The first season of “Severance,” back in 2022, put a new spin on the concept of being your own boss.

It took us inside the mysterious, blinding-white offices of Lumon Industries, where employees in the “macrodata refinement department” have chips implanted in their brains to partition them between a work self (the “innie”) and an out-of-office self (the “outie”). The outies collect the paychecks and enjoy the personal time, subcontracting the work to their innies, whose identities only activate when they enter the office. As reality appears to them, the instant they clock out, they clock back in.

We unsevered real-life viewers have had to endure nearly three full, conscious years since the propulsive heart attack of a first-season finale. A group of Lumon innies, led by Mark (Adam Scott), engineered a virtual breakout, activating their consciousnesses in the outside world to expose Lumon’s abuses and uncover its secrets — ending with the cliffhanger revelation that Mark’s supposedly dead wife, Gemma (Dichen Lachman), was alive and captive as a Lumon employee. Oh, for a fast-forward brain chip!

Fortunately, “Severance” returns to Apple TV+ on Friday, and its makers seem to have used every second of the absence productively. The season takes new turns while remaining the most ambitious, batty and all-out pleasurable show on TV, an M.C. Escher maze whose plot convolutions never get in the way of its voice, heart and sense of humor.

I have watched all 10 episodes, and there is little that I can in good conscience tell you about what happens in them. Innie Mark returns to work with the vague goal of liberating his outie’s wife, a quest complicated by his own romance with his co-worker Helly R. (Britt Lower), who — of course there is a further complication — in the outie world is Helena Eagan, the scion of the cultlike family who founded Lumon.

Fearing punishment for innie escape, Mark is instead received in the office as a hero. The “Macrodata Uprising,” he is told, prompted sweeping reforms at the company. There will be new freedoms, new perks and new vending-machine snacks. Now back to work!

You should question this story. You should question a lot in “Severance.” The series, created by Dan Erickson and executive produced by Ben Stiller (he also directs several episodes), is the kind of show that invites you to parse, rewatch and sift for clues, to wonder whether every tease will pay off, whether every thread will be tied in a bow, whether the ultimate ending will “stick the landing.”

To be sure, there are plenty more surprises and confounding details this season: More disturbing Eagan family lore; an enormous conference room/pasture grazed by a herd of goats; and Miss Huang (Sarah Bock), a new manager who happens to be a young child and seems to have wandered off the set of a Wes Anderson movie.

But the important thing in continuing this kind of puzzle-box mystery is sustaining the series’s momentum. And in this respect, “Severance” stands atop the mountain of series that have tried to re-create the Rubik’s Cube pleasures of “Lost.” It is strange and unsettling but never dour or homework-like; it understands that tension and comedy are partners, both springing from the unexpected.

It also understands that a show like this needs to grow or die. Unlike the recent return of “Squid Game,” which largely executed stylish variations on the first season’s bloodletting, the new season of “Severance” expands the story’s stakes and scale, with several knockout episodes that change up the form and setting of the series. (Strap in tight for Episode 4.)

It expands the cast with several familiar character actors (Gwendoline Christie, Merritt Wever, John Noble) whose appearances feel well-chosen, not simply like flexes from an acclaimed show.

It expands our knowledge of the Lumon staff, including Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) and Seth Milchick (the charismatic Tramell Tillman), the cheerfully menacing manager who has his own conflicts about the pressures and indignities of his work. We see deeper into the loneliness and self-doubts of Mark’s co-workers Irving (John Turturro) and Dylan (Zach Cherry).

Most important, “Severance” expands its ideas, especially around its dual-consciousness premise, which is both the source of some stunning twists and a font of questions about the nature of being. How much does circumstance determine personality? Can an innie cheat on his outie’s spouse? What makes you — to borrow the title of the self-help book ingeniously deployed throughout the series — “The You You Are”?

It takes deft acting to make these mind games credible. Lower shows how the same drive that manifests as ruthlessness in outie Helena becomes rebel fierceness in innie Helly. Shifting between moody, sarcastic outie Mark and his chipper, naïve innie, Scott takes the same core personality and launders it like a freshly pressed work shirt.

In the first season, the idea of separating one’s work self from one’s out-of-office self is presented as a fascinating life hack. The second season thinks more about the emotional reasons one might want to spin off a new consciousness — loneliness, guilt, fear of failure. For some, one’s innie is not just a second self but a second chance, an opportunity to create a spinoff who might be happier, better, kinder. (A recurrent theme of twins and doppelgängers underscores this notion.)

The innies, however, might not want to see themselves as someone else’s do-over. The season gains force as it confronts the power imbalance between these bifurcated selves.

Outie Mark Scout and innie “Mark S.” (he does not even get custody of the full name) may have fallen into an alliance, but do they really have the same objectives? As the season hurtles toward its finale — which could work either as a tantalizing cliffhanger or a haunting ending — it invites you to wonder if they can truly be equals.

It is not hard to see what “Severance” has to say about work culture, the dehumanization of employees and how capitalism sees workers with full, messy lives as an inconvenience. If anything, it’s quaint to imagine that a corporation would invent an elaborate surgical infrastructure to create more productive workers, when real companies might soon do the same job cheaper with A.I.

But there’s another phenomenon that Season 2 engages: the alienation of the self from the self, the brain-chip version of which is simply more extreme than, say, the different versions of ourselves we already create on LinkedIn vs. Instagram. In this way, you might liken “Severance” to “The Substance,” another fable about how modern pressures drive people to create optimized, alternative versions of themselves, with catastrophic results. We have met the enemy, “Severance” says, and they are us.