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.

Taking the idea of work-life balance to extremes, the sardonic and surrealist thriller “Severance” on Apple TV+ envisions a dystopian corporate world in which employees of a company called Lumon Industries have a chip implanted in their brains that severs their memory in two.