After three long years, 'Severance' returns with a knotty Season 2 that's as impressive for how much it untangles as it is for what it refuses to.

Severance season 2 defies expectations in the best possible way. Read our spoiler-free review of the long-awaited new season here.

The characters on “Severance” — at least, the “innie” versions of them — don’t experience time like the rest of us. Innies exist only on a subterranean floor in the headquarters of Lumon Industries, a company that splits some employees’ consciousness into a work self and a not-work self.

Now, the lauded Apple TV+ drama from creator Dan Erickson returns with a briskly paced sophomore season that refines its many themes into a timely, rewarding, and challenging debate about the power and parameters of personhood.

There were reasons to worry about a "Severance" sophomore slump. Foremost, the Ben Stiller-backed, 2022 Apple TV+ series was such a brilliantly realized paranoid thriller/sci-fi satire of the work-life balance illusion -- recreating its first season magic would be a herculean task under the best circumstances.

Praise Kier. For anyone worried that “Severance” could have a sophomore slump — especially since the wait between seasons was three years long — put aside your woes. Season 2 (premiering Jan. 17 on AppleTV+) is just as phenomenal as Season 1.

Three years is an absurd amount of time to wait for a new season of TV. That’s triply true when the TV show in question is Severance, a series whose near-flawless first season left us on the steepest and sharpest of cliffhangers.

Season 2 of the surreal sci-fi workplace satire returns to Lumon Industries, where office workers severed from their outside identities search for answers at their existential peril.

In May 2022, one month after Severance’s Season 1 finale premiered, I quit my job. Unlike the Macrodata Refinement (MDR) Team at Lumon Industries, my brain was chip-free, my professional and personal memories were synced,