I fucking called it once again, I have to say.
I’m not a plot–twist predictor by trade—frankly, I think it ruins a lot of the fun and joy to speculate into oblivion—but when I was watching season one of Severance, the instant Ms. Casey showed up on my screen, I said: “Oh, that’s going to be Mark’s wife.”
I’m no genius. The “Hellyna” plot twist at the end of the first season took me completely by surprise, as have most of the reveals of seasons one and two thus far. But I am beyond proud to report that I’ve always thought Gemma was alive, and I’ve found all the theories about her being reincarnated or cloned or a robot or whatever the hell else were doing too much at best and stupid as hell at worst.
So, I fucking called it, once again! I am so happy to gloat, because what a brilliant, beautiful, and absolutely ruinous truth it is to know that Gemma is as alive as can be, and is just out of Mark’s reach.
Chikhai Bardo is an incredible directorial debut from the show’s cinematographer, Jessica Lee Gagné. It follows Mark and Gemma’s marriage before Gemma’s “car crash” and Mark’s severance, as well as showing us the life Gemma has been leading inside the Lumon office—a floor away from Mark, and desperate to claw her way back to him.
The episode itself intertwines those stories beautifully—a testament to Gagné’s skills as a director and cinematographer, to the entire editing team, to Adam Scott and Dichen Lachman’s ability to play different people in the same body, and to the writers, for deftly constructing the bones of the episode that Gagné and the rest of the team put some truly juicy meat on. But in the recap, it’s simpler to sever, so let’s start in the outside world, and then take a step inward.
Paletted in warm browns and soothing pastels, a film–grain–y Mark and Gemma flirt at a Lumon blood drive. They’re professors at a college (Mark teaches history, and Gemma, English), so it’s nerdy and endearing. They flirt again at school, and we move into a beautiful montage shot on film that captures their relationship as it progresses. Books pile up on tables; they dance in the sunlight; they kiss in the middle of their warm living room.
They have dinner with Ricken and Devon, and Devon notices that Gemma’s abstaining from drinking the wine. "Holy shit," she all but says, and Gemma gives her a little smile that says yes, I think so, we haven’t made it a big deal.
It’s a lovely moment—until you remember that we, as viewers, already know that Mark and Gemma don’t have any kids. We know that this will not end well.
It doesn’t. Gemma miscarries and sobs in the shower. Blood streaks her legs. Mark holds her.
They try to get pregnant. They go to a Lumon fertility clinic—and isn’t that a terrifying thought? Mark gives Gemma hormone injections (“turn around and bend over,” says a very charming, very well groomed Adam Scott, before sticking a needle in his wife’s ass). At the clinic, we see a flash of Dr. Mauer—someone that the audience has seen in Gemma’s inside–Lumon story throughout this episode.
It doesn’t work. Mark and Gemma fight. Gemma heads out, gives Mark a chance to come with her, but he says no.
A car pulls up, and police officers make their way to Mark’s door. We know the lie they’re about to tell him—that his wife got into a car crash. We end the episode still not knowing exactly what happened in that time period, but we also end it knowing what happened afterward.
Gemma got from her house to Lumon somehow, some way, though we’re not told the specifics yet. We’ll find that out eventually, I’m sure; my guess is some sort of kidnapping, targeting her as an ideal subject via the blood drive–fertility clinic, though I haven’t yet landed on what makes her (and Mark) so appealing to the company. Regardless, though, we know that Gemma didn’t die in that car crash, because the bulk of the episode is spent watching her live a life of cyclical, numbing slavery at the whims of Lumon.
She’s severed multiple times over, and the only thing each of her innies knows is suffering.
Gemma is trapped on a new floor of Lumon—the exports hall floor, if we’re to assume, based on the whistling maniac who brings surgical tools down to her. She’s herself down there, as far as we can tell (Dichen Lachman is truly creating this character wholecloth from very little this episode), but when she enters any of the various rooms that she’s made to go into, a new part of her consciousness takes over.
The rooms are all named after mid–sized–ish cities: Wellington, Loveland, Cairns, Allentown. Allentown, for which Mark S. has a plaque on his desk, commemorative of his efforts. How horrifying to realize that he’s been rewarded for torturing his wife whom he thought dead, who has been trying to get back to him this whole time.
The rooms are different tortures. The dentist. An airplane wracked with turbulence. A hundred thank–you cards that Gemma has to sign, with the sadistic doctor we saw at the fertility clinic roleplaying in each scenario. When she signs cards, he’s her husband, dictator of a realm of monochromatic Christmas gifts, a lifeless tree, and a fuck–ass wig that Gemma dons.
Gemma’s on–call doctor and nurse routinely lie to her, messing with her perception of time and feeding her whatever she’d need to hear to keep going. We already knew that Lumon is full of liars, but with each passing episode, we’ve had less and less reason to believe that anything any of their employees says is true. This episode is confirmation that any tidbits of information about the outside world should never, ever be trusted by the inside employees.
She hasn’t been inside the Cold Harbor room yet; we don’t know what fresh hell it holds. By the end of the episode, Mark is 96% done with refining it. I am incredibly worried about what’ll happen to Gemma once he’s done.
Each room requires a different outfit in which Gemma is forced to play dress–up. It’s commentary on the way that women and their labor and their bodies are treated by structures of power, but particularly Asian women in a white–dominated corporate structure and society. It’s chilling. It’s such a simple but effective reveal—she’s not dead, she’s not cloned, she’s not revived, she’s just trapped. She’s trapped and tortured and being used as a test case in what I theorize is a stress–test protocol; Lumon figuring out the limits of the human mind and refining a tool that could create a “painless” experience for everyone by severing them in moments of distress (like at the dentist, or on an airplane, or churning out thank–you cards).
“You will see the world again, and the world will see you,” assures Gemma’s evil doctor, encouraging her to keep going with a project she doesn’t understand.
“So I’ll see Mark?” she asks, and I all but sob.
Eventually, Gemma snaps. She tells Dr. Mauer, who has been cosplaying as her dentist/flight attendant/disgustingly, husband in the various rooms, that she wants to leave. He lies to her and tells her that Mark remarried and—just to hammer home the bad feelings, just to twist the knife and make a woman feel worse for her infertility, even though it’s not her fault—tells her that Mark has a new daughter.
Gemma, to her credit, pushes back. Dr. Mauer, in an absurdly evil moment, implies that Gemma’s moved on in one of the severed rooms as well. This is particularly disgusting considering first, what we know about Mark/Helly, and the dramatic irony of all that, and second, the fact that Dr. Mauer pretends to be her husband in the thank–you–note–writing room, and that he demanded that severed version of Gemma to tell him that she loved him. And third, again, the commentary that the series is doing in this episode on the exploitation of women, the expected emotional labor performed by them, the questions and ethics surrounding consent as it pertains to the innies, and the added layer of mistreatment of Asian women in America’s past (where the innie rooms are mostly set) and present (where Gemma is trapped in exploitative corporate hell, in the most literal sense).
Gemma swipes Dr. Mauer clean upside the head with a chair. It’s incredible.
She makes a break for it, rushing towards the exit. She gets in the elevator … but is, of course, severed, and reverts to her Ms. Casey personality as she rides upward, an experience of consciousness that does not hate Lumon and does not want to escape, even if Casey isn’t particularly fulfilled.
Milchick meets Casey at the end of the hall and tells her there’s been a mix–up, that she has to ride the elevator back down. Casey complies. Gemma comes to, collapses in the elevator, and cries. She ends up back with her nurse. There’s no happy tomorrow for her, just endless hours in a time–fucked, repeatedly–severed existence.
There’s one final thread that tracks through the episode, which is the slight pops into the present timeline with Mark, where we see how he’s faring following his collapse at the end of the previous episode.
It starts where the last episode ends, with Mark collapsing and Reghabi and Devon looking over him. Reghabi explains reintegration to Devon, and that Gemma is still alive; Devon watches over him and desperately tries to contact Cobel, or to go to the innie cabin where we saw last season’s birthing camp, so that this can pass. Reghabi insists that it’s different, and that Devon can’t talk to Cobel—and runs away.
The last thing we learn is that MDR is being monitored even more than we initially thought. Mark’s computer is a camera, and there’s a shadow team of refiners—who look sort of like the MDR team, whose desks are arranged in an inverse of the MDR team’s arrangement—watching over each refiner and doing their own process on them. What the hell?
Grab bag thoughts: I want to dive deep and try to sort out the relationship between the room names and the activities within. I am fascinated by the line where Gemma says she’s afraid of drowning, and what that means with regard to Lumon’s logo being a water droplet. Mark and Gemma being teachers, being inherently curious and knowledge–seeking and hungry, is absolutely devastating to see in action, past and present.
There’s a shot I can’t stop thinking about—a fade transition as Casey walks docilely back to the elevator cut against the base of Mark’s skull. Memory, love, and striving for something ever better. Severance just can’t stop.
