(This story contains major spoilers from Severance pay Season one.)

Severance pay returns to Apple TV+ this week after being absent from the screen for nearly three years. I can’t remember what happened in Dan Erickson and Ben Stiller’s riveting drama that connects the mysterious intrigues of… Lost with the corporate nonsense of The office? You should really do something about it! If you don’t have time to rewatch the first season (which is highly recommended before starting the second season), you’ve come to the right place. Here’s everything you need to consider beforehand Severance pay comes back online.

Severance pay The focus is on Mark Scout (Adam Scott), a widower who deals with his grief by completely switching off for an entire work day from nine to five. He is “disconnected,” meaning a chip in his brain prevents Mark from accessing his memories at work. He clocks in and then clocks out as if nothing had happened at all. Except something did happen: Mark S. took over. That’s the name of Mark Scout’s “Innie,” the term the mysterious company Lumon Industries uses to describe the disconnected employee while they’re at work.

At the start of the series, Mark S. is the newly appointed manager of Lumon’s microdata refinement department, responsible for “mysterious and important” work that so far makes little to no sense to the characters, let alone the viewers. Mark and his colleagues (including John Turturro’s Irving, Zach Cherry’s Dylan, and Britt Lower as Helly, the newest member of their team) spend their workdays staring at computer screens, identifying numbers that scare them, and putting them in boxes to classify. Why are they doing this? This is a central question Severance pay Season one, with no clear answer promised in season two.

If Lumon sounds really shady as a company, that’s because it is Lumon is really shady. In fact, the whole world is of Severance pay is a little off. The story takes place in the unknown state of “PE”, in Lumon’s small company town called “Kier”, which takes its name from Kier Egan, the company’s much-celebrated founder, who died long ago but is immortalized on the separate floor of Lumon’s “Perpetuity Wing” , a veritable wax museum with all the major Egan relatives – and oh yeah, sometimes they host waffle parties here too, and by “waffle parties” I mean Orgy-adjacent dance parties with a waffle on the side. Do you have all of this? Cool, me neither!

There’s the mysterious O&D “Optics and Design” department headed by Christopher Walken’s Burt, who may or may not have led the dismantling of a previous MDR team. There’s the guy who feeds and raises goats for reasons completely unknown. There’s the wellness center run by Dichen Lachman’s Ms. Casey, an empty and almost zombified woman who is empty and zombified because she’s supposed to be dead? It turns out that Ms. Casey is Gemma, the wife of Mark Scout, who supposedly died in a car accident several years ago and yet somehow lives in the depths of Lumon. If all the different ways Lumon treats his employees weren’t already a red flag, the fact that they have Mark’s dead-but-not-dead wife under control should be a downright bloody red flag.

As the season progresses, the Innies become more and more skeptical of Lumon, to the point of a real revolution. The four nuclear refiners stage a daring escape using the “Overtime Contingency”, a protocol that allows Lumon to awaken Innies outside of work in the event of an emergency. We learn of his existence when middle management Mr. Milchik (Tramell Tillman) activates Innie Dylan at Outie Dylan’s house, causing Innie Dylan to learn that he has a son in the outside world. Normally a dedicated employee, Dylan rebelled angrily, biting Milchik’s arm during a musical dance experience (you’ve seen the GIFs) and telling his co-workers what he saw. Everyone agrees: Lumon sucks and the innies deserve a chance at a bigger life just like the outies, so they’re going to grab it.

In the final episodes of the season, the operation begins. Dylan holds the fort in Lumon and runs the OTC while Mark, Helly and Irving visit the outside world. Mark and Helly kiss before things go wrong, and Irving hopes for some love as he plans to seek out his office crush Burt. Meanwhile, Helly must deal with the surprising realization that she is an Egan, meaning her outie is likely responsible for her innie’s suffering, in a more practical way than she could have ever imagined. Then there’s Mark, who wakes up at a book release party for his brother-in-law Ricken Lazlo Hale (Michael Chernus). Mark is shocked when he suddenly wakes up with his boss, Ms. Cobel (Patricia Arquette), who isn’t supposed to be here but is at the party because she’s been spending the last time pretending she meets a woman named Ms. Selvig who happens to live next door to Mark because… well, much of a stalker?

During the party, Ms. Cobel finds out that Mark’s Innie is online and frantically runs back to Lumon to complete the refineries’ trip. With any luck, perhaps she could be rehired by Lumon, having been fired from the company just an episode earlier because of her fixation on Mark and her equally mysterious fixation on “reintegration,” a theory that states that fired employees their two selves can merge. (Side note: At the beginning of the season, Mark Scout finds out all about this from Petey, an old colleague he doesn’t know at all; Petey claims that Lumon is evil, that he has undergone reintegration, but dies a few days later. As a legacy, Petey has it Entry into Mark’s life led Mark to question Lumon’s practices and even witness some of their shady dealings up close – including, but not limited to, murder by baseball bat in the brain office supplies.)

We don’t know whether Cobel will get her job back or not. What we Do She knows she can alert Milchik, who manages to shut down the OTC, but only after defeating the ridiculously strong muscleman named Dylan G. The season ends with Irving standing outside Burt’s house and banging on the door; Helly at a gala for the Egans, where she shocks the audience by denouncing severance pay; and Mark, holding a photo of his outie’s wife, Gemma, recognizing her as his colleague Ms. Casey and shouting two frightening words: “She’s alive!”

And scene. That’s it. Almost three years after one of the most aggressive cliffhangers in recent television history, Severance pay is about to flip the switch again and finally take responsibility for the fate of Mark, Helly, Dylan, Irving and the others. Old mysteries will be solved and new ones will emerge, and a small army of internet sleuths is ready to solve them all. So get comfortable, folks. We have a lot of micro data to refine over the next 10 weeks.

Severance pay The second season will be released on Friday with two episodes. The 10-episode second season drops new episodes weekly on Apple TV+.