This post contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 7, “Chikhai Bardo,” of Severance.
Lumon’s endgame is the central mystery of Severance, Apple TV+’s hit sci-fi thriller about office employees whose consciousnesses have been “severed” into their “innie” work selves and their “outie” personal selves. Finally, seven episodes into the second season, we’re starting to get some idea of what this sinister megacorporation is doing.
That’s not to say that things are clear now. Far from it. But Friday’s enrapturing episode, “Chikhai Bardo,” has made a few things less opaque. Mark’s wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman) is not only alive on Lumon’s testing floor, but seems like she’s more or less herself, not merely a blank cipher whose brain has been wiped of all its contents. She still retains memories of her old life from before she wound up deep in a Lumon sub-basement, her family and friends left to grieve and believe that she had died in a car crash. Gemma only takes on different, severed personalities when she crosses certain rooms’ thresholds, or when an elevator takes her up to Lumon’s severed floor and turns her into robotic office therapist “Ms. Casey.” Underneath, both literally and figuratively, is the woman whom outie Mark (Adam Scott) loves.
We now know more about the testing floor, that scary place where Lumon banished Gemma after a therapy session (performed as “Ms. Casey”) in the first season. She is a human lab rat down there, bouncing between rooms with their own severance barriers that prevent Gemma from carrying memories from each room into the hallways. She’s been through every room, we learn, except the one labeled “Cold Harbor,” the same label on the project that innie Mark S. is 96 percent of the way to completing. Once Mark finishes Cold Harbor, we learn, Gemma will leave the testing floor—but how exactly she will depart remains unsaid.
In this episode, we also get Gemma and Mark’s much-needed backstory. The two college professors have a meet-cute at a blood drive and fall hard for each other. They get married and conceive a child, before a miscarriage knocks their perfect relationship off balance. Gemma blames herself, the couple attempts IVF, and then in a poof, she’s gone—presumed dead, but really somewhere in the bowels of Lumon. Now, years later, Mark—whose outie learned, via a revelation from his innie, that Gemma is still alive—might be on the verge of a breakthrough in finding her.
It’s a masterful episode of television, one that delivers a satisfying if partial payoff to the tangled web that show creator Dan Erickson has woven over the past two seasons. But, with “Chikhai Bardo,” Severance is still showing us just the shape of the game, but not the endgame—and every answer in this week’s show only begets more questions.
To wit: While the testing floor’s activities are now clear, Lumon’s larger plans are not. The floor has many rooms, and each day, a nurse shepherds Gemma around to a handful of them. The experiences in the rooms are designed to be unpleasant for Gemma, whose severance chip prevents her from remembering any of it once she leaves each room. One is a dentist’s office, in which innie Gemma cries when a creepy doctor, called Dr. Mauer, begins to operate on her. In another room, Mauer cosplays as innie Gemma’s husband at Christmas and forces her to write her way through a huge pile of thank-you cards until her hand is in pain. “It’s always Christmas,” she says, nearing tears as she wraps up another day of writing. In yet another room, innie Gemma is a passenger on a violently turbulent plane that looks like it’s about to crash.
What’s the connection between all these rooms? Here’s my theory: Lumon is using Gemma to test a consumer version of severance, designed to spare people from remembering painful experiences. The company already offers severance at a birthing retreat, where women can compartmentalize away their labor. Lumon could be experimenting with severance to conquer a fear of flying or to avoid the dread of the dentist’s office. One possible clue is in a question posed in this episode: “Are the severance barriers holding?” Lumon’s hulking security guy asks an underling who’s watching Gemma from his monitor, in what appears to be a macrodata refinement center similar to the one that innie Mark and his beloved team operate. Yes, the underling tells him: “The technology is working.” Outie Gemma, when questioned by her Lumon overseers, doesn’t remember what’s behind each door, and her only way of deducing anything is if a body part is in pain when she returns to the hallway. Severance holds up, then, even under extreme distress or suffering—results that would bode well for widespread implementation of the procedure. (Meanwhile, the refiners who are watching Gemma bear an uncanny resemblance to Mark, Helly, Irving, and Dylan, our refiner-protagonists. Why does Lumon have body doubles of each of them?)
Interestingly, none of Gemma’s testing that we have seen relates to fertility, even though the episode’s flashbacks make clear that her and Mark’s quest to have a child was the biggest thorn in their life at the time of Gemma’s presumed death. In one scene from the past, Gemma is looking over a card representing “Chikhai Bardo,” a Tibetan Buddhist concept representing the moment when the process of dying begins (on the card, it’s illustrated with a man fighting himself and defeating his own psyche). Implications of the concept aside—remember Mark’s ongoing efforts to eliminate the barrier between his innie and outie so that he can ratchet up the search for Gemma inside Lumon?—it’s notable that Gemma thinks she got onto a mailing list for the card by way of the fertility clinic she and Mark have been going to.
That raises its own harrowing question: Did Lumon seek out Gemma because of her troubles getting pregnant? Knowing that she was an accomplished academic with a mind for science, is it possible that Gemma went to Lumon willingly, in the hopes that the medical minds at the company might help her conceive again? She and Mark were growing distant in the days leading up to her supposed accident, so it doesn’t seem far-fetched that she’d have kept an out-of-the-box treatment option secret. The company is now engaged in a kidnapping plot—and when outie Gemma tells her Lumon doctor that she’d like to go home, he lies that Mark has remarried—but it is possible that Gemma arrived of her own accord. (It’s even possible she agreed to fake her own death, though that seems to me like too much of a stretch.)
The version of Gemma that rots away inside Lumon has little joy, but, before the cruel lie about Mark remarrying, she manages to crack a smile at the notion that she might soon reunite with her husband. Mauer tells Gemma that she is “siring” a new world, and that when she goes to Cold Harbor, “the world will see you again” and “you will see the world.” She asks if she’ll get to see Mark, and Mauer evasively tells her that Mark will “benefit” from the new world Gemma is building. But no worry, because Kier Eagan, the company’s dead founder and object of cult devotion, will wipe away Mark’s pain just as he’s wiped away Gemma’s. What does that mean? We are looking at the real Gemma, but has Lumon overpowered her with some kind of supercharged antidepressant?
Gemma finds all of Mauer’s answers unsatisfactory, and she bangs him on the head with a chair in her sterile, windowless apartment on the testing floor. She steals the doctor’s card and races into the elevator, angling to escape the testing floor and get home. But that elevator only takes her to the regular severed floor of Lumon, where Gemma’s chip reverts her into robotic innie Ms. Casey mode. In that brain, she has no idea what is happening. The increasingly unkind Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman) tells her that her outie stepped into the wrong elevator and sends her back down the long, dark tunnel to the testing floor.
When Gemma arrives back on the testing floor, once again inhabiting her own brain as her outie self, she is devastated. Her expression as she begins to cry isn’t just one of desperation but of regret, of someone who thinks she’s made a bad choice or two that she cannot take back. Gemma has no route to escape without losing consciousness and forgetting her own objectives. She is a prisoner, and at no point does her quest for liberation seem more doomed than when she is forced back to the testing floor.
She needs a cavalry, and it might be coming. Mark has spent this episode passed out on his couch, recovering from a terrifying spasm during his reintegration treatment at the end of the last episode. Outie Mark is working with a rogue former Lumon doctor, Reghabi (Karen Aldridge), to merge the brains of his innie and outie so that he can find his wife. It’s not clear if the procedure has worked, and a disagreement with Mark’s sister, Devon (Jen Tullock), leads Reghabi to ditch them. But as Mark wakes, he looks at his sister and seems confused—but certainly not shocked—to be where he is. Innie Mark met his outie’s sister in the Season 1 finale, when his gang of innies managed to activate a special protocol to wake themselves in the outside world. Now, Mark seems to know Devon is a friendly face. Does he see a sibling, though?
The episode ends with a close shot of Gemma’s eyes, first shown in normal light and then blared in the white tones of a Lumon basement, kind of like the last thing a person might see before fading away. Has Mark’s reintegration succeeded, or has his outie just died and been replaced by his innie, as contemplated in the illustration of “Chikhai Bardo”? In either case, maybe there’s hope yet for Gemma’s plight in the pitiless depths of Lumon.
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