Severance Season 2: Is the Time Jump Real?

Severance Season 2‘s premiere episode was quick to plunge viewers back into the mysterious world of the Lumon corporation and its severance program. After the game-changing twists of the Season 1 finale, the Season 2 premiere was a strangely mundane ‘back to business’ affair. (SPOILERS) Mark S. (Adam Scott) found himself right back at work in the Macrodata Refinement division, even though he had led an entire mutiny to escape the company. Mark didn’t return to work quietly: he had more than a few questions for Lumon’s severed floor supervisor Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman), and Mr. Milchick was more than ready with some key answers.

According to Milchick, it has been five months since Mark led his rebellion and activated the “Overtime Contingency” protocol, allowing him and his MDR team members Helly (Britt Lower) and Irving (John Turturro) to activate their workplace personas in the outside world. However, the Season 2 premiere, “Hello, Ms. Cobel”, was a tricky game of hiding big secrets in plain sight, and a lot of fans are echoing the theory that time is one of them.

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Severance Season 2 Theory: How Long Has It Been Since The MDR Uprising?

There is a lot of evidence in the Severance Season 2 premiere that Milchick isn’t telling the truth about the current status quo. First, there’s the conspicuous detail that Milchick is likely aiding Helena Eagan/Helly in infiltrating MDR and studying the team members, to find out how the uprising took root in the severed employees. Then there’s the title of the episode, “Hello, Ms. Cobel”, and how it relates to the situation in the manager’s office; clearly Milchick’s “promotion” is not a fully recognized one yet, as his computer is still registered to Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette). Most tellingly, however, is the fact that the episode never once lets viewers know what the current status quo is with the characters in the outside world. Every time Mark gets on the elevator to leave work, he seemingly goes right back into a new shift.

Locking Mark into a perpetual work cycle and studying him seems like the sort of punishment that Lumon and the Eagan family would inflict upon the mutineers from MDR – the only question is: how long has that punishment been going on? And if it’s indeed only been five months, then what’s happened in that time?

There are arguments to be made either way: Severance Season 2 could make the passage of time one of its biggest reveals if done correctly. The entire show revolves around the notion of people who only want to experience certain moments of life and edit out other parts, and Season 1 built the foundation of its mystery on the contextual truths that existed in between those “severed” spaces. Since Severance had such a troubled time getting this second season out, making the three-year wait into a major storytelling twist would be masterful. Finding out that Mark has become a full-time severed employee and has been severing for years would be a major twist – and an even bigger emotional turn if it turns out something about life on the outside made him run away, and willfully choose to live a half-life of servitude.

It would be equally clever to go the opposite way: to set the events of Season 2 immediately after the Season 1 finale as if the three-year wait never happened. It would explain a lot of what we saw in the Season 2 premiere: Helena and Milchick’s immediate retaliation against Mark being perpetual work; Irving and Dylan being separated at first, and only brought back (along with “Helly”) to keep Mark docile enough; why Harmony Corbel’s presence is not fully gone yet (she was the one to discover and warn about the uprising, and could be re-instated); not to mention the larger question of what’s to gain from keeping Mark in this situation, which seems to be gaining more insight into what “glitch” is lurking inside the severance process that could cause the employees to possibly turn on the employers. That’s an immediate concern – an answer that Helena Eagan would desperately need to get (for herself) after investigating so much in promoting severance.

What do you think? Is Severance Season 2 being real about its time jump? We’ll find out as new episodes stream on Apple TV+.