The first reviews for Severance season 2 have arrived, and the long-awaited new season now holds a 100% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The sci-fi thriller series, created by Dan Erickson and directed by Ben Stiller,

Severance Season 2 is what happens when you stop running. In Severance, Mark Scout (Adam Scott) leads a team of office workers at Lumon Industries. Timeless offices that offer small signifiers plucked from different time periods and work cultures are filled with employees who have undergone a severance procedure that surgically divides their memories between their work and personal lives.

After three long years off the clock, Dan Erickson's corporate thriller returns with a knotty new season as impressive for how much it untangles as it is for what can't be so simply straightened out.

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.

Lumon employees grapple with newfound information about their alter egos in Apple TV+’s striking, superlative series

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.

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.