‘Severance’ Is Back. Here’s a Season 1 Recap to Jog Your Memory.

In our world, it has been nearly three years since Season 1 of the dystopian sci-fi office thriller “Severance” became a breakout hit for Apple TV+. But in Kier, the fictional town where the show’s action takes place, just five months have purportedly passed since the events of the Season 1 finale.

The Season 2 premiere picks up right back in the thick of things (a word of warning: You probably remember even less than you think), so if you can find 41 minutes in your unsevered life, we highly recommend rewatching the finale. But if you don’t have time, here’s what you need to remember before watching Season 2, which had a surprise early debut on Thursday, the night before it had been scheduled.

‘Innies,’ ‘Outies’ and Severance

“Severance” follows the lives of a group of workers at a company called Lumon Industries who have agreed to undergo a procedure known as “severance.” During this operation, a device — the Severance Chip — is inserted into their brains. It separates their work selves, known as “innies,” from their home selves, known as “outies.”

The lives of the innies are tightly circumscribed, with their awareness extending only as far as the walls of the office and the beginning and end of each workday. The innies typically cannot send any kind of messages to their “outies,” and though they can submit resignations, their outies never accept them.

The show’s central group of group innies — Mark S. (Adam Scott), Irving B. (John Turturro), Helly R. (Britt Lower) and Dylan G. (Zach Cherry) — work in a sterile and timelessly ultramodern office doing “macrodata refinement,” which involves moving numbers around on a vintage-future computer screen — and that’s it. None of the refiners know what the numbers mean.