Adam Scott’s workplace thriller is back – and somehow even more clever, trippy and heartbreaking than before. A total TV triumph

It has been a three-year wait for fans, but the creators of Severance clearly haven’t wasted a minute of it. The first series was fantastically stylish, clever, trippy and compelling. The second is even more so. It demands all your concentration and takes you down rabbit holes so deep and twisted that you may meet yourself coming back. One half of your brain tries to keep up with developments while the other half is trying to digest what it all means. You are effectively severed yourself.

When we left our four heroes, Dylan (Zach Cherry) had broken into the security room and tripped the switch that awoke his three friends’s Innies in the Outie world, in the hope of shining a light on Lumon’s cruelties towards employees and its ultimately-unknown-but-surely-not-morally-sound purpose. Mark (Adam Scott) discovered that his supposedly dead wife, Gemma (Dichen Lachman), is still alive. Helly (Britt Lower) learned she is the daughter of Lumon’s CEO – and declines to share this new knowledge with her colleagues when they are eventually reunited five months after the awakenings. Irving (John Turturro) discovered that his Outie obsessively paints a vision full of foreboding (or, Severance being what it is, possibly past-boding) of a mysterious elevator at the end of a dark hallway, and that his beloved Burt (Christopher Walken) was living with someone.