Warning: The review of the season premiere of Severance will contain spoilers.

I often wonder if AppleTV+ knew it had such a massive hit on hits hands when they quietly dropped season 1 of Severance in early 2022. The show quickly became a word-of-mouth darling amongst critics and fans as the season went on – culminating in a number of Emmy nominations – and expectations have only grown in the 3 year wait for season 2. It can’t be overstated how rare it is in today’s TV landscape to have a truly original show that succeeds at being thrilling, insightful, and mysterious. Creator Dan Erickson rightfully earned comparisons to Lost with the sheer depth of his world, and it felt like season 1 had only scratched the surface.

Combine the hype with the truly jaw-dropping cliffhanger which season 1 left on, and Erickson and his team of writers have a great deal riding on their shoulders. Will they lean into the show’s rich lore, whether the show needs it or not, or will they stay true to its original mission statement? How much detail are they hoping fans remember after three long years – in spite of AppleTV+’s handy “catch up” primer? Season 2’s season premiere, “Hello, Ms. Cobel” throws a few new wrenches into the works, while continuing to raise the stakes of what season 1 introduced. Naturally, the best place to start is immediately after the endpoint of last season, when the “overtime contingency” ended, and the innies temporarily went outside the Lumon office.

Episode 1 of season 2 spends almost all of its runtime with the innies, as they try to figure out a way forward. But, of the core group from last season, only Mark S. (Adam Scott) remains to pick up the pieces. As Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman) tells Mark, it’s been 5 months, and the innies have become a national story for reigniting the ethical conversation around the Severance procedure. Except Irving (John Turturro), Dylan (Zach Cherry), and Helly (Britt Lower) chose not to come back. Since we have an entire season of Severance under our belts though, we know that this is most likely not true and we’re left to think the worst has happened to them, or something terrible will happen to Mark as punishment.

Punishment has an interesting connotation within the Severance universe, of course. Much like Lost, the show is heavily allegorical about heaven, hell, and organized religion. Are Mark, and all the other severed employees, dead, forced to live out a menial existence they can’t escape from? I imagine that Erickson will have a great deal of fun with the notion this time around, and “Hello Ms. Cobel” provides no easy answers. If anything, it raises more questions. Like, who are the new people that suddenly show up in the Macrodata Refinery office, played by Alia Shawkat, Bob Balaban, and Stefano Carannante?

And who is Miss Huang (Sarah Bock), the new floor manager, who also happens to be a child? Severance, and episode director Ben Stiller, certainly wants us to believe that there’s a connection between her and Miss Casey (Dichen Lachman), who we learned last season is Mark’s dead wife Gemma, but was last seen going down the dark hallway to the downward elevator below the Severed floor. If Severance is truly an allegory for the afterlife, perhaps she’s some sort of reincarnation, but for now, Mark simply wants to know the truth.

The truth gets muddled in the episode’s major plot development, which comes after one of the funniest bits from Severance so far, when Milchick treats the reunited MDR team to a stop-motion infomercial on the events of last season. Left alone, Mark and the innies recount what they saw on the outside, but Helly lies and doesn’t reveal the truth about her lineage, or her public outing of the Severance program from the season 1 finale. Did she lie out of fear for the others’ perception of her, or was there some darker motivation at hand? Irving’s suspicions are certainly raised, and we know that he’s nothing if not persistent. Whatever the reason may be, I’m sure it’ll only be a matter of time before the truth comes out, and everyone reaps the consequences.

• You Got Your Lost in My Severance!: I’ll use this space to highlight an aspect of each episode where it feels like the show is trying to channel Lost‘s tendency to throw in some random bit of lore that fans will surely obsess over, whether they have any intention of paying it off or not. I have a feeling there will be a number of contenders every week, but for episode 1, I’ll give it to the aforementioned casting of Shawkat, Balaban, and Carannante. Their characters’ appearance provides a number of massive questions of the world of Lumon and Severance – Where did they come from? How much of the non-severed world do they know? Are they Lumon plants to try to mess with Mark and his former team? Lost trafficked in similar stunt casting, or in bringing in outsiders in increasingly improbable fashions, so only time will tell if we’ll ever get answers, or if it’ll just be a lore worm dangling on a hook.