Severance Cannot Save You
The show seems to be delivering an uncomfortable verdict on one of its biggest questions.
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This article contains spoilers through the seventh episode of Severance, Season 2.
The promise of Severance is a seductive one: The titular procedure separates a person’s work self from the rest of their identity, granting them a literal work-life balance. Lumon, the biotech company that offers severance—which involves implanting a microchip into employees’ brains—markets it as a method to free oneself of difficult feelings or experiences. What those who elect to undergo the process aren’t told is that their severed personalities, “innies” who toil away in Lumon’s offices, seem to be fully formed human beings of their own. But they have no free will, chained to a numbing in-office existence about which their “outies” remain oblivious. That reality has chilling ramifications for everyone directly affected by the procedure, which the show has only just begun to reveal in its second season. Neither severance nor Severance, we come to find out, was meant to offer an escape from anything.
Much of Severance’s success rides on its cryptic, thematically rich world building, which invites viewers to form theories about nearly every aspect of the story it tells. Even some of the most basic elements of the plot remain opaque—such as the purpose of the mundane computer tasks that some of the innies are asked to perform. (The show implies that their seemingly menial jobs at Lumon have an importance that extends outside the company itself; the tension ramps up when an especially productive employee named Mark, played by Adam Scott, begins to investigate the true fruits of his labor.) But beyond specific questions about what Lumon is really up to, Season 2 has inspired deep philosophical debates about what makes a person a person, rendered through the show’s specific lens: Is a severed person home to many unique souls, or just one, fragmented into parts? Can an innie have a different fate from their outie?
The executives in charge of Lumon have given no indication that they’ve ever bothered to consider these questions. Those at the top seem to be preoccupied with the technology’s mechanics, not its repercussions; they appear to be stress-testing the barriers between innies and outies. Season 2’s devastating seventh episode, “Chikhai Bardo,” highlights this dehumanizing experiment with horrific detail. We see that Gemma (played by Dichen Lachman), Mark’s wife, presumed dead in the outside world, has been trapped on an inaccessible floor of Lumon. She is the subject of a cycle of emotionally taxing trials, while her husband’s innie plugs away on a floor above hers.
Read: When work is a terrifying dystopia
The evaluations involve repeated severance of Gemma’s brain, producing different personalities that are exposed to various forms of routine pain (such as dental work and tumultuous airplane rides); their responses are measured against the original Gemma’s recollection of them. The end goal isn’t clear, but it appears that Lumon’s scientists wish to ensure that an innie and outie cannot share memories. When one of Gemma’s severed personas, a Lumon wellness counselor known as Ms. Casey, meets Mark’s innie in Season 1, they are strangers to each other—which would seem to confirm that the technology functions as intended.
But even if they don’t share each other’s memories, the innies and outies do have related desires. Mark, who chose to be severed in order to compartmentalize his grief over Gemma’s death, falls for another innie, Helly (Britt Lower). Their colleague Irving (John Turturro), overwhelmed by his loneliness when outside Lumon’s confines, also develops feelings for someone. Dylan (Zach Cherry), whose outie is disillusioned by his suburban doldrums, finds a fanatic sort of motivation within the mysterious computer assignment his team is required to complete. And alongside pursuing a romance with Mark, Helly takes every opportunity to rebel against the company’s bizarre rules and rituals; her outie is similarly headstrong, as she chafes under her despotic father’s authority. (He also happens to be Lumon’s CEO.)
Innies and outies share elements of their foundational selves; as such, they not only have the same basic wants, but also seem to face the same fears and consequences. Mark’s budding relationship with Helly is threatened by his outie’s continued feelings for Gemma. Irving becomes despondent after learning that his innie lover has abruptly retired—and thus disappeared—from Lumon. Dylan, despite the confidence his work has given him, begins to obsessively covet his outie’s family and home life.
Read: What are the puzzles of Severance about?
For each of the innie workers, the realization that their two halves share some core truths is both a comfort and a torment. They seem doomed to repeat patterns, unable to break free of them. Yet the show obscures whether innies and outies should be considered parts of a single being, making it difficult for viewers to know how to judge their behavior. If they can be considered independently of each other, one persona could be seen as more virtuous than the other. If so, perhaps an innie—who knows nothing of reality outside Lumon’s controlled environment—would be more appreciative of the life that their outie seems to take for granted. Exploring these hypotheticals matters only to a point; their shared body will bear all of the outcomes regardless.
That innies have some level of autonomy is good news for them, and bad news for Lumon, whose project to create powerless mind-serfs is looking more sinister by the episode. But there are limits to that self-determination; an outie’s problems are their innie’s, too. Severance began with a relatively simple prompt—if you could separate yourself from your dissatisfaction and pain, would that be enough to make you a happier person? The show seems to be delivering an uneasy verdict: New discomforts will only take their place.
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Severance Season 2, Episode 7 Recap
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‘Chikhai Bardo’ sees the Apple TV+ series—and everyone involved in it, from Adam Scott to Dichen Lachman—reach the absolute peak of its powers.
Looking for a recap of season 2, episode 6? Lumon is listening.
Once you wipe your tears, text the refiner closest to you, and make your post-episode scroll on the Severance Reddit, I want you to think about something. Try to remember when you watched season 1 for the first time. What did you think Severance was really about? No wrong answers, but for me (and many others), it was a whip-smart, hilarious, and occasionally heartbreaking critique of modern capitalism—of a working society where we value hollow mantras, empty promises, and corporate jargon over treating people well. That made for a damn good show, right?
It did. But as of this Friday morning—which saw the debut of season 2, episode 7, “Chikhai Bardo”—Severance is not that show anymore. It is so much more than that.
Severance just lifted the veil on its mystery, delivered meaningful answers, and triumphantly (and tragically) introduced Gemma as a beautiful, complex character. That alone is a feat worth celebrating. But from the very first shot of “Chikhai Bardo”—the back of Gemma’s head as she walks into the warm, bustling landscape a life she would soon lose—Severance is telegraphing something else, too.
This is an exploration of memory, how we perceive time, and what lurks within the deepest corners of our psyche. More so than its quirky and unsettling rumination on this great cubicled life, Severance is a study of how we experience—and more often than not, repress—our darkest trauma, only to find joy again through sheer will.
I’ll say it: “Chikhai Bardo” is a masterpiece. After I watched the episode for the first time (yes, I’ve seen it … three times now), I immediately asked to talk to the director, Jessica Lee Gagné. Here she explains how she pulled it off, from shooting the flashbacks on film to the very subtext I described above.
Before I start my weekly recap, a quick note for new and returning readers: Since this episode skips around in time and delivers a lot of surprises, this recap is also a bit out of order. It’s for the sake of clarity, I promise! Hit me with any questions you have afterward.
Episode 7 follows three different storylines:
For the sake of our collective sanity—and because we have so damn much to postgame today—let’s knock out number one. The biggest takeaway from the scenes at Mark’s apartment is this: Devon hatches the idea to take Mark to the Damona Birthing Retreat. In what’s suddenly an important subplot from season 1, we learned that the one percent found a way to sever themselves from giving birth.
Devon sees it as a place to talk to Mark’s Innie, going so far as to suggest that Harmony Cobel (once again, I ask: where is she?!) could help. Reghabi promptly reminds Devon that Harmony is “Lumon, through and through,” and that contacting her is a no-go. Reghabi and Devon’s disagreement escalates to the point where the former storms out of Mark’s apartment, leaving the latter to fully deal with the consequences of having custody of her brother’s brain.
Considering that Severance is (intentionally) a fluorescent-lit, sterile show set against a winter backdrop, the opening of episode 7 hits you like one of Reghabi’s needles to the back of the head. In season 1, we learned that Gemma was a Russian-literature professor who met Mark at Ganz College. (He was a history teacher.) We see Gemma walking onto campus in what’s a very atypical Severance scene: autumn, happy people bustling around, all shot on film.
From there, we jump right into Mark and Gemma’s meet-cute, which has two tiny metaphors that actually frame the entire episode. (God, even the sight of Mark with a fresh haircut is sad, right?) Turns out, the two met while donating blood. They tell each other about the papers they’re currently reading: Mark is grading an essay on drug use by enlisted soldiers during World War I (“All Quiet on the Western Blunt”), while Gemma is studying up on themes of religious conversions in Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
The subtext in this show actually kills me: Mark is reading a paper about war veterans who go to extreme measures to detach themselves from their PTSD. Sound familiar?! Meanwhile, Tolstoy’s novella—to grossly simplify a richly philosophical work—follows a character who spends nearly the entire story grappling with his approaching death. At least in Mark’s world (again, we’re likely revisiting this moment from his point of view), meeting Gemma is the first chapter in a story that leads to her death. Oh, and this is Severance, so we’re treated to a big ol’ Lumon logo on the blood-collection machine. We’ll revisit this, but I don’t think any of us can go another second without…
After the blood-bank date of Bon Iver’s dreams, Severance not so casually tosses us into its biggest reveal since we learned that Helly is Helena Eagan in the season 1 finale: Gemma Scout is alive—not as a clone, not as Ms. Casey, but as Gemma Scout. That reveal alone is a bombshell, but no … Severance has about a dozen more mysteries in its holster for episode 7.
Our introduction to Gemma’s world as a prisoner of Lumon goes like this: A mysterious nurse asks her an increasingly mysterious series of questions while taking her vitals (i.e.: “If you were caught in a landslide, would you be more afraid of suffocating or drowning?”). Her days consist of calisthenics, reading, and eating weird Star Wars food that is literally shaped like the Lumon logo. I bet the flaky dinner roll is good!
Okay, readers, let’s do this. To be absolutely clear, this is my interpretation of what the files and the rooms mean, given what we learn in “Chikhai Bardo”: Every day, Gemma visits a certain number of rooms. Each space corresponds to a file that MDR is working on. We even see an Allentown room, which is the first file that Innie Mark completed at Lumon. (Remember Mark’s Freshman Fluke?) When Gemma enters any given room, she is immediately severed into a brand-new individual who only knows the world of that room. For the Gemma who visits the dentist, that’s her entire life. Severance signals this up front: “Can I at least get a break?” she asks Dr. Mauer. (We’ll get to that bastard soon.) “Just for a little while?” He replies: “But it’s been six weeks.” Gemma’s response is gutting: “I was just here.” Each space is clearly designed to impart some sort of physical and/or mental pain—writing a Christmas card so many times that carpal tunnel is a certainty; the worst turbulence of all time; some kind of retro sporting event that we’re not privy to.
In between MDR and the Testing Floor is what Gagné referred to as the “control room,” so I’ll go with that. Each refiner at MDR has a corresponding agent in the control room; each one conspicuously looks like the refiner themselves. The agents have a live feed to Gemma’s activities, MDR at their desks, and what they’re refining on their computers. A time lapse tells us that the control room has watched Mark at MDR since the very beginning of his employment.
So … why? What’s the point? Well, as Mr. Drummond asks Coach (?!) Mauer in the control room, “Are the severance barriers holding?” Mauer: “Yes. The technology is working.” There you go: On the most basic level, Gemma’s tour de creepy rooms is meant to test (and maybe even improve) her severance barrier. Does this mean that Mark has been refining Gemma’s emotions in each room the entire time? And sorting each of the Four Tempers (we inferred this from Mark’s screen earlier in season 2) as Gemma feels them in real time? If that’s the case, then it’s possible that the overarching idea of MDR is to improve severance technology … somehow. Whether MDR is constructing an ultimate Innie Gemma or simply testing Lumon’s existing severance capabilities, we don’t know yet.
Remember the beginning of episode 5, when a man visits Optics and Design while whistling Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” to himself? Well, folks, we hear the whistle as soon as Innie Dental Patient Gemma walks into the Wellington room. Meet Lumon’s resident evil doctor: Dr. Mauer, who is played by veteran actor Robby Benson. We don’t learn terribly much about this guy, but Severance goes to great lengths telling us that he is most definitely a creep—and that episode 7 is likely not the first time Gemma attacked him. “You like her,” remarks Drummond during their control-room chat. “Yes,” replies Mauer. “She’s easy to like. She’s fond of me too, of course.” No she isn’t, man! She tried to break your fingers and concuss you.
As if this episode didn’t have enough death and tragedy: Drummond tells Mauer that he’ll have to say goodbye to Gemma when Cold Harbor is complete. Now, we could play the theory game all day—maybe Outie Gemma will simply cease to exist—but considering what the doctor tells Gemma later on, I think the implication is that Mark and Gemma will die when Cold Harbor is complete. “There’s only one room I haven’t been to yet, and today it had a name on it,” says Gemma, talking about Cold Harbor. “So what happens after I’ve been in all the rooms?” Mauer, the weirdo he is, responds, “You will see the world again—and the world will see you.” When Gemma asks if that means she’ll see Mark again, Mauer says, “Mark will benefit from the world you’re siring. Kier will take away all his pain just as he has taken away yours.”
But later in the episode, sensing that Gemma is maybe holding out too much hope, Mauer outright lies to her—and it’s a move that immediately backfires: “Your husband remarried last year. And he has a daughter now,” he says. “You’ve been gone a long time, Gemma. He’s moved on. Maybe you’ve moved on too. In one of the rooms, what do you think? … Do you feel yourself gravitating toward one room or another? Maybe you’ve felt things behind those doors you’ve never felt with Mark. Maybe I’ve seen it.”
Gemma smacks him in the back of the head with a chair, then she runs through the hallway and manages to leave the Testing Floor via the elevator. She goes upstairs, where she reappears as … Ms. Casey. Damn. The Ms. Casey of It All is most definitely a conversation we need to have in the coming days, but my initial thought is that she’s some dialed-up version of Lumon’s tests of the severance barrier. In one of Gagné’s wild montages, we see flickers of Innie Mark crafting a tree from clay during one of Ms. Casey’s wellness sessions. The tree represents the site of Gemma’s car crash—and considering that Cobel watched Mark’s wellness sessions, it now feels like those interactions were extreme tests of their severance barriers’ strength. Or something like that. My brain is aching at this point.
Just as Ms. Casey tries to enter the severed floor, an out-of-breath Milchick appears in front of her. This is an all-time Milchick line: “Your Outie came in for a public art exhibition and found herself in the wrong elevator,” he says. You can see the hurt in Ms. Casey as she slowly realizes how long she’s been gone: “How long have I been… Where is…?” Milchick sends her back to the Testing Floor, where she turns back into Gemma. She collapses to the floor, whispering Mark’s name to herself.
God, you just have to give it up for Dichen Lachman. Her performance in “Chikhai Bardo” is nothing short of incredible—she captures the entirety of Gemma’s pain, trauma, and love for Mark in a single episode.
Ugh. I’m sorry to say that there is no possible way to end this recap on a happy note. Mark and Gemma’s love story takes a turn for the tragic—even before the car crash. Early in the episode, Mark just so happens to order a crib, because “it was on sale.” Then, over a meal with Ricken and Devon, Gemma declines a glass of wine. She’s pregnant.
All the baby-related symbolism in season 2 suddenly makes sense—the intro’s Boss Baby Kier, Milchick’s blue balloons, reminiscent of a gender reveal—this is the true source of pain in Mark and Gemma’s relationship. Because soon after we learn of Gemma’s pregnancy, we witness her miscarriage. It’s one of Severance’s most devastating scenes to this point—she turns on the shower and falls to the floor, sobbing while Mark comforts her.
Gemma eventually turns to IVF, and we even see her with Mark at a fertility clinic. About that: Just like the Lumon-logo nod at the blood bank, we see a water droplet on the patient intake form. It begs the question of whether Lumon—owning all of Mark and Gemma’s medical records—purposefully targeted them for the experimentation we’ve seen over the course of Severance.
But the IVF doesn’t work either. The couple has an extremely telling tiff while Gemma is amusing herself with materials from the fertility clinic. (Hat tip to my colleague Josh Rosenberg, who pointed out that we see these cards in season 1. Optics and Design made them.) “Why are you wasting your time with this?” Mark asks, sounding very much like the depressed, dickish Outie Mark we’ve come to know in Severance. “Why are you being an asshole?” Gemma asks, before telling him that she feels “beat to shit.” Mark bluntly suggests that they just … stop. As in, give up the hope of ever having a child. The look on Gemma’s face says it all.
The next time we see Mark and Gemma? It’s the night of the car crash. Mark is working late at night and declines to go to a party with her. He’s so distracted that Gemma even needs to prompt him to say “I love you” back to her. Honestly, I didn’t read too much into this interaction at first—all I saw was a devastating final interaction between two people deeply in love—but I’m looking at it a little differently after speaking to Gagné. For the sake of keeping this under 3,000 (!) words, I’ll drop the link to the interview again here.
Instead, I’ll leave you with her beautiful remark on the episode’s final shot. When Mark finally wakes up, Devon asks the same thing as Gemma’s nurse at the beginning of episode 7: “Where did you go?” From Gagné: “Mark has to experience all the moments he’s ever had with Gemma, then realize that she’s not there. It’s like this bittersweet moment that he’s had, where he was able to be with her again.”
Over the next week, we’ll have time to fully process everything we just saw—the rooms, the files, Dr. Mauer, Gemma’s future, and what’s really inside Cold Harbor. All of it. But last night, as soon as the episode dropped, multiple friends texted me varying versions of … Wow. And I really can’t remember the last time so many people messaged me about something they watched. It’s a beautiful thing.
Thank you, as always, for journeying with me—it’s been a pleasure watching this season with you. I’ll see you next week.
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