Before season 2, Severance creators promise they have an ending for the show in mind

After nearly three years of waiting, the second season of Severance is about to premiere on Apple TV+. And Apple must have a lot of faith in the new episodes, because they're promoting it hard. Not only are the cast and crew out there doing interviews by the truckload, but several of the stars turned up the other day in Grand Central Station in New York City for a pop-up event where they puttered around doing heaven-knows-what in little cubicles just like they do on the show:

Adam Scott (Mark), Britt Lower (Helly), Zach Cherry (Dylan), Tramell Tillman (Mr. Milchick) and Patricia Arquette (Ms. Cobel) all participated in this event, which is the kind of fun marketing stunt that gets people talking. Maybe after such a long wait, Apple feels like it needs to pull out all the stops to get people excited, and I'm not complaining.

"[I]t was so great to be able to tell people a date," Adam Scott told Gizmodo about the long wait. Because multiple times a day, people are asking me where season two is. And I get it. It’s been a while. So it’s been great being able to say 'January 17th'...It’s so great that people have been as patient as they have, and that they’re willing to wait around this long."

Adam Scott sounds like he's happy to be here for the ride. He's perfect in the duel role of Mark, who in his personal life is a bit of a sad sack unable to move on from the death of his wife, and at work is an optimistic company man. The gimmick of Severance is that Mark and the other "severed" employees have undergone a procedure where they can't remember what they did at work when they're at home and vice versa, which basically means that work Mark — aka Mark's "innie" in the parlance of the show — is an entirely new person, one who spent the first season becoming increasingly disillusioned with what was going on at Lumon Industries.

"I love playing both of them," Scott said of the two Marks, the innie and the outie. "I think that they’re just different parts of the same person. And I think it’s all the same guy. But there are things I love playing with both of them." Given how great Scott is in this part, it might surprise you to learn that Apple didn't initially think he was a big enough star; executive producer Ben Stiller had to wear them down. “I understood why they were feeling this way because, the first time I read this script, my first instinct was: ‘There’s no way I’m going to end up doing this. This is too good,’” Scott said on The Severance Podcast with Ben Stiller & Adam Scott. “If I was Apple, I would likely be wanting a giant star to play this role.”

Severance bosses know how many seasons they want the show to run, but won't reveal the number just yet

"I think that we’re starting season two with him being thrown back into this situation where he is beyond disillusioned now," Scott continued. "Now he’s at a place of needing answers and needing to know what exactly he’s supposed to do with this information and if there’s even a way of getting it to his outie."

This means Mark basically now shares the same goals as the audience: to get the bottom of what is happening at Lumon. What are their real plans for the severance procedure? Where do all the weird passageways in the Lumon basement lead? What exactly are Mark and his teammates in the Macrodata Refinement Department doing when they shuffled numbers around a screen?

Those little computers they use are actually functional, by the way. “When you see us, we really are refining numbers. There is actually a way to do it," Scott told The Verge. “These people have no idea what they’re doing. They just know that they need to refine numbers by feeling sort of when they get scary. Getting to actually do that when we’re on camera is really important and really helps a lot.”

Little details like that may be why Severance feels so immediate and grounded even as everything that happens is deeply surreal and weird. But sooner or later, answers are coming, as creator Dan Erickson promised Tech Radar. "I have a sense of what the final scene will be and, in terms of a number of seasons, kind of where I see it all landing on a character level," he said. "We've certainly talked about what we see as the ideal run of the show. But, from the beginning, we also wanted to be flexible enough that, if something came along that surprised us [narratively], and we fell in love with a certain storytelling element or a character, we'd want to spend more time with these things or these people. So, we wanted to create a flexible plan that we could turn to if we had any ideas [of where we could take these things]."

Hopefully the answers will be as weird and wonderful as the questions. One thing Erickson is mindful of is not making the show feel too predictable. "I think when you start to get into answering the questions about the corporate conspiracy, there's always the concern that it's going to become sort of more of a traditional thriller and that it's going to turn into something more familiar, like we've seen before. So, I wanted to create something where it's like there were big stakes that made sense with sort of the global nature of Lumon as a company, but that didn't turn it into something that was -Suddenly, we're just running around trying to shoot each other and dodging hitmen and stuff, you know?" he told Forbes. "The show works in a lot of ways because of the small moments - the characters arguing about when it's time to change out the group photos - and so, we had to make sure that its soul stayed intact in that way."

Stiller also confirmed to IndieWire that they "definitely have an end" in mind, just in case you were worried that the show would completely make itself up as it went along, resulting in an unsatisfying ending. Balancing people's thirst for answers with the art of long-form storytelling is a challenge for any puzzle box show. Hopefully the long team between seasons gave the Severance team plenty of time to get it right. We'll see how things turned out when the season 2 premiere lands on Apple TV+ this Friday, January 17.

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h/t Kotaku