This week, Severance had a bleak, horrifying, charming, deeply excellent episode, one full of a number of answers but unfortunately, ones that raise even more questions, as shows like this tend to do.
At long last, this was a Gemma-focused episode, rather than Dichen Lachman showing up for a split second every week in a Mark flashback. The brutal reveal is not just that Gemma is being kept prisoner in her Ms. Casey personality, but she is actually a test subject that appears to be multi-severed. Her original personality is intact, but she’s not just split into Ms. Casey, she is split when going through a number of different doors, each featuring some sort of terrible test with a new character, Dr. Mauer.
Each personality is trapped in this specific hell, a never-ending series of dentist appointments, eternal Christmas card-writing, constantly being in a plane apparently about to crash. Mauer falls in love with Gemma, and probably has already become the most-hated character this show has ever seen.
However, there are a number of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments that show just how pervasive Lumon’s reach is in the lives of both Mark and Gemma before any of this ever happened. Quite literally from the moment they met, it was at a Lumon-run blood bank (they made that pretty clear). But past that, there was a Lumon logo on Gemma’s intake form at the fertility clinic. But even past that, you might have had to rewind and rewatch to see that Dr. Mauer, Gemma’s future torturer, was a doctor at that same clinic.
This has some heavy implications for the entire trajectory of Mark and Gemma’s relationship and lives. We already know that Lumon helped fake Gemma’s death, so what else did they do? Were they the reason that Gemma never got pregnant through IVF, as surely they’re not a normal fertility clinic, if that was even a real one at all. Did they promise Gemma a child or something if they went along with their plans? Is that how they first trapped her?
The rest of that is just speculative, but we know for a fact that Lumon had a hand in essentially every event we saw in Mark and Gemma’s pre-severed lives. We do not know why exactly, but this whole thing has a much wider scope than we could have imagined. I am sure we’re going to find out more as time goes on, but that episode was just astonishing, as were the limited reveals and clues that it gave us.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
