The music dance experience is officially canceled—but Severance has returned. After three long years, the macrodata refinement crew is back on our screens. Follow along each week as we break down each episode of Severance Season 2. In the process, we’ll try to piece together what the heck is going on at Lumon Industries. Next up: Episode 7, “Chikhai Bardo.”
Crunching the Numbers
FINALLY!
Thanks to Mark’s reintegration-fueled lapse into his memory palace, we got the Gemma backstory at long last. There was a meet-cute at a blood drive! A thoughtful, if misguided, gift of ants! A wedding, and dancing, and houseplants, and a house full of books, and excellent southern exposure. A love story, in short.
And I do mean short. In the wake of a miscarriage and the turmoil of IVF, Gemma started getting interested in Lumon. “I think I got onto the mailing list at the clinic,” she remarks to Mark, showing him a set of chikhai bardo cards that look very similar to the one Dylan pilfered from the optics and design suite in Season 1. A bardo is a principle in some schools of Buddhism that refers to one of six states of being; the chikhai bardo—which is also the episode’s title, a.k.a. highlighted and triple-underlined—is the bardo that immediately follows death.
That’s a pretty clear reference to Gemma’s death—or, that is, “death.” Mark’s memories take us back to the night of Gemma’s supposedly fatal car crash. We still don’t know how exactly she and/or Lumon faked her death, complete with Mark identifying what he believed was her body. But it does now seem like Gemma was in on it: As she headed out that night, she shot a distracted Mark a look that felt much more “I’m going away for a long time” than “See you in a couple hours.”
While Mark’s brain was working its way back toward the present, we finally discovered what Gemma is up to at Lumon. Sure enough, she is living at Lumon HQ and is apparently a sort of in-house guinea pig. Her days consist of a battery of physical and mental exams interspersed with visits to rooms with names we’ve seen before denoting different Lumon projects: Cairns, Dranesville, Loveland, Lucknow, and so on. Each contains its own bizarro nightmare fuel, ranging from turbulence on a circa-1980s plane to the forced drafting of thank-you card after thank-you card in a mid-century Christmas tableau. The Wellington room might be the worst of all: Gemma spends two hours in a dental chair for who knows what. Making all this better (for Gemma) and worse (for empathy) is that each room causes Gemma to enter a severed state—though seemingly not the one where she’s Ms. Casey. (Given the option to partake in this very specific severance use case, I would absolutely go full Helena Eagan. Oh, my innie’s reality is composed entirely of visits to the dentist, a life spent between scraping for plaque and closing for suction with nary a Skittle to break things up? Whatever! You are not a person! Get back in the chair!)
It looks more and more like at least part of why Gemma is at Lumon is to test the efficacy of the severance procedure. “Are the severance barriers working?” Drummond asks during a flashback to Ms. Casey’s day monitoring Helly in the MDR office, which she did from right behind Mark. Indeed, the barriers were working: Neither Mark nor Ms. Casey appeared to know who the other really was.
Back in the before times, Mark was less than supportive of Gemma’s burgeoning interest in Lumon: “Why are you wasting your time with this?” he asks. That dismissal makes his decision to undergo severance after her “death” that much bleaker: He knew of Lumon and thought it was nonsense, and yet.
And, willing participant though she might be (or at least have been), things aren’t looking great for Gemma. All of the severed rooms we saw are occupied by a creepy Lumon minder, Dr. Mauer, who alternately serves as dentist, flight attendant, and scolding husband and whose slow whistling indicates he was probably the same guy who was pushing the cart at the beginning of Episode 5. Mauer is overly invested, to put it mildly—despite Drummond’s reminder that they’ll have to “get rid of” Gemma as soon as Mark wraps up his nearly finished work on the Cold Harbor project.
When Gemma expresses her desire to go home, Mauer lies, telling her that Mark has remarried and now has a child with his new wife, and intimating that Gemma’s innie—or rather, one of Gemma’s innies—might have moved on as well. Gemma doesn’t buy it. She clubs Mauer in the head with a chair and makes a break for it, only to end up back on the severed floor. There, Gemma’s Ms. Casey innie activates, and Milchick—of course—promptly sends her back down to the residential floor. At Lumon, no one can hear you scream.
Unanswered Questions
What’s a mystery box show without them? Here’s what we can’t stop thinking about.
Why is Gemma doing this?
Yes, we saw her make a break for it this week. But we now know that, at least as long as she’s not in a severed-specific room, Gemma is still Gemma—with memories of Mark and her life outside Lumon. (“So I’ll see Mark?” she asks excitedly about a potential visit to the as-yet-unseen Cold Harbor room.) Gemma is the one doing her daily reading and calisthenics and submitting to day after day of ominous severed-room visits. So—why?
We saw her get interested in Lumon, and that feels like the likeliest explanation: She believes—or at least believed—that Lumon is doing something good and important, and she’s agreed to (at least temporarily) sacrifice her own comfort for the mission. But what mission is worth making your spouse think you’re dead and giving up your normal life and freedom for two years and counting?
Her patience with the project is finally wearing thin. “So what happens once I’ve been in all the rooms?” Gemma asks Mauer.
“You will see the world again, and the world will see you,” he replies. “Mark will benefit from the world you’re siring. Kier will take away all his pain, just as Kier has taken away yours.”
“Can you please just talk like a normal person?” Gemma snaps. Well—no. Now that Gemma’s had it with her Lumon residency, it’s clear that she can’t free herself. So who is going to save her?
What’s up with the Damona Birthing Retreat?
Devon has worked out that the cabin where she met another expectant mother in Season 1 transforms people into their innies and pitches Reghabi on bringing Mark there to awaken his innie self. Reghabi insists it wouldn’t work, but—especially now that Reghabi has stormed out of Mark’s place at the prospect of Devon calling Ms. Cobel for help—this is starting to feel a bit like Chekhov’s cabin.
Whose side is Ms. Cobel on?
Reghabi insists that Cobel is a Lumon lifer—and indeed, we know that she used to have a literal shrine to the company (and Kier) in her home. But her feelings have gotten a lot more complicated since her Season 1 firing (and her rejection of Helena’s offer to return). If Devon reaches out, would Cobel help Mark with his reintegration woes, or is she more likely to turn the pair in in the hope of (re-)currying favor? I’m inclined to think the former is more likely. It’s not clear how much Cobel could help with Mark’s warring brain states, but she knows Ms. Casey is Gemma and thus might have an awfully good sense of how to access her domicile turned prison.
Speaking of long absences: Where the heck is the replacement MDR team?
When we last saw Mark’s would-be colleagues, Bob Balaban’s Mark W. was being escorted out of Lumon by security as he groused about his abrupt dismissal. But you don’t hire Balaban and Alia Shawkat to film a scene or two and then depart, severance (sorry) checks in hand. It seems all but certain that we’ll be seeing them (and, yes, Stefano Carannante’s Dario R.) again. But there’s not a lot of show left. Come back! Hurry!
Reddit Theory of the Week
First of all: rude. I’m partial to this theory—written under the (divine?) influence of cold medication—that all the characters on Severance have some version of the word “in” hidden in their names. Except, that is, for Mark and Gemma Scout ….
Employee of the Week: Gemma Scout
OK, so hitting your colleague (supervisor?) over the head with a chair is not typically considered positive workplace behavior (at least this side of SummerSlam). Nor is stealing their ID to access forbidden areas of the office—though I will grant that the intended forbidden area was, uh, “outside.”
But for two years, Gemma has been grinding away at Lumon Industries. In the Wellington room, she was informed that her last visit was just six weeks earlier. That is a lot of dental work, particularly for her poor Wellington room innie, whose panic at the sight of the dentist chair suggests that that’s all that particular innie consciousness gets to experience. One good thing about having a job: dental insurance. One very, very, very bad thing about having a job at Lumon: mandatory extensive dental work. Also: invasive health monitoring, zero freedom of movement, the emotional evisceration of a spouse, frequent perms—and did I mention all those thank-you notes? (“You hate writing thank-you notes,” Mark remarked in a memory of their marriage. I bet that feeling hasn’t softened!)
And yet Gemma has endured it all, seemingly without incident till now. Who knows what other quotidian nightmares she’s been enduring all this time? Get this girl a raise.
Design Porn
Severance isn’t just a story; it’s an atmosphere. Each week we’re highlighting our favorite looks captured by the show’s eerily gorgeous production design and cinematography.
Babe, wake up, a new sinister Lumon surveillance room just dropped:
Really, though, the star of “Chikhai Bardo” was Gemma, whose work at Lumon seems to be one part baroque torture and three parts fabulous outfits:
Dichen Lachman: flawless in any era.
