What if workers were fully alienated from their labor? This is the question posed by severance, the titular procedure at the heart of the Apple TV hit, in which employees of the fictional corporate Lumon, divorced from their non-work selves, toil at meaningless labor in a basement-level prison. If the central metaphor of season one was that you cannot truly separate your self from your job, even with a bifurcated brain, season two tackles what happens after that knowledge becomes inescapable. Estrangement from the self must be addressed — and overcome.

The process of severance is posed as a solution to employees: Achieve work-life balance by not remembering your work day — literally leaving your job at the workplace doors (or elevators, as the case may be). But like every technological advancement flowing from corporations downward, this innovation doesn’t help workers so much as their bosses. Having no histories and context of the outer world to draw on, the severed employees of the Macrodata Refinement Division are easier to manipulate and abuse, and they don’t understand just how meaningless their work is. While the work may truly be important as well as mysterious, they’re just sorting scary numbers, utterly unaware of the point of their labor. This disaffection follows them home, exacerbated because of severance, not diminished.

As season two expands to spend more time with the outies, a fuller picture emerges of how their severance affects them during what should be leisure time. Dylan (Zach Cherry), in particular, is a sobering case study: Despite his loving wife and three nice children, he’s chronically unhappy with his lot. For Irving B. (John Turturro), his outie’s activities remain the most opaque, but he seems to spend most of his time painting the same ominous scene of the Exports Hall, trying to recapture what he supposedly left at the office. Helly R. (Britt Lower), meanwhile, appears to have a more fulfilling life than her outie; Helena Eagan temporarily takes that life over, stealing the pleasure of Helly R.’s relationship with Mark S. (Adam Scott). She may be an Eagan, the company’s heir apparent, but the obscenely wealthy corporate class still suffers the effects of alienation — estrangement from their human nature.

Mark took the severed job in an attempt to forget about his dead wife, Gemma, for the duration of the workday, but that hasn’t........

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