Note: This story contains spoilers from “Severance” Season 2, Episode 2.
Even the most casual “Severance” fan knows the Lumon offices are anything but cozy. What’s perhaps more surprising is how cold the series feels when it leaves its dystopian corporate hellscape, a setting that’s explored more in the second episode of Season 2.
While the Season 2 premiere focused on Innie Mark’s (Adam Scott) return to Lumon, “Goodbye, Mrs. Selvig” is all about what happened in the outside world five months after Innie Mark made contact with his outie. Previously, “Severance” has only offered audiences a glimpse at PE, the fictional state where the series takes place. Little is known about this location other than the fact it’s likely in New England, owing to the fact the series is filmed in New York and New Jersey. But the latest episode of the Apple TV+ original is the first to fully show that the outside world is just as bleak and miserable as Lumon’s corridors.
“From the beginning in the first season, we felt that the outside world had to be its own kind of weird, stark, lonely place,” Ben Stiller, the series’ director and executive producer, told TheWrap. This setting was chosen to reflect the “cold, isolated, dark place” Mark occupies as the series begins.
“It was really important that we didn’t have any sort of relationship to our current culture or world. It could be anywhere,” Stiller continued. “We were always trying to find ways to show the contrast between the two realities that Innie Mark and Outie Mark are living in, but also have each one be weird and off-putting in its own way. So second season, the challenge was how do you expand that out?”
Any time the show required a new environment, “Severance” utilized a location team to try and figure out “what’s the most interesting way to show something that’s going to feel off,” Stiller said.
All of this snow and vast expanses devoid of people were chosen to highlight just how alienated Mark feels in the “real world.” Stiller noted that the only source of comfort in Mark’s life exists in his sister Devon’s (Jen Tullock) house. “Even that, you have to deal with Ricken (Michael Chernus) there, so it’s a little bit off. But I always wanted it to feel like, in the design, that this was a place where you couldn’t quite put your finger on where it was.”
“There’s more warmth in that sandwich Devon makes Mark in Season 1 than there is on the entire Severance floor,” series writer, creator and executive producer Dan Erickson added.
“Severance” airs new episodes Fridays on Apple TV+.
