We’re talking a lot about Severance today and for good reason. The second season just wrapped up with a banger of a finale, an event that itself was almost three years in the making. Plus, a third season was officially announced and we got to chat with the show’s creator, Dan Erickson. It’s a lot of Lumon, to be sure, but best to get everything in before the long wait for the next season.
But what will that season even be? In an interview with Rolling Stone, Erickson discussed what season three could look like in a broader sense given what happens at the end of season two and it’s very, very interesting. So, it’s time to get into spoilers.
The first season of Severance ended with the four main characters rebelling against Lumon. Then, in the season two premiere, they’re back. It feels like a jump but the show takes a lot of time to explain how and why that happens, Basically though, it’s a reset.
Season two ends with the remaining innies—Mark, Helly, and Dylan—rebelling again, but this time on an even larger scale. They blow up one of Lumon’s biggest secrets, everything involving Cold Harbor including the kidnapping of Gemma Scout, and Mark even kills one of Lumon’s executives, Mr. Drummond. How could season three even begin to imagine people going back to work after all that and more?
Well, maybe it won’t. When asked directly about this pattern, Erickson had a very intriguing answer. “We like to blow up the formula at the end of each season and see if we could bring it back,” he said. “I don’t want to speak too much about what season three would look like. But I will say that we wanted to do something that blew up the world even more than in the first season. It’s a really valid question that people will be asking: ‘Can the show continue in the format that we’ve been seeing, or is it going to need to transform into something else?’”
That Erickson even acknowledges it could be “something else” suggests, well, that it could be “something else.” And maybe it will be. Or, maybe, it won’t. Maybe it’ll just ding back onto the severed floor of Lumon as the audience, and characters, anxiously await to learn how this evil corporation cleaned it all up.
We don’t know what season three will be but we have full trust in the team. And, thankfully, we now know it’s officially coming and hope it’ll come as soon as it can.
For more from Erickson read our interview, of course, but Rolling Stone’s is very good too. Both seasons of Severance are currently on Apple TV+ with season three on the way.
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