‘Severance’ Season 1 Recap: What to Remember Before Season 2

• “Severance” is finally back, three years after it first aired on Apple TV+.
• The series follows Lumon Industries’ “severed” employees, who split their selves between work and home.
• Here’s everything you need to remember before watching season two.

“Severance” season one was a workplace satire like no other — and after a three year wait, the ambitious Apple TV+ series is finally back.

The show follows a group of employees who work at the mysterious Lumon Industries. Unlike others at the company, they’ve undergone the “severance” procedure, which splits them into two distinct selves: one that lives in the outside world, and one that exists only at work.

The show’s first season raised more questions than it answered, and three years is a long time to remember all of the series’ various plot threads, intricacies, and goat-related mysteries. Here’s a recap of everything that happened in season one — and what you need to remember before diving into “Severance” season two.

Mark S. is a “severed” employee at Lumon — and his new coworker Helly R. wants to leave.

Lumon Industries pioneered a workplace procedure called severance, which bifurcates a person’s consciousness into two distinct entities by inserting a chip into their brain. Their “outie” exists in the outside world, while their “innie” exists at work. The split means that outies have no knowledge of their jobs — and innies have no knowledge of their outie’s life outside the Lumon office. Sometimes, the severance technology is applied in other contexts: Mark’s sister Devon encounters a mother who underwent severance so she wouldn’t have to experience childbirth.

After his wife’s death, Mark Scout (Adam Scott) accepts a job at Lumon as a Macrodata Refiner on the severed floor. He leads a team of three other employees: Dylan G. (Zach Cherry), Irving B. (John Turturro), and newcomer Helly R. (Britt Lower), who replaced their longtime colleague Petey (Yul Vazquez).

When Helly R. awakes on a conference table, she’s hostile and wants to leave. Mark lets her go — but every time Helly attempts to exit the severed floor, the person she is on the outside forces her to reenter.

Helly Mark, Irving, and Dylan stare at lines of code all day, dragging numbers into buckets based on the emotional response they provoke. Employees work through files with names like “Tumwater” — but unfortunately, none of them have a clue what kind of work they’re doing. It’s rare for employees to finish files because they quickly expire, Dylan says — which makes finishing a file a big deal.

Helly persistently tries to leave her job at Lumon.

Helly attempts to formally resign from her job at Lumon, but her outie immediately denies the request. In turn, Helly attempts to send messages to her outie telling her that she wants to quit, to no avail. After one attempt to communicate with her outie, Helly is taken to the Break Room, where she’s forced to repeat an apologetic monologue until supervisor Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman) determines that she means it.

Helly resorts to more extreme measures, threatening to cut off her fingers if she’s not allowed to send a video message to her outie. In response, Helly’s outie sends a video message denying her request and tells Helly that she’s not a person.

As a last resort, Helly attempts to hang herself in the elevator. She survives, but her outie forces her to return. Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman), the wellness counselor, is asked to observe her. When Mark and Helly escape Ms. Casey’s supervision, she gets sent to the Break Room for punishment.

Lumon has a religious devotion to its founder, Kier Eagan.

The Lumon CEOs have all come from the Eagan line, and the office features numerous displays of reverence for the founder, Kier Eagan. Among those is the perpetuity wing, which features figures of members of the Eagan line and dedicates an entire section to Kier himself.

Lumon espouses many of Kier’s philosophies, including his four tempers — woe, frolic, dread, and malice — that he believed determine a person’s character.

Devotion to Kier isn’t just the company line for some. Mark’s boss, Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette), genuinely worships the founder and has a shrine to him in her home.

In the outside world, Mark lives a lonely life.

While innie Mark is cheerful, outie Mark bears the weight of his wife’s death. His sister Devon (Jen Tullock) is skeptical of his job, especially after he returns from work with an injury and a gift card to Pip’s, a local bar and grill, as recompense.

When Mark goes to Pip’s, he runs into Petey, a man whom this version of himself has never met. However, Petey is unsevered now, and he thinks Lumon is out to get him. Petey hands Mark a red envelope and says that even if he dies, the information he collected needs to be preserved.

There’s another surprise in the outside world: Mark’s neighbor, Mrs. Selvig, is actually Harmony Cobel, his innie’s boss.

Petey is involved with a group trying to end severance, and it’s a big problem for Lumon.

When Mark visits Petey on the outside, he finds Petey ill from something he’s calling “reintegration sickness,” caused by the fusion of his two personalities. Mark takes him in, but Petey doesn’t have many answers about their job at Lumon.

Before his dismissal, Petey’s innie made a map of the severed floor, which Mark discovers and eventually shreds. On the outside, Petey was working with a group trying to end severance. His point of contact was a doctor named Raghabi, who reintegrated him. Eventually, Petey collapses and dies, presumably from the reintegration sickness.

In the aftermath, Harmony attends Petey’s funeral, where she steals his severance chip directly from his skull. Lumon security officer Graner (Michael Cumpsty) tests the chip and confirms that Petey’s memory was reintegrated.

Mark eventually makes contact with Raghabi, and she tells him that she was the one who did his severance procedure. When Graner turns up, however, Raghabi beats him to death with a baseball bat. She gives Mark Graner’s security card and says that his innie will know what to do with it.

Irving strikes up a friendship with Burt from O&D, despite tension between their departments.

After falling asleep at his desk — and witnessing a horrifying vision of goopy black paint invading his workspace as a result — Irving gets sent to meet with Ms. Casey, who reads him a list of pleasing, supposed facts about his outie.

There, he runs into Burt (Christopher Walken), the Optics & Design department chief. Macrodata Refinement and O&D don’t typically get along due to a rumor that O&D once tried to execute a coup.

Irving pursues a friendship with Burt, but later learns that O&D is a much larger department than Burt told him. Irving and Dylan corner Burt in a conference room, and he tells them that O&D doesn’t trust MDR either. After speaking, they tentatively reconcile.

Irvin and Burt’s relationship continues to deepen, and they nearly kiss. Unfortunately, Burt retires — effectively meaning that his innie ceases to exist, and Irving will likely never see him again.

MDR stages a revolution, with shocking consequences.

After Dylan takes a card from O&D, Milchick awakens his innie on the outside to confirm where he left the card. While awakened on the outside, Dylan sees his outie’s son.

The incident inspires MDR to attempt to awaken themselves on the outside, using Graner’s security card that Mark found in his pocket. After hitting their target for the quarter, Dylan earns a waffle party, meaning that he’ll be at the office after hours.

Before they leave the office that day, Mark and Helly kiss. After sitting through his reward, which features a performance from lingerie-clad dancers wearing the masks of Kier’s four tempers, Dylan initiates the “overtime contingency” (OTC), awakening his colleagues on the outside.

Irving awakens alone in his apartment, and attempts to locate Burt on the outside. When he does, however, he discovers that Burt has a husband.

Mark wakes up at his brother-in-law Ricken’s book launch party, where he recognizes Harmony Cobel. Despite having been suspended by the Lumon board, Cobel runs back to the office when she realizes that Mark’s innie is on the outside. At the party, however, Mark sees a photo of his wife Gemma and realizes she’s still alive as Ms. Casey, the severed floor wellness counselor.

Unfortunately, Ms. Casey was forced to retire after a final wellness session with Mark. The circumstances of her severance were also different from his: during that session, she told him that she was mostly awakened in 30-minute increments and had only been “alive” for 107 total hours. After the session, and at Cobel’s request, Milchick sent her down a dark hallway to the testing floor.

Helly’s identity reveal is the biggest shock: she’s Helena Eagan, heir to Lumon. She awakens at a company event where she’s supposed to speak firsthand about the benefits of severance. While there, she meets her father, Jame Eagan, who tells her that the world will adopt severance chips and become “Kier’s children.”

Cobel tries to stop Helly from speaking at the event but is unsuccessful. When it’s time to give her speech, Helly goes rogue and exposes herself as Helena’s innie, telling the crowd gathered there that she and the other innies are “prisoners” of the company.

There are also some goats and a few other loose ends.

While wandering around the halls of the severed floor, Mark and Helly encounter a room full of goat kids. A man bottle-feeding one tells them that “they’re not ready” and that “it isn’t time.” He rushes them out.

Irving’s outie is also an artist, but when we meet him on the outside, it turns out that he keeps painting the same black hallway, using paint that resembles the goop his innie sometimes hallucinates. This hallway resembles the one that Ms. Casey walks down on her way to the testing floor.

Mark’s brother-in-law, Ricken, also accidentally wrote a religious text for the innies. After Ricken dropped it off on outie Mark’s front porch, Cobel stole it and brought it to the Lumon office. There, innie Mark and Dylan both begin to read from the book, and internalize some of its worker-specific messages.

“Severance” season two premieres on Apple TV+ on January 17.