one's life (especially in comparison to other societies, like much of Europe), and so forth. It was great. It was well-acted. And, even though I'm not really a mystery show person, I was willing to go along with the hidden elements because it seemed like they were all leading toward some reasonable conclusion. Enter Season 2...

From the very outset, the plot left reason and progression at the door in favor of the bizarre. Not only was it no longer really a metaphor for modern work life, but it also seemed to be grasping in different directions at the stranger corners of said life, such as cultish religions like Scientology. Suddenly, the founder of Lumon didn't just inspire Steve Jobs-like devotion, but was instead this messianic individual whose words were followed like commands from the gods and who had created this miraculous invention that would be the saving grace of humankind as long as those same stupid humans didn't get in the way of its immaculate conclusion. And that's all well and good, as long as you're actually trying to tell a story and not just provide set pieces for being weird. Instead of telling a story that seems to have some kind of sense attached, we were just shown episode after episode of people talking about dire consequences and impending doom, along with side jaunts into basement meadows filled with young goats for no discernible purpose. As I said, I'm not really a mystery show person, so I'm probably not the target audience here. I am OK with weird things happening, as long as said mystery seems to be progressing in a positive direction. That is, to say, progressing at all.

Without that direction, we're going to end up with something like The Killing, which was an American attempt to duplicate a successful Danish TV show about a murder and the subsequent investigation. But the first season was a series of red herrings which meant that the story didn't develop, most of the characters involved didn't develop, and the season finale left everyone watching feeling like they were robbed because what most assumed would be the tedious Agatha Christie-style resolution wasn't even that but yet another massive teaser for the second season, which most viewers largely and rightly abandoned, myself among them. Showrunner Veena Sud then insisted that the fact that people hated the ending of season 1 was a good thing because it meant people were talking about the show. That sounds like a great example of marketing, rather than actually telling a story and there's some of that feel to the end of this season of Severance, as well.

Don't get me wrong. I understand and appreciate a lot of the work that's going into this. The character conflict between Mark's two halves and Dylan's emotional trauma with his wife's attraction to his innie and the halting relationship between Irving and Bert and all of the other quirks of humanity that the actors and their stories are bringing to this are things that I appreciate. But it also feels like all of the strangeness is just there to bring window dressing to outwardly-realized internal conflicts. It's like trying to tell a personal drama by dosing someone with LSD every couple days and seeing if they can figure out what's real and what's delusion; what emotions are genuine and what's just the drugs talking. I can see that our various characters are going through changes and I appreciate that, but I don't feel like the story itself is going anywhere. Again, it's reminiscent of The Killing, in which each episode was about localized emotional trauma but all of those set pieces didn't add up to an actual game, to put it in football terms. (That's not supposed to be another slam against Ted Lasso, but feel free to read it that way, if you like.) This feels like what people tell me Lost turned into: an excuse to keep the mystery going and not actually bringing anyone to a conclusion that they'll feel was worth the effort of keeping up with the non-story. Unlike the end of season 1, I'm not compelled to sit down in front of season 3 at all and that's unfortunate because I felt like the first season was actually saying something and not just an excuse to run to Reddit and talk about everyone's pet theories about what the goat and Brienne of Tarth really represent.