‘Severance’ Episode 7: Take My Wife, Please
This post contains spoilers for this week’s episode of Severance, “Chikhai Bardo,” which is now streaming on Apple TV+.
Lumon management has spent much of Severance Season Two letting the innies get away with everything short of murder. They are largely unsupervised. They barely do any work. They were granted their very own ORTBO, and got to hear Ms. Huang play her theremin. Dylan has been allowed to meet — and unexpectedly woo — his outie’s wife. Mark was able to force Lumon to rehire the rest of the team, and when Irving exposed Helena’s impersonation of Helly, the Eagans ordered her to resume turning her body over to Helly. All of this has been justified, we are told, by how important Mark is to Cold Harbor, which Mr. Drummond suggested a few episodes back will one day be remembered as “one of the great moments in the history of the planet.”
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Such a comment, and such laissez-faire oversight from a group of religious-cult supervillains, sets an incredibly high bar for the explanation of what Cold Harbor actually is. If Lumon is just trying to create the world’s best panini grill, this all falls apart. With “Chikhai Bardo,” we finally have at least some idea of what the project is doing, though Mark’s centrality to it isn’t dealt with beyond the fact that Gemma is the project’s main test subject, and Mark is her husband.
Is it enough? That depends on how much you feel we do and don’t learn from the episode — and if, in fact, what we just saw is Cold Harbor.
“Chikhai Bardo” is structurally very different from every other installment this season. Outside of picking up on the cliffhanger of Outie Mark having a seizure(*), the episode is largely unstuck in time, drifting back and forth — sometimes in chronological order, sometimes seemingly at random, because of the nature of what Gemma is going through — between the story of Mark and Gemma’s relationship from their first meeting to her “death,” and what Lumon is doing to her down on the export floor.
(*) Three thoughts on this: 1) Devon’s mention of the cabin where innies can meet their outies was the first time this season where I had zero memory of a plot point from Season One, even after I was reminded of it. Devon gave birth at that cabin in the series’ fifth episode, and met a mother who turned out to be an innie. With some other hazy old details, like Reghabi, I at least remembered once they turned up again. With this one, though, I was wondering how on earth Devon knew about the place. (In general, the Season One outie stories tended to be less sticky than the stuff on the severed floor.) 2) The cabin seems like an excuse to get rid of Reghabi and bring back Harmony, who’s been absent for most of the season. Reghabi is more of a walking plot device than a character, so she’s no huge loss. But the idea that Devon would be willing to seek help from Harmony, a crazy woman who was spying on her brother, and who briefly appeared to have kidnapped Devon’s own child? What? How does this in any way make sense for this woman who is so protective of Mark, and so rightly mistrustful of Lumon? 3) All of this feels like the show is struggling a bit with pacing various seasonal arcs. Mark’s reintegration clearly can’t be completed just yet, so various problems with the process keep cropping up right when a full integration would solve various problems for him in both worlds.
And what they are doing appears to be awfully similar to what happened to Dichen Lachman’s character on the series that provided her first regular employment in American TV: Dollhouse.
Don’t feel bad if you’ve forgotten all about the short-lived Joss Whedon sci-fi drama, which aired on Fox in 2009 and 2010 — assuming you were aware it existed in the first place. Dollhouse involves an illicit business where people in desperate circumstances volunteer to have their minds temporarily wiped, so that, essentially, their hard drive can be overwritten with new memories and a new personality. At first, it seemed to be used for the world’s most expensive, convoluted escort service. Lachman played one of the dolls, Sierra, who in any given week could be transformed into a pop star’s eager superfan, a master spy, or a dorky gamer. In time, it was revealed that the Dollhouse was just beta-testing technology that would allow its wealthy clients to upload their minds into these young, fit bodies, becoming functionally immortal(*).
(*) This eventually led to a post-apocalyptic scenario where the technology accidentally scrambled the personality of most of humanity, but you’ll be forgiven for not knowing that even if you watched some of the show, since the episode explaining this never aired on Fox, and wound up as a DVD exclusive. The broadcast TV business in the late 2000s was weird, kids.
If this isn’t exactly what Lumon is doing with Gemma, it seems in the ballpark — enough that the casting of Lachman in this role would be one hell of a coincidence if Team Severance wasn’t aware that she did this extremely specific thing once before, and incredibly well at that. Here, we see Gemma passed back and forth between two handlers, played by Sandra Bernhard and Robby Benson. When she is in her own quarters, or in the export floor’s halls, Gemma is herself. When Bernhard lets her into one room or another, she becomes another person, placed in a variety of physically and/or emotionally taxing scenarios — a dental exam, having to perpetually sign Christmas cards at what she thinks is holiday time — to see whether Gemma recalls any of them when she returns to normal.
It is, it seems, taking the concept of severance — and the sheer amount of control that process gives Lumon over its employees — to an even more nightmarish level. If Innie Mark doesn’t know what his life is like away from the severed floor, he still possesses enough of Outie Mark that he’s able to push back against the unjust system he’s trapped in. With this process, there is nothing of Gemma left when she enters each room. She is whatever Lumon wants her to be, willing to do whatever is asked of her. (Even if Gemma protests some of the scenarios, she still ultimately goes along.) With this process, Lumon can create an army of completely programmable slaves, able to be placed in any situation, stripped of free will or anything resembling their true minds and spirits. We don’t know what will happen when Gemma eventually goes into the room labeled “Cold Harbor,” nor what that has to do with Innie Mark’s work with the numbers. But none of it seems good.
The episode’s title reflects an aspect of Buddhism, loosely translated into “Bardo of the Moment of Death” — the moment when you are transitioning from this world to the next one, and are just barely aware of both at once. Little by little, Lumon is killing Gemma, even as Robby Benson keeps convincing her that this will all be for the greater good. She wants to be reunited with Mark, and all Benson will tell her is, “Mark will benefit from the world you’re siring. Kier will take away all his pain, just as Kier has taken away yours.” We don’t know whether she initially came down here voluntarily, but Gemma knows she’s a prisoner now. After Benson lies to her that Mark has been remarried and has a daughter — an especially painful taunt, given that we have seen her go through the agony of a miscarriage, followed by ongoing fertility problems — she attempts a violent escape, not realizing that if she gets up to the next floor, she will simply turn into Ms. Casey, with Milchick there to smile his friendly devil smile and send her straight back down into bondage.
The episode, written by Dan Erickson and Mark Friedman and directed by Jessica Lee Gagné, feels almost made with Reddit in mind, filled with images and Easter Eggs that demand intensive screenshot analysis. Are the doppelgangers of MDR who work in the export floor’s control room, for instance, meant to be the same group who were shadowing our heroes in the woods on the ORTBO? (In the closing credits, one of them is listed as “Mark Watcher.”) But it also recognizes that we need to care about Gemma, and about Mark and Gemma’s relationship, beyond our understanding that she is the wife of our hero and he was so broken by her apparent death that he agreed to undergo severance. And in that respect, “Chikhai Bardo” tells an even more complete story than the material involving Cold Harbor. Nothing that we see happen between the two feels shocking or hugely inventive.
But Adam Scott and Lachman have good chemistry together. Gemma feels like an actual person, rather than a Reghabi-style MacGuffin. And seeing Scott both looking and acting more like his usual onscreen persona (including a shorter haircut) helps underscore just how damaged Outie Mark was by losing Gemma. A guy being devastated by the death of his wife is a familiar enough idea that it doesn’t need much embellishment; it just needs to feel real, and to provide an emotional anchor for that side of things. So far, our love hexagon, or whatever shape it is, has focused almost entirely on various combinations of Mark and Helly/Helena. But much of what both Marks are doing this season is on behalf of Gemma. At a certain point, Gemma had to become more than an abstraction, and that very much happens here.
To paraphrase Mr. Drummond, was “Chikhai Bardo” one of the great moments in the history of Severance? Not really, but only because episodes like “Woe’s Hollow” and the Season One finale set a very high bar. But it had a big, complicated job to tackle, and it did it in fascinating, unconventional fashion.
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