The latest episode of Severance, "Chikhai Bardo," finally reveals what happened to Mark's wife Gemma, whom he'd thought dead for years. She didn't die, but was rather kidnapped by Lumon Industries. For years, she's been held in a sub-floor in the same building where her husband's severed personality works. But while Mark was severed only once, Gemma has been severed many, many times.
Gemma spends her days entering a series of rooms, each with a different name. Whenever she enters a room, a different severed personality — or Innie — kicks in. After she exits the rooms, she's debriefed by a nurse (Sandra Bernhard) and a man named Dr. Mauer (Robby Benson). Dr. Mauer clearly has a bit of an obsession with Gemma; we get the idea he thinks of her as more than just a test subject, which would be plenty bad enough.
You may not have caught it, but Dr. Mauer actually shows up elsewhere in the episode. Throughout "Chikhai Bardo," we see flashbacks to Gemma's life before she was being held in the Lumon building, to when she was married to Mark and they were trying to have a baby. After some difficulties, Gemma and Mark go to a fertility clinic, and we see that Gemma signs a form with a Lumon logo on it. For a brief moment, we see Dr. Mauer in the office, eyeing Gemma a little too intently for comfort.
"They’ve definitely been watching them for a long time," star Dichen Lachman, who plays Gemma, told Variety. "My theory is that they picked something up with Gemma’s blood work when she went to the fertility clinic, and that’s got something to do with why they picked Mark and Gemma." As for how they faked Gemma's death so convincingly that Mark positiviely ID-ed the body, Lachman has a theory about that too: "My theory is that they gave her some Shakespearean potion, that Lumon has made salves and balms and stuff. Maybe it’s something that stops your heartbeat and breathing for enough time to fake her death."
It's also possible that Dr. Mauer had a direct hand in picking Gemma. "She loathes him, obviously," Lachman said. "His relationship with her is totally different because he gets to experience being in all these different rooms with her. He’s infantilizing her in a way. I think maybe she understands that they have time together that she’s not aware of, which is super creepy. That could go into some really dark places."
As usual, we don't have all the answers, but "Chikhai Bardo" put together a lot of puzzle pieces. Hopefully that will continue in the final three episodes of Severance season 2. New episodes drop Fridays on Apple TV+.
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