Severance Doubles Down on the Body Horror

Photo: Apple TV+

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Spoilers follow for the Severance episode “Chikhai Bardo,” which premiered on Apple TV+ on February 28.

Severance’s “Chikhai Bardo,” an episode-long portrait of what Gemma has been forced to endure since she “died” in a car accident, doesn’t give us all the answers about what Lumon is up to in Branch 501. We still don’t know Lumon’s intended endgame for the severance procedure, or whether the fertility clinic Gemma and Mark visited — staffed by the same doctor we see working with Gemma on Lumon’s secret basement floor — was a Lumon front all along, or if there are more Gemmas out there, trapped in other branch buildings. But just as what Ricken wrote in his new version of The You You Are was less important than the fact that he agreed to write it for Lumon at all, so too is the purpose of Gemma’s ordeals less meaningful than her seemingly involuntary experience of them.

Severance is really letting its body-horror freak flag fly this season, and the grotesquerie of its obsession with how bodies can be manipulated, against our will or without our knowledge, includes Gemma but isn’t limited to her. Doubles, shadows, and watchers; facsimiles, dead ringers, and twins — Russian-literature majors, this season’s for you! Like one Mark crawling out of another Mark’s split skull in the new opening credits, there’s abnormal, gnarly, Cronenbergian stuff peeking out everywhere this season, underscoring that the battle being waged by Lumon is one of flesh and blood with minds and bodies turned into weapons against their seemingly rightful owners.

A brief overview of the season-two body horror that emphasizes how powerless both the Innies and Outies are once Lumon starts messing with their personage: In “Woe’s Hollow,” the MDR team sees eerie versions of themselves, identified in the episode’s credits as “shadows,” guiding them through the forest; we never learn if these are people, holograms, or some kind of collective vision implanted in their minds. Innie Mark is sexually assaulted by Helena pretending to be Helly. The effects of Outie Mark’s reintegration surgery, which we see in a Clockwork Orange–esque close-up as Reghabi floods the chip in his brain, are collapsing his sense of space and time; he’s overwhelmed by visions, headaches, and time gaps, as if his body is somehow rejecting its unification. Gemma has been turned into a paper doll for a delusional doctor to play with, with dozens of identities cordoned off inside her brain that he can access but she can’t. And in a room somehow connected to the MDR suite, a group of “watchers” who resemble Mark, Helly, Irving, and Dylan peer at each of them through monitors that resemble their computer screens, almost as though these corporeal mimeos are the MDR team’s tethered. More copies, created by Lumon? Employees hired just for their resemblance? Who are these people, and do they ever think about how weird it is that they look like the individual they’re watching?

Severance has always foregrounded the tension between Innie and Outie control over a shared body, a struggle with long pop-culture history: in literature like Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Altered Carbon, in comics with the relationship between Eddie Brock and alien symbiote Venom, in movies like the sexism-skewering The Substance. Think of how Helly reacts to being “born” into her Innie body in the series-premiere episode, demanding to know her history so she can reconcile her tangible physicality with her lack of interiority (“Am I livestock? … Did you grow me as food and that’s why I have no memories?”), or how Innie Irv’s haunting visions of black ooze pouring all over the MDR workspace are influenced by his Outie’s obsession with the Exports Hall. Severance generates nearly all of its character development from that tension between one form, two minds (again, Helly: “She told me I wasn’t a person. My own self told me that”). The Innie-Outie divide is fundamentally about the sensation of not recognizing our bodies, even as we know intrinsically that they’re ours. What the show has also done, though, and especially ratcheted up this season, is zero in on ways other people — and other institutions, like Lumon — can make our bodies feel alien, too.

In the first season, this comes across through a focus on specific body parts, like the row-of-teeth portraits in the Perpetuity Wing and Burt sharing with the MDR team that they’re rumored to have “pouches” with “a larval offspring that will jump off and attack when we get too close … in this theory, the larva eventually eats and replaces you.” In the second season, there’s still weird body stuff happening, like the Annihilation–esque story Mr. Milchick tells during the ORTBO about how Dieter Eagan’s body, in a deluge of pus and blood, became a tree. But the possibility of replacement has come to the fore, becoming something the MDR team should consider a genuine possibility thanks to Lumon’s sprawling power.

Lumon “provides” the MDR team with those ghastly, spectral twins in “Woe’s Hollow” so they can feel close to Kier and Dieter Eagan and dresses and styles each of them like Mark, Helly, Irving, and Dylan. They’re denied speech, however, and without the ability to communicate, they’re not a source of comfort but an implicit threat. Adam Jepsen, Mishay Petronelli, Matthew LaBanca, and Quentin Avery Brown resemble Adam Scott, Britt Lower, John Turturro, and Zach Cherry just enough to require a second look and to make you wonder how we really distinguish between people who seem alike — is it their similarities or their differences that define them? That seems to be one of the guiding thematic questions in Lumon’s experiments on Gemma as they make her act out versions of prior experiences with Mark and test whether she reacts or recognizes them as part of her original life. And it also comes up in the experiences of the “watchers,” who don’t seem to be the same characters as the “shadows” from “Woe’s Hollow” (they’re at least not played by the same actors; “Mark Watcher” is played by Eric J. Carlson) but who serve a similar function of essentially keeping the Innies in line. The shadows watched the MDR team from the top of a waterfall, and the watchers shadow them from inside their own computer screens. Everywhere MDR is, Lumon has constructed a panopticon to surveil them — and bodies that could supplant them.

“Chikhai Bardo” is named after the Buddhist liminal state in which one’s consciousness experiences death, which evokes the end of The Double, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1846 novel. In that work, the protagonist Mr. Golyadkin is so afraid that his double is going to successfully take over his life that he eventually loses his mind and is chased out of town. “There was nowhere to escape” from the “terrible multitude of duplicates [that] had sprung into being,” so Mr. Golyadkin leaves with his “unworthy twin … throwing farewell kisses” at his retreat. The old Mr. Golyadkin has to exit so the new Mr. Golyadkin can take his place, a switcheroo with which Lumon has terrorized all of its severed employees. The real-life pregnancy that Outie Gemma wanted has been replaced by her compulsorily carrying other severed identities within her brain and acting them out with her body. The MDR shadows and watchers are ready to be activated whenever, and there might be evil larvae in all those white hallways not yet explored. Body horror in all its repulsive forms crops up everywhere on Severance, because within Branch 501, one’s body is no longer their own — and that’s exactly how Lumon wants it.