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Seven Severance Questions is a weekly attempt to digest the events of one of television’s twistiest shows by highlighting the weirdest, most confusing, and most important unresolved issues after this week’s episode, “Chikhai Bardo.” There will be theories. Many will be unhinged.
The second season of Severance has been littered with twists and reveals — Helena Eagan was posing as Helly R., Mark went and got himself reintegrated, Milchick has a motorcycle, etc. — each of which has made the show’s series of mysteries both clearer and murkier. This week’s episode, titled “Chikhai Bardo” for reasons that have significance stretching between seasons and across the Innie-Outie divide, might have taken that to its furthest reaches to date. You want to know what Lumon has been up to with Gemma? Fine. Here you go. Buckle in, slugger.
How we got here is as interesting as the things we saw, though. The previous episode ended with Mark on the floor of his kitchen with his chip flooded. Now, he’s on a journey through time and his love story with Gemma — meet-cutes and fertility issues and confounded baby cribs that Mark was ill-equipped to construct anyway. The journey dovetails with the reveal of Gemma’s role at Lumon as a multiple-severed test subject who is basically being held prisoner. It all ends with a scene that wrecked me a little. I am used to Severance twisting my brain into a knot; I am less used to the show doing to my heart, too. Sometimes I feel like the audience is being put through more than the characters on the show. Then I remember that Mark’s dead wife is actually alive and being experimented on by an evil corporation that has an executive who deceived his Innie into having sex with her in the woods. Gotta admit he has me beat there.
As you can imagine, an episode like this raises many questions. Here are the ones on my mind today.
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What is Lumon doing with/to Gemma?
Let’s run through what we know …
We know Lumon has Gemma in the building on a separate floor. We know she’s still “Gemma” most of the time, based on people referring to her as Gemma and her saying things about Mark. We know they spend a lot of time shuffling her into and out of rooms with names that match up with the files the MDR team is working on. We know that it sure looks like she’s severed differently in each room she’s in based on her saying things like “it’s always Christmas” when she’s in the holiday-themed room labeled “Allentown,” which was also the name of the project where Mark had his freshman fluke. We know that they’re putting her through stressful experiments in each room — dentist appointments, plane turbulence, writing Christmas cards until her hand cramps — and then asking what she remembers later about each. We know her nurse is Sandra Bernhard, which is somehow the least and most important thing in this whole paragraph.
We also know the gears for all of this have been in motion for a while, if Mark’s flashbacks are to be taken at face value: There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance by the creepy doctor as Mark and Gemma arrive at their first visit to the fertility clinic. (I missed it on my first viewing then gasped like a frightened old woman in a British murder mystery when I caught it.) She “ended up on the clinic’s mailing list” and received a package containing the same body-movement cards Dylan yoinked from O&D that everyone thought were some sort of paramilitary fighting guidelines for a minute. It turns out they were actually about the battle within yourself and killing your own ego. Unless they’re about a completely different third thing, which they absolutely could be given the winding road we’ve been on so far. There is a non-zero chance this started on or even before the day Mark and Gemma were donating blood. Those blood donations could have been a secret DNA testing/harvesting run by Lumon to see which candidates were best suited for their various scientific endeavors.
(I would love to see the kinds of things wacky uncles post about Lumon on message boards on this show. Do they have Facebook? I bet it’s wild as hell on there.)
Maybe most importantly, we know that Lumon is not keen on letting her leave. The only elevator exit appears to go straight to the severed floor, where Milchick — again in the leather jacket, which he only seems to be wearing when things go haywire — can address her as Ms. Casey and tell her enough lies to get her to go back downstairs. They want her bouncing around those rooms at the very least until Mark finishes Cold Harbor, which appears to be the final step in whatever this process is.
So that’s where we’re at with Gemma now. It raises as many new questions as it answers. The most interesting of these remains …
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What is Lumon doing, just, like, generally?
I’m getting a real “striving for immortality” vibe from a lot of this. Some of that is the stuff we’ve seen already, between all the fertility business (everything with Gemma this week, the weird birthing center where Devon met the politician’s severed wife, the thing where Cobel/Selvig knew a lot about lactation) and the goats (cloning maybe???) and the weirdly mature child in a supervisory role in the top-secret wing of a mysterious and possibly evil corporation. (I need a full episode devoted to whatever Miss Huang does when or if she leaves the severed floor.) Some of it is just because rich weirdos always seem to be after immortality in one way or another. Call it a hunch.
What does this have to do with severing people’s brains into different segments? I don’t know, man. At least not yet. I’m willing to go as far as “the severing process is part of a larger plan to allow the wealthiest members of society to eventually store and upload their memories into new human vessels so they can experience a never-ending version of life that extends beyond a disposable physical form.” But I’m happy to hear you out, too.
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How happy were you when Gemma clobbered the creepy doctor?
I was very happy. This show is not long on moments of satisfying comeuppance. Even this one was pretty short-lived based on what happens immediately after with the elevator and Milchick and his leather jacket. But man, did it ever feel good to see that goon get walloped, especially after an episode filled with quasi-medical procedures and stupid Christmas sweaters and straight-up lies about what Mark has been up to while she’s down there. I hope that doctor’s dead.
I realize this is maybe not the nicest sentence I’ve ever typed. I try to refrain from wishing death on people, especially in writing. But I stand by this one, both because of the chaos it would introduce into the show as we hit the home stretch of season two and because, I mean, screw these cretins, you know? Let me have one cathartic murder. I do not ask for much.
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If you can only have one of these outcomes, which do you choose?
(1) Mark and Gemma figure out how to reunite on the outside and rekindle the romance they each thought was lost forever.
(2) Helly R. figures out a way to override her Helena Eagan Outie and she and a reintegrated Mark reunite on the outside to continue their burgeoning romance.
(3) Someone burns down the Lumon building with all of its executives inside.
I have been on Team Burn Down the Building for a long time now. And I might still be. But after watching that last scene, the one at the end of an episode about a marriage being put through the wringer of fertility issues, the one with Mark and Gemma separately coming to the same devastating conclusion — Mark as he’s hearing about the car crash from the cop, Gemma as she’s realizing she’s trapped at Lumon — that they’ll never see their spouse again, I’m wavering a little. What a gutting moment of television.
Maybe they can all team up and burn down the building together. I know I’m breaking my own rule about only choosing one of the outcomes, but I guess I’m a romantic like that.
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Whose side are you on in Devon and Reghabi’s fight about whether to call Cobel?
Obviously Devon’s, right? I do understand why Reghabi feels that way given her history with Lumon and the thing where she has to worry about the bigger picture of her work beyond just Mark. Cobel has not proven herself to be trustworthy at all up to this point. I’m a little surprised Devon is even open to involving her given the baby-related subterfuge from last season.
But, as I said last week, I … I really do kind of miss Cobel. Get her back in here. Let’s get weird. Maybe she can help burn the building down, too. Close your eyes right now and tell me you can’t see a shot of her staring into the flames as a large corporate structure burns, the corners of her mouth creeping up into a tiny diabolical smile.
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What is going to happen with Mark when he wakes up?
I want one of two things:
(1) Mark snaps upright fully reintegrated like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix and uses the moves from the Chikhai Bardo cards to defeat a series of Lumon employees — Milchick, Miss Huang, Drummond, Evil Burt, give me all you got — in hand-to-hand combat.
(2) Mark recites the entirety of the paper he was grading while donating blood, “All Quiet On The Western Blunt: Drug Use By Enlisted Soldiers During World War I,” from memory.
Admittedly, neither of these are the most probable scenarios. I do really want to know what the rest of that paper said, though. The possibilities are almost endless. I hope that the student works at Lumon now too.
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What if learning that Ricken is an expert mountain climber means we’re heading toward a dramatic jailbreak scenario where he scales the elevator shaft of the Lumon building to free Gemma?
This is officially my theory for the end of this season. Ricken inside the elevator shaft that leads from the severed floor to ground level, dangling with one arm as his other grasps Gemma’s by the forearm. The full Mission: Impossible.
It’s not any crazier than the goats.
More From This Series
- James Le Gros Spent Two Years Figuring Out His Severance Character
- Can Cobel Be Trusted? And Other Severance Questions.
- Severance Recap: You Can’t Go Home Again