From the start, Severance has offered a captivating take on how perspectives can change within a single story, and even within the minds of individual characters. As season two began, the show gave us back-to-back episodes that showed the immediate fallout of the season one finale—in which the “innies” briefly awakened and experienced life as their “outies”—from different points of view, with the non-severed characters also getting space to share their reactions.
As season two has progressed, Severance has continued to explore this aspect of its storytelling, giving us more time with the outies to balance out season one’s innie focus, and presenting constant surprises to the audience as a result. Certain things that we believed to be true are in fact completely false, shaped by Lumon Industries’ unique ability to massage reality for its employees who aren’t able to access their full consciousness. And while the innies’ world is almost entirely fabricated, some of that massaging has happened in the outie world, too.
This week’s episode, “Chikai Bardo” was perhaps Severance’s most poignant and wrenching to date. And a lot of that has to do with which character got to be its protagonist.
Gemma (Dichen Lachman) was a peripheral character for most of season one. We first meet her as Ms. Casey, the counselor in Lumon’s Wellness Center. She has a stilted, almost robotic presence—and she’s aware of it; “I know I’m strange,” she says at one point. Midway through season one, of course, we discover that Ms. Casey is actually Gemma, the wife of main character Mark (Adam Scott).
Gemma’s “death” in a car accident two years prior is why Mark decided to get the severance procedure and take a job at Lumon. She’s alive, sure, but she’s not living much of a life; she’s somehow been absorbed into Lumon and isn’t allowed to leave. How and especially why this occurred, and what it has to do with Mark’s yet-to-be-revealed true purpose at Lumon, have become the biggest mysteries looming over Severance season two.
Mark’s innie knows Ms. Casey is his outie’s wife. And Mark’s outie has accepted the wonderful/horrible truth that Gemma is still alive, to the point that he’s allowing his own brain to be mangled in an attempt to re-integrate its divided sides. But it’s all been about his pain until this point. In episode seven, we finally got Gemma’s perspective on her (very grim) current state of existence, as well as her own memories of her relationship with Mark.
Her different innie personas are awakened for the “testing” she’s put through in Lumon’s sub-basement severed rooms; some of those we get to see, others we don’t. But it’s Gemma herself that’s the most intriguing. Before “Chikhai Bardo,” Gemma was a smiling woman in a wedding photograph. She was a woman her husband wistfully remembered as “extraordinary,” someone who made him a better person. So it’s startling that the first time we really meet her is as a Lumon lab rat. The precise levers that were pulled to get her there are still a mystery, but thanks to “Chikhai Bardo” we have an illuminating picture of her life before.
Severance takes full advantage of this departure from its usual setting and style, transporting us through Gemma’s memories using unfamiliar lighting (sunshine!), flowing camera movements, and even production design touches that prove “stark winter” isn’t the only season in its world. We even hear birds chirping at one point.
But that happy, gauzy montage soon spirals into something much darker and sadder: tension in the marriage that crops up as they navigate fertility struggles. This was never mentioned in season one—in which Mark’s sister Devon gave birth to a daughter—but it was clearly and understandably a devastating issue for Mark and Gemma. The way “Chikhai Bardo” cuts from Gemma and Mark grieving their loss into a scene fans will instantly remember from season one—Ms. Casey telling Mark’s innie that she’s been detailed to his department to watch over the potentially suicidal Helly R.—brings an entirely new meaning to their interaction. They don’t recognize each other, but Ms. Casey’s explanation that “I am to watch her for signs of sadness” is suddenly a thousand times more searing.
As “Chikhai Bardo” puzzle-pieces other aspects of Gemma and Ms. Casey’s lives together (and stirs up fodder for dozens more Severance fan theories), it ends by shifting from Gemma’s point of view back to Mark’s. He’s essentially been in a coma for the entire episode, and when he wakes up, a concerned Devon asks him where he “went.” He doesn’t answer, and it’s actually unclear at first which version of Mark this is. But the camera shows us what’s dancing through his mind, and there’s no doubt: he was thinking only of Gemma, and we realize we’ve really been seeing both of their memories meshed together throughout the episode.
As Severance season two heads into its final episodes, it will surely leave some dangling threads, if not a massive cliffhanger. So far “Chikhai Bardo” is the closest we’ve gotten to a flashback episode, and it feels possible that we might get more in that vein: a deep dive into Harmony Cobel’s psyche, or a look at Burt’s early days at Lumon, or the origins of Kier Eagan’s cult-leader aspirations. But even beyond that, this week was a vivid illustration of one big reason why Severance has hooked so many fans: its mysteries contain multitudes, with ever-changing context that somehow constantly stuffs even more layers of meaning into what’s already a compelling story.
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