This week’s episode of Severance is fascinating both because of what it reveals and what it hides. We learn so much and yet, by the time the credits roll, at least two very monumental questions remain. Spoilers follow.
First and foremost, we learn what Gemma’s day-to-day life has been like in the floor below the Severed Floor over the past few years: Bleak and horrifying. Gemma (Dichen Lachman) has been severed to pieces. Lumon is running some kind of dreadful experiment on her, sending her into countless rooms, each with a different severed consciousness and bizarre experience. In ‘Chikhai Bardo’ she enters six rooms. We only see a few of these.
A Million Little Pieces
In the first, the Wellington room, she visits a dentist. It’s effectively a torture chamber. Think about this for a moment: This innie only visits the dentist. Over and over and over again. Gemma never has to go to the dentist, but her innie lives there. Her jaw is sore afterward, but hey imagine a world where you never have to go to the dentist. Lumon will set you free from pain.
The dentist is the whistling man who we saw the other week, whistling “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by Gordon Lightfoot. We didn’t see his face then, but we see it now. This is Dr. Mauer (Robby Benson) and he is the nightmare all of Gemma’s innies meet, in each of these strange and terrible rooms. In one, he is her husband, wearing a gaudy Christmas sweater. Gemma’s innie sits on the floor, handwriting thank you notes for random Christmas presents, all of which are a matte blue.
Here, we find echoes of Gemma and Mark’s past. The episode is divided into two main storylines. In one, we follow Gemma’s Lumon odyssey. In the other, we see how Mark (Adam Scott) first met his wife, and their tragic backstory unfolds. At one point, she tells him she’ll write a thank you note and he replies, “You hate writing thank you notes.” So of course in one of her severed rooms, that’s all she does. When it’s time to leave the room, her “husband” says “I love you” and when she doesn’t reply he says, “Hey, I said ‘I love you’” and she says it back, though there’s venom in her voice.
This is also an echo of her and Mark’s past. The night she leaves and “dies” in a car accident, as she’s leaving she says “I love you” and Mark doesn’t respond, too distracted with his work. “Hey, I said ‘I love you’” she says. In another flashback, we see them cuddled up by a Christmas tree. Are each of these rooms some instance of her life playing out in a dark and twisted fashion, her and Mark’s memories forming the little vignettes her myriad innies experience? This would explain why Mark’s MDR work is so crucial to the experiment, with Mark “building” her various innies from his console. The work is mysterious and important, after all. And the numbers are scary.
In another room, Gemma finds herself on a plane. Dr. Mauer is her flight attendant, serving her a plate of food as the turbulence shakes the plane, hurling him to the ceiling as she panics in her seat.
When Dr. Mauer visits Gemma after her visits to the rooms, he asks her questions about how she felt. “Did you experience despair?” he asks. “Gaiety?” Does she remember anything at all from any of the rooms? She doesn’t, of course. In what appears to be some kind of control room, Mr. Drummond (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) asks “Are the severance barriers holding?” Clearly, Lumon is working to perfect the severance procedure, creating a world where it can be used ubiquitously, though to what end remains a mystery.
When Gemma asks Dr. Mauer about the final door, the one she hasn’t entered yet, he replies, “Ah, Cold Harbor.” He tells her that once she’s gone in that room, her work will be done. “You will see the world and the world will see you,” he says, cryptically. When she asks if she’ll be able to see Mark, his eyes grow cold. “Mark will benefit from the world you sire,” he tells her, ominously. “Can’t you just talk like a normal #*$&ing person?” she says. “Goodnight Gemma,” he replies. “Dream sweet.” I guess not.
First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage
This episode also gives us our first glimpse into the lives of Mark and Gemma before her “death” and his decision to sever. They meet at a blood draw (apparently run by Lumon) and right from that first moment, you can feel their chemistry. It’s not long before they’re in love. The flashbacks are a bit dreamlike, with grainy film and a washed out palette. We see their relationship unfold in little moments of sweetness and joy, until they decide to have a baby. This isn’t discussed, but Mark buys a crib so we know. He makes a joke about who’s going to put it together. It’s a bit of foreshadowing.
The baby never comes. Gemma miscarries and Mark finds her in the shower weeping. Their attempts to have a child lead them back to Lumon and its fertility clinic. But it’s clear after awhile that nothing is working. Their relationship suffers. Gemma is devastated and Mark grows detached. A distance forms between them, a great gulf of sadness neither can breach. The night she leaves to go to the party, she asks him if he’s sure he doesn’t want to come. When he says no, she offers to stay. He tells her he has to finish all this work anyways and so she goes. Later, police show up at his door. He stands in the shadows as they take off their hats.
So we know what their life was like and what brought them closer to Lumon, and we know what Gemma’s life has been like since, but we still have a couple very big questions that this episode does not answer.
First, how did Gemma end up inside Lumon to begin with? She is clearly a prisoner. Her one attempt to escape this episode resulted in her going up the down elevator after knocking Dr. Mauer out with a chair. (This came after he made some deeply creepy comments about “what goes on” in the various rooms, perhaps things she never experienced with Mark; he also lies to her, telling her that Mark has remarried and has a daughter). When she reaches the severed floor, she becomes Ms. Casey and at the end of the hallway, runs into Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman) who tells her to go back to the elevator. When she starts to protest he says “On you go,” in that deeply frightening way he has.
So she’s a prisoner, but how did she end up here to begin with? Was it something she chose to do? Or was she taken against her will? Did Lumon promise her something, luring her here of her own volition? Or was she really in an accident, and taken by Lumon’s people who then faked her death without her knowledge? I’m really not sure what to think.
The other big question is what are they planning to do with her once she visits the Cold Harbor room? And, of course, what this will accomplish for Lumon and their mysterious severed project. They clearly have no intention of letting her leave, and earlier when Mark asks Reghabi (Karen Aldridge) if Gemma was a live, she says “Yes” but also notes that she was the last time she saw her. In other words, she’s not entirely sure she’s still alive. This suggests that Lumon does not, in fact, intend to let her live. After all this experimenting, after severing her into who knows how many slices, Lumon will kill her in the end. Or at least that seems to be the plan. But why? To cover it all up? Or because they’re actually a creepy death cult?
Okay, Now What?
The title of the episode is “Chikhai Bardo”. A “bardo” is a Tibetan Buddhist concept referring to an intermediate state or transitional phase between two stages of existence, most commonly associated with the period between death and rebirth. According to the Samye Institute, the Chikhai bardo “is the Bardo of the Moment of Death.” The website says “According to tradition, this bardo begins when the outer and inner signs of the onset of death appear and continues through the dissolution or transmutation until the external and internal breath ends.”
This ties into the episode when Gemma is going over some picture cards sent by Lumon and discusses what she sees with Mark, but I think it’s fairly obvious that the concept is much more about what Gemma herself is experiencing, both in her relationship with Mark and down in the Lumon basement. It’s all very ominous. Lumon is, without a doubt, a deeply evil organization run by wicked, wicked people.
This was yet another deeply powerful episode, and perhaps the hardest one to watch so far. The cruelty inflicted upon Gemma is simply devastating. The tragedy of her and Mark’s marriage is heartbreaking. I’ve watched the episode twice and each time I came away not just unsettled, but deeply moved and saddened.
In the present, Devon (Jen Tullock) talks with Reghabi about Mark and learns that he’s reintegrating. She’s none too happy about this. But when Reghabi reveals that Gemma is alive, she’s at a loss. Concern for her brother wins out, and she tells Reghabi that they can’t keep doing this. There has to be another way. She tells her about the birthing retreat and the “innie” house there. Perhaps they could take Mark there and talk with his innie instead of going through with reintegration.
When Devon suggests calling Ms. Cobel (Patricia Arquette) Reghabi flips out. She’ll turn them all in, she says. She’s a Lumon “soldier” raised by Lumon from childhood. A true believer. But Devon insists, so Reghabi packs her things and leaves. “You can’t leave!” Devon tells her, shocked that Reghabi is doing exactly what she said she would do. “I need you.” “This isn’t my choice,” Reghabi replies, “It’s yours.” She heads out the door. “Do not call that woman!” she says on her way out, leaving Devon and Mark behind.
Few shows can follow up a perfect first season with such a profoundly powerful second, but so far Severance is the exception to the rule. Every week has been a banger, and this is no exception. Just three episodes remain. Will we get answers to these big lingering questions? What is Lumon actually up to? How did Gemma end up in their clutches? Will Mark and his friends be able to save her before it’s too late? And what will happen if they do, especially between Mark S. and Helly R. (Britt Lower)?
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