[Editor’s note: The following review contains spoilers for “Severance” Season 2, Episode 7, “Chikhai Bardo.” For coverage of earlier episodes, read our previous reviews.]
“Where did you go?”
The first time we hear that question, it’s the start of Episode 7, and Gemma (Dichen Lachman) is somewhere deep within Lumon headquarters having her blood drawn. Watching the small vials with green lids fill up one by one, Gemma’s mind drifts back to when she first met Mark (Adam Scott) at a blood drive held in the campus library. Back then, they were just fellow teachers making the most of some downtime during a shared good deed, unaware their polite yet potent flirtation over a research paper titled “All Quiet on the Western Blunt” would alter the rest of their lives.
That’s the way love goes, though. It tends to arrive as if from nowhere and then, suddenly, it’s like it’s always been a part of you.
So when Mark finally comes to at the end of the episode and Devon (Jen Tullock) asks, “Where’d you go?,” I doubt it would surprise her to learn he was visiting Gemma. In times of hardship, we seek solace from the ones we love, and both Gemma and Mark survive their various ordeals by remembering each other. Gemma is trapped in a prison whose bars are set by a tiny chip in her brain. Her ordeal is very real — her jaw hurts from those mysterious dental procedures, and her hand aches from writing thank you cards to fictional friends and family — but Mark’s experience only exists in his memories. Memories he hopes to preserve during reintegration, while he gains access to all the ones he’s lost at Lumon.
But can those memories coexist? Episode 7, “Chikhai Bardo,” gets its name from the Buddhist term describing the first stage of death. In stage two, they’re faced with visions of the past, and in stage three (the final stage), they’re reincarnated as something new, which restarts the six phases of life and death.
Literally speaking, Mark and Gemma don’t want to start over as someone new. Gemma has done that enough in her many visits to many rooms where she becomes many different characters. “I want to go home,” she tells the sadistic Lumon scientist (played by Robby Benson) who’s overseeing her treatment (and who we first saw in Episode 5, wheeling a cart of dental tools down the black hallway). Of course, she can’t go home. Lumon needs her. Why, exactly, remains unclear, but the scientist (or perhaps I should say “scientist”) tries to negate the request by lying to Gemma. “You’ve been gone a long time, Gemma,” he says. “[Mark’s] moved on. Maybe you’ve moved on, too. In one of the rooms. What do you think?”
Of course, Mark hasn’t moved on. He also isn’t ready to start over. He may have been inching closer to a form of rebirth when he still thought Gemma was dead, but now that he knows she’s alive, he’s desperate to get his old life back. She’s the only reason he went through reintegration to begin with, proving he’s willing to do anything to get her back, to get their life back, to go back, not forward.
Perhaps that’s why when Gemma brings up the concept of Chikhai Bardo, after receiving a card in the mail, Mark initially says the picture “looks like two guys fighting.” Gemma corrects him, explaining it’s actually “the same guy fighting himself, defeating his own psyche — ego death.” Does Mark’s original interpretation indicate he’s approaching his current problem the wrong way? Does Mark see reintegration as an attack? Is he pitting Innie vs. Outie, hoping for the former to absorb (and thus defeat) the latter? Instead, should he be looking at reintegration as recognition? A battle that can only be won when “the same guy” sets aside his subjective self-identity by acknowledging the existence of his two objective selves?
Practically speaking, I’m not sure what that would mean for Mark’s Innie and Outie and their respective relationships. But for as much as Episode 7 serves to remind us of Mark and Gemma’s intimate, enduring connection, it also reminds us that they can’t simply go back to what they had before. They have to move forward. Whether they can go there together, well, that’s the million-dollar question.
Grade: B+
“Severance” Season 2 releases new episodes every Friday.
Further Refinement:
• Brava to Jessica Lee Gagné, the director of this episode who’s been the director of photography on “Severance” since Season 1. “Chikhai Bardo” relies on visual transitions and emotional logic to stitch together its time-hopping narrative, while revealing critical details about Gemma’s present-day plight. Its performances are exacting from one distinct moment to the next in a way that requires a guiding hand to keep them all in harmony just as much as it needs attentive professional actors to deliver what’s asked of them. Also, not for nothing, it’s beautiful. The flashbacks are dreamy without becoming mawkish, and Gemma’s scenes in Lumon are nightmarish without feeling untethered or otherwordly. As a whole, it works elegantly, and as one part of a longer season, it stands out.
• To that end, bravo to Dan Erickson, the co-writer on this episode (with Mark Friedman) and the creator of “Severance” since the beginning. That Episode 7 holds together as well as it does is a testament not only to its own thoughtful composition, but every thoughtful composition that came before it. In a story that keeps asking us to recognize and respect each of Mark’s two selves, it’s critical we support each of his relationships equally — or as equally as possible. His Innie’s relationship with Helly has unfolded before us, beat by beat, all along. They’re the couple we’ve grown with and rooted for, so they’ve earned our devotion. But we hadn’t seen his Outie’s relationship with Gemma until this week, which leaves Episode 7 the unenviable task of balancing the scales. We need to invest in Gemma as much as we’re already invested in Helly, and while that may not be a fair demand, “Chikhai Bardo” brings their history to vivid life. It humanizes Gemma in ways we’d yet to see for ourselves.
Code Detectors:
• Still, I have questions. Like, how did Gemma end up at Lumon to begin with? Did they just pick her at random, kidnap her, and fake a total stranger’s death? Did she go to them at some point (perhaps during her fertility treatments) and end up volunteering for the severance procedure in secret? Is there another reason we have no way of guessing yet? No matter what, there’s a big chunk of time missing after Mark and Gemma’s marriage started to stumble and before the night Mark last saw Gemma alive. Maybe we’ll get another flashback-heavy entry sometime soon.
• It is reassuring, so to speak, to know that what we see Gemma going through in Episode 7 is happening in the present. At first, I was worried her experiments in the various rooms may have also been taking place in the distant past, like some of the other scenes, but when Mr. Drummond (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) and the “doctor” are watching the monitors, they mention Mark is “stuck” at 96 percent on Cold Harbor. Mr. Drummond says the bloody nose held them back (which just happened last week) and the “doctor” is wearing a stupid holiday sweater, which we see again in the next scene: It’s part of another experiment with Gemma in another room. So it appears, at least, both Gemma’s present timeline in this episode and the MDR workers’ timeline in the previous episodes are in sync. Let the race to not finish Cold Harbor commence!
• “So what happens once I’ve been in all the rooms?”
“You will see the world again, and the world will see you.”
“So I’ll see Mark?”
“Mark will benefit from the world you’re siring. Kier will take away all his pain just as Kier has taken away yours.”
[her eye is welling up, she’s angry]“Can you please just talk like a normal person?”
PLEASE! MY GOD! SHE’S ASKING THE EXACT QUESTIONS WE WANT ANSWERED, AND SHE’S GETTING NOTHING BUT CULTY NONSENSE IN RETURN! STOP TOYING WITH US, “SEVERANCE”!!
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