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Spoilers below.
On any given week, we can count on a new episode of Severance to pack an emotional wallop. But I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to call season 2, episode 7, “Chikhai Bardo,” one of the series’ most ambitious and heart-wrenching installments yet. Gorgeously rendered by Severance cinematographer Jessica Lee Gagné—who also serves as this week’s director—“Chikhai Bardo” leaps between three distinct timelines and narratives, but weaves them together in a manner that feels graceful, illuminating, and inevitable.
The first of those timelines concerns the courtship of Mark and Gemma, the Russian literature professor with whom Mark fell in love; the second Gemma’s more recent reality on Lumon’s Testing Floor; and the third the fallout from Mark’s reintegration seizure last episode. But let’s start with the first timeline, which is interspersed throughout the episode in tender vignettes as Mark’s reintegration-disturbed memories flood to the surface.
We watch as Mark and Gemma meet on the college campus where they both work. They sit down to donate blood—which I don’t think is coincidental, given the Lumon branding on their IV hook-ups—and Gemma turns to chat with Mark, who’s pretty much immediately besotted with her. It’s worth noting that these versions of Mark and Gemma are meant to be younger, yes, but they also look so much healthier. Some of that is owing to the color saturation of their scenery, as compared to the stark fluorescence we’re accustomed to within Mark’s Lumon housing and, especially, within Lumon itself. But the hair, make-up, and styling is also to thank. In his dapper suede suit and fresh haircut, this professorial version of Adam Scott reminds me much more of Ben Wyatt than it does Mark Scout, and as with all things in Severance, the requisite appeal is intentional. The Mark-is-hot memes have already begun. (As Gagné herself told TV Guide, “I wanted him to be sexy.”)
We watch, then, as these two very hot professors learn to be hot together. We see Mark surprise Gemma with a gag gift. We see her seducing him as he attempts to catch up on grading papers, only to notice that he’s bought a crib. The montage precedes with flashes of vignettes, stitched together like an old-school roll of film, complete with choppy cuts and color leaks and grainy footage, their love story a portrait of marital bliss of the “light academia” flavor. (This is not important—though, in Severance, everything’s important—but the home they share together is so, so, so beautiful. Big props to the set designer. There are so many books! And plants! I would like to live there!) We encounter a dinner party scene in which Devon attempts to pour Gemma some wine, and when she refuses, Devon gives her a knowing look. “Oh, fuck right off,” Mark’s sister whispers with the utmost joy and affection. We all know what this means. Gemma is—was—pregnant.
Mere seconds later, the light around her darkens to shadow, and we see her in a bathroom, squeezing her eyes shut in physical pain and emotional torment. We know what this means, too. The trickle of blood down her leg confirms what was already understood: She’s experiencing a miscarriage, and Mark discovers her curled into a ball on the floor of their shower, weeping. Later, they check into a fertility clinic, where the Lumon logo makes another appearance on Gemma’s intake form. We watch her receive a third IVF injection. And we see her back in that bathroom, alone, gazing at a negative pregnancy test.
From this timeline, we learn a number of important details: Mark and Gemma were desperate to have a child. They voluntarily signed up with a Lumon clinic for fertility treatments. Gemma was pregnant at one point, though what that means for the broader story is as yet unclear. Lumon has been intimately involved in their relationship from its very inception. Is it possible they planned for Gemma’s fertility journey all along? Might their supposed IVF treatments been placebos? Either way, we learn the answer to one important question: Gemma was not secretly working for Lumon when she and Mark met.
That doesn’t explain the second timeline we witness, though it provides important context. In the recent-past timeline, Gemma is somewhere on the Testing Floor of Lumon, where she similarly receives a blood draw from a nameless nurse. This nurse checks Gemma’s vitals; measures her weight; asks if she’s read her “50 pages” and done her calisthenics. With strange, egg-like tools, she calculates Gemma’s response when asked if she’d be more scared of suffocating or drowning, were she to be caught in a mudslide. (I’m not sure what difference it makes, really, but Gemma goes with “drowning.”) Gemma then has her own chance to ask a question: She wonders how many “rooms” she’ll have to face that day. After learning the answer is six, she walks to the closet inside her equally sterile living quarters, slides open the door, and discovers the first outfit—though, perhaps, “costume” is an apter description—she’ll wear that day. Upon seeing the maroon-colored minidress and heels, she mutters, “Shit.”
After she changes, she’s escorted down a hallway of doors, some of which bear the names of familiar MDR files: Allentown, Cairns, Dranesville, Loveland, Wellington. After the nurse opens the “Wellington” door using a pinprick of her own blood (a recurring motif this episode!), Gemma steps through and phases into her Innie. However, this Innie does not seem to be Ms. Casey, the only other Innie Gemma of which we’ve previously been made aware. For one thing, this Innie’s outfit and wig is different. For another, her mannerisms are much more fidgety than Ms. Casey’s. As this Innie looks upon the dentist’s office into which she’s strolled, she claims she was “just here.” The doctor who snagged the dental supplies from Optics & Design in episode 5 reappears, and he settles this Innie Gemma into a dental chair. She looks terrified—and though I, too, am terrified of the dentist, this fear seems markedly more primal than your average phobia.
Gemma re-emerges from Wellington with a sore jaw but no memory of what took place in the room. As she hops from room to room, her outfits and mannerisms shift. It would seem as though each of these rooms awaken within Gemma a different Innie, each of whom have only ever experienced their respective rooms. In one, Gemma’s Innie experiences dramatic plane turbulence; in another, she’s forced to write hundreds of shaky thank-you notes in a ’50s-era Christmas scene. As this Innie claims, her scowl deepening, “It’s always Christmas.”
Back in her cookie-cutter living quarters, Gemma’s doctor, Doctor Mauer (Robby Benson), rattles off six of the rooms she’s recently visited: Wellington, Billings, Lucknow, St. Pierre, Cairns, and Zurich. She remembers nothing of what took place in those rooms. But instead of answering his further questions, she asks about the one room she has not yet been inside: the one bearing the name “Cold Harbor.” She’s curious. What will happen, once she’s visited every room and inhabited each disparate Innie?
“You will see the world again, and the world will see you,” the doctor replies.
“So, I’ll see Mark?” she asks.
“Mark will benefit from the world you’re siring,” he says. “Kier will take away all his pain, just as Kier has taken away yours.”
Here, “siring” is an interesting word choice, given the episode’s focus on fertility. I mentioned in last week’s recap that Severance’s endgame seems pointed toward some intersection of spirituality and sex. Fertility is, of course, strongly associated with both. But why Gemma’s specific fertility journey is of interest to Lumon remains opaque. “Siring” implies birthing. But if she’s not currently pregnant, then what, exactly, is Gemma siring?
For now, the Lumon overlords (including Mr. Drummond) aren’t forthcoming with their intentions. We watch them spy on the MDR employees through cameras in the refiners’ computers, satisfied to see that the severance barriers are “holding.” But they also note that Mark’s progress on Cold Harbor is stalled at 96 percent. Once he finishes, the doctor will have to “say goodbye” to Gemma. He does not seem eager to do this.
When he later visits Gemma in her quarters, he whips out some further psychological torture, telling her that Mark has “moved on,” having remarried last year. To rub further salt in the wound, the doctor says Mark has a daughter now. “Maybe you’ve moved on, too,” the doctor tells Gemma. “In one of the rooms. What do you think? Maybe you felt things behind those doors you never felt with Mark.” He wants her to believe that one of her Innies has fallen in love—and probably with him. Either way, Gemma could not possibly care less. She lifts up a metal chair and knocks him out cold. Atta girl, Gem! Go get your man!!! But her valiant escape (which, perhaps, is not her first) is cut short when she “wakes up” on the severed floor as Ms. Casey. There, she encounters a panting Milchick, who sends her right back down to the Testing Floor.
Finally, we come to the present-day timeline, set in the immediate aftermath of episode 6. After Mark collapsed last episode, Devon is—understandably—freaking out. “I can tell that you’re smarter than me,” she informs Reghabi, “so forgive me if I say this, like, super plainly. But if you give one solitary thought to messing with my brother again, I will throw you off a fucking bridge.” (As sister to a brother myself, I relate to every one of Devon’s protective-sibling outbursts.) Reghabi tries to call off the hounds by telling Devon that Gemma is indeed alive. But even after Reghabi gets Mark stabilized, Devon isn’t satisfied.
What she wants is an alternative to reintegration, which Devon is convinced will ultimately kill Mark. She comes up with a plan to shuttle Mark to the Damona Birthing Retreat—the same birthing cottage where, last season, Devon met a wealthy woman whose Innie gave birth while her Outie remained blissfully ignorant of the pain. Devon thinks the cabin could “wake up” Innie Mark, so that she might ask him questions about Gemma. Reghabi thinks that plan sounds dumb. But Devon is absolutely on one now, and so she decides to call Harmony Cobel, thinking the woman formerly known as Ms. Selvig might also know something about Gemma’s whereabouts.
“She’s Lumon through and through!” Reghabi protests. “She was raised by them. She’s a soldier.” But as she realizes Devon won’t back down, Reghabi gets antsy. She refuses to get within a 10-mile radius of Cobel. And so she leaves, taking her reintegration equipment and abandoning Devon to try and interpret an unconscious Mark’s muttering of “chikhai bardo.”
“Chikhai bardo,” as it turns out, connects to the instruction card Dylan swiped from Optics & Design back in season 1. (I’d wondered when those cards would make their crucial reappearance!) In another flashback, Gemma tells Mark that she somehow ended up on the Lumon clinic’s mailing list, and the clinic’s been sending her the strange little cards. The latest depicts a man fighting against himself, or, as Gemma puts it, “defeating his own psyche.” It’s “chikhai bardo,” a liminal stage between death and rebirth, and in this case “ego death.” “Defeating” your own psyche sounds a lot like severance, doesn’t it? But when Mark can’t understand the allure of the cards—or the other puzzles Lumon seems to be sending Gemma’s way—the failed IVF reveals the toll it’s taken on their relationship. They bicker, and Mark recommends they stop the treatments altogether. When he attempts to set up the crib he bought, he ends up throwing the pieces to the ground in despair and frustration.
And as Mark has always been apt to do, he stuffs these emotions deep down and pours his energy into his work instead. Ultimately, that instinct costs him his precious final moments with his wife. When she heads out for the evening, promising to be back by 10 p.m., he’s so distracted by his pile of papers that he nearly forgets to return her “I love you.” Hours later, a car pulls into his driveway, and Mark knows immediately it’s not his wife’s. When he sees the two policemen standing in his doorway, recognition dawns on his face.
Here, the timelines converge in the most achingly brutal way. We watch Mark as he gives his head a slight, desperate shake, as if refusing the reality of the tragedy before him. In Lumon, we watch Gemma mimic the gesture, shaking her head at the nurse who’s come to retrieve her from the Testing Floor elevator. She sinks to the floor, weeping, pleading for her husband. The camera phases between these two characters, crossing space and time to mirror their losses. The frame settles on the back of Mark’s head—where, soon, his own severance chip will be implanted—and then the front of his face, dipped in a shroud of shadow.
At last, in the present timeline, we watch as Mark—this time bathed in sunlight—awakens to Devon’s sympathetic gaze. He says nothing at first, but the tears in his eyes tell us what we need to know. He’s seen his wife again. And he’ll stop at nothing to get her home.