Severance is a show about people whose brains are bifurcated such that they can't remember anything about what they did at work when they're at home, and vice versa. There are love triangles involving Person A, Person B, and Person B's other persona. A couple of weeks ago the severed employees mourned the loss of their friend by eating a watermelon carved in the shape of his hear. This show is weird, so when I say that "Chikhai Bardo" is the weirdest episode so far, it means something.
At the end of the last episode, "Attila," Mark fell into a torpor as his reintegration process continued. Perhaps what we're seeing here is his waking dream as the two halves of his personlity knit themselves back together. Only that can't be it, because we spend most of our time with Gemma, Mark's wife who supposedly died some two years back. Her death pulled Mark into a depression so deep he opted to get himself severed, which more and more looks like a move orchestrated by Lumon Industries itself. We still don't have all the answers, but the picture is becoming more clear.
We see Mark's fractured memories as well as Gemma's. It makes for a trippy, fragmented viewing experience. Let's try and make sense of it.
Severance review, season 2, Episode 7, "Chikhai Bardo"
We get a glimpse of Mark and Gemma's life before her fake death. We see them meet cute while giving blood. We see them dance to French music in their sun-dappled living room in a sequence so full of romantic comedy cliches I wondered if the show was having a go at me. We see them struggle to get pregnant. It puts strain on their marriage but they stay together.
And then one night, Gemma leaves to go to a party. Charades will be played, which makes me think Rickon Hale is the host. Mark stays behind to type up something important on his manual typewriter, because he is a romantic comedy hipster. And that's the night Gemma "dies."
All of this is quite straightforward, but the style makes it special. The transitions between scenes are especially spectacular. In one shot, we zoom in on Gemma's laughing eyes; then the lighting changes and we watch as her eyes become tired and hollow. She's in her bathroom, blood running down her leg. She's miscarried. She huddles in the shower as Mark comes to comfort her. The water droplets recede back up into the showerhead, and suddenly we find ourselves on the severed floor as Mark S talks to Ms. Casey.
Are we in Mark's mind? Gemma's? Are we bouncing back between the two? The episode doesn't make it clear and looks great not doing it. Director Jessica Lee Gagné must be shouted out for crafting a visually compelling, dream-like hour of television.
The passion of Gemma
So that's everything that happened before Gemma was abducted by Lumon, which I'm assuming is what happened. Ever since, she's been on a floor beneath the severed floor, which we'll call the sub-severed floor; it's where the elevator at the end that long dark hallway goes. The sub-severed floor is a network of uncanny white hallways, standard for this building. But these hallways are lined with doors that lead to individual rooms, each of which has a name.
Once inside these rooms, Gemma's severed personality comes online...or rather, one of her severed personalities. While Mark and the other folks in Macrodata Refinement have only two personas, Gemma has a different persona for every one of these rooms, of which it looks like there are dozens. She must have been severed over and over and over again.
Once inside these rooms, her personas are faced with a variety of different scenarios. In the Allentown room, she must write thank-you notes for Christmas gifts ad nauseam until her hand cramps and ink gets under her fingernails. The Wellington room is a dentist's office. And remember: these severed personalities are only ever online in these rooms, so Wellington Gemma has been getting poked and prodded by the dentist for every waking moment of her existence.
Mark and the others are subjected to inhumane treatment on the severed floor, but Gemma is truly being tortured on the sub-severed floor. And Mark's outie, in theory, can opt out of the severed life, but Gemma can't. Towards the end of the episode, after she's gotten fed up doing whatever it is Lumon has her doing down there, she tries to escape up the elevator, but stepping onto the severed floor just activates her Ms. Casey persona. It's an easy matter for Mr. Milchick to cajole the meek Ms. Casey into getting back on the elevator, and Gemma is right back where she started.
The shows sells us on the creepy hopelessness of Gemma's situation, and I liked that it threw in a bit of humor to break things up: one of the rooms simulates an airplane in severe turbulence, and as upsetting as it is to think of that version of Gemma living eternally in panic, it's funny to watch the flight attendant slam a plastic-wrapped meal in front of her and assure her that everything's fine as he's bounced to the ceiling. And as Gemma, Dichen Lachman does a wonderful job taking us on this winding journey. This is far and away her biggest acting showcase on the series yet and she makes the most of it.
Why is Lumon doing this to Gemma?
There are more layers. A man named Dr. Mauer takes part in the simulations with Gemma — he's the dentist and the flight attendant — and then checks on her when she's done. He seems to have a thing for her. A nurse (played by comedian Sandra Bernhard in a surprise cameo) draws Gemma's blood, measures her blood pressure, and asks her questions while she's hooked up to some kind of E-meter-like device. Gemma has to do calisthenics every day. She has to do "her reading" every day; probably all about Kier, I imagine.
Also, each of the rooms correspond to a different project being worked on by the Macrodata Refinement Department; Mark already completed one project called "Dranesville." There's also a room labeled "Cold Harbor," the name of Mark's deep dark mystery project; Mark is almost done with that one but not quite.
And now we ask the question every Severance fan asks at least three times per episode: what does it all mean? What is Lumon doing?
Dr. Mauer and Nurse Bernhard are constantly checking to see if Gemma remembers anything from inside any of the rooms; they seem to be testing the limits of the severance technology, subjecting her to all kinds of stimuli to see if anything breaks through. So far it seems to be holding up.
My theory is that Gemma's reactions in the rooms are being meticulously recorded and synthesized. Her reactions are then expressed as the weird floating numbers Mark and the other employees in the MDR department sort through. With each completed project, Lumon understands the severance technology a little better.
But my theory makes no sense, because Mark is working on Cold Harbor and that's the one room Gemma hasn't been inside...so far as she knows, anyway. Who can tell who knows what and when and how on a show like this?
We're also no closer to understanding what will happen when Mark completes Cold Harbor, although Dr. Mauer certainly makes it sound important. "You will see the world again, and the world will see you," he tells Gemma. "Mark will benefit from the world you're siring. Kier will take away all his pain, just as Kier has taken away yours." Gemma speaks for all of us when she asks him to talk like a "normal person."
We also don't know what exactly happened to Gemma the night of her "car accident." Was she abducted by Lumon? Did she go willingly, but under false pretenses? We see that Dr. Mauer has no problem lying to her when he says that Mark has remarried and has a child. Or maybe she was already involved with the cult of Kier beforehand. In any case, she only tries to escape the sub-severed floor years into her ordeal, so it feels like she's been there willingly at least part of the time.
Verdict
The episode ends with Mark, who awakes from his reintegration coma to find Devon watching over him. Alarmingly, Asal Reghabi has left; she gets spooked when Devon gets the bright idea to call Ms. Cobel about Mark's situation, and I don't blame her.
So is Mark finally reintegrated? It's always been Severance's way to give us as least as many answers as questions, and that's another one we'll have to add to the pile. But as episodes like "Chikhai Bardo" prove, getting there is at least as fascinating as being there, and maybe moreso.
Severance Bullet Points
- I agree with Gemma: "All Quiet on the Western Blunt" is an amazing title for a paper about drug use during World War I. Automatic A.
- Here are all the rooms I either saw or were mentioned by Dr. Mauer: Allentown, Cairns, Dranesville, Siena, Loveland, Tumwater, Wellington, Rhodes, Billings, Lucknow, St. Pierre, Zurich and Cold Harbor. All the rooms are named after real-life regions or cities.
- Devon is not pleased to hear that Mark is trying to integrate. "We don't do that again...It's settled fucking law, lady," she tells Asal. So reintegration is illegal but severance isn't? And what does she mean by "again"?
- Remember when Devon ran into a severed woman who was going to have a baby for her outie? Asal Reghabi reveals that this happened at the "Damona Birthing Retreat"?
- This might be me reading too much into things — this show will do that to you — but I feel like they're hiding Gemma's last name from us. When she introduces herself to Mark, it's just as "Gemma," and later, when she's filling out her name at the doctor's office. we only see her write "Gemma" before we cut away. Sure, she was married to Mark by that point, so she was probably just going to write "Scout," but I've caught a stupid theory by the tail here and I'm not letting go. If she's "Gemma Eagan" I'm going to lose it.
Episode Grade: A-
To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and Twitter account, sign up for our exclusive newsletter and check out our YouTube channel.