Severance’s creators clarify the artwork of an incredible cliffhanger

After a protracted wait, Severance is again. Season 2 premiered on Apple TV Plus on January seventeenth, greater than two years after the primary season wrapped up. The wait was notably exhausting due to how the season 1 finale ended — a large cliffhanger that may fully upend the lives of virtually everybody on this sci-fi thriller. Cliffhangers are a difficult enterprise. They can assist hold viewers considering no matter comes subsequent, however they will also be irritating, seeming to withhold info purely for the aim of preserving folks hooked.

Severance has managed this balancing act properly to date, and I had the possibility to speak to among the artistic workforce behind the present — creator Dan Erickson, director Ben Stiller, and star Adam Scott — about how they’ve pulled it off. “Truthfully it’s simply type of guessing in your thoughts,” Stiller tells The Verge. “You strive to consider what the stakes are that we’ve established, and hopefully you’ve earned it by the top.”

One of many trickiest components for Severance, no less than early on, was that the workforce wasn’t actually positive how audiences would react. It’s a bizarre present that follows a bunch of workplace staff who’ve their brains surgically altered to separate their work and residential lives. This, in essence, creates two selves: those that stay within the exterior world (outies); and those that are confined to the basement workplace of Lumon Industries (innies). Issues solely get stranger from there, involving the whole lot from an workplace goat pen to a terrifyingly ominous dance occasion. Whereas the present finally discovered an viewers, that wasn’t a given throughout manufacturing.

“We made the entire season in a bubble the place no one noticed something till it was all performed, and we didn’t know if anyone would even reply to the present,” says Stiller. “I keep in mind the season 1, episode 8 ending was a cliffhanger. And I keep in mind considering ‘that’s a very good cliffhanger, I ponder if individuals are going to really feel the episode 9 ending is an effective cliffhanger too.’ Will this all add up for folks? Fortunately it did.”

Scott, who performs Mark on the present and in addition serves as a producer, echoes that by saying, “It’s a roll of the cube whether or not or not one thing goes to work.” The thought is to design the present in order that it builds as much as these huge moments, after which hope it connects the way in which you deliberate. “There’s all of this structure constructing as much as that second in episode 9,” Scott explains. “I keep in mind after we had been capturing the finale, and capturing the scene the place Mark walks previous [Harmony Cobel, played by Patricia Arquette] and calls her by the unsuitable title, and speaking to Ben and Patricia and simply saying ‘In the event that they’re nonetheless with us at this level, that is going to be so superior.’”

A part of what made the season 1 finale work, says Erickson, is that it managed to each reply questions and introduce new ones. It gave viewers an intriguing mixture of satisfaction and thriller. For individuals who haven’t seen it — spoilers forward! — the ninth and remaining episode of season 1 has Mark and his coworkers doing one thing forbidden: coming into the skin world as their innie selves. There, they study every kind of essential details about who they are surely. Mark, specifically, discovers that his spouse, who he thought was lifeless within the exterior world, is definitely dwelling a severed life at Lumon below the brand new title Ms. Casey. The episode ends proper on that stunning revelation.

“With Mark, that remaining second of ‘she’s alive,’ in a method it solutions one query; the query was at all times is he going to search out out about Ms. Casey, and is he going to have the ability to ship a message to the skin world that she’s down there,” Erickson explains. “We get solutions to these. However then it opens up this entire new query of what now? How is that going to vary the established order on the within and the skin.?”

Whereas the wait was lengthy, season 2 of Severance picks up proper after that second, so that you lastly get some solutions — however after all, there are a lot extra in retailer.