I'm worried a little about 'Severance'

This better be going somewhere.

There’s a wide line between being too obvious and being too opaque. “Severance,” the Apple TV series now in its second season, may have strayed past the far side of that line.

It’s an interesting show, but one where you have to sift through fan theories the next day to see if you’re getting it.

Mostly, I’m not.

“Severance” centers on this mysterious company called Lumon.  Certain Lumon employees exist in two versions: “innie,” when they’re at work, and “outie,” when they’re at home. Not two  physical bodies, I guess, just two exclusive halves of a single consciousness. They enter the elevator as one, come out as the other. The outies are unaware of what the innies do at work, and vice versa.

The “work” involves sitting at 90s-era computer terminals and grouping sets of numbers to be placed in on-screen bins. Upper management consists of Mr. Milchick, his adolescent assistant Hanna and a disembodied speaker phone, all of whom are equal parts sinister and weird. Somewhere in the maze of blank hallways, the “severed” floor also contains a meadow inhabited by goats.

Just typing that makes me think I’ve already spent too much time with this show. It reminds me of “The Prisoner,” the British series that ran for 17 episodes starting in 1967. Patrick McGoohan played a retired spy (Number 6) held in a strange village where all sorts of weird shit ensued. Not until the final episode did you realize that weirdness was the whole point. Yeah, it was tarted up as one guy’s futile battle against authoritarian rule, but the show was just jerking us around the whole time. Roll credits. 

I keep seeing signs of a narrative arc in “Severance,” so I’ll stick around. The cast is great and the premise still intrigues. But I’m starting to worry that it will end up like “The Prisoner” – or “Lost” or “Twin Peaks” – where the ending satisfies no one and a whole analysis industry springs up about what it was all supposed to mean.