Warning: This post contains spoilers for Episode 7 of Severance Season 2.
The big Gemma-centric episode we’ve all been waiting for on Severance has finally arrived. Unfortunately, it seems to have left us with more new questions than answers. But we’re going to try to make sense of what we learned about both past and present Gemma (Dichen Lachman) in the seventh episode of Season 2 as best as possible.
After outie Mark (Adam Scott) collapsed at the end of Episode 6 following his latest reintegration procedure, this week’s episode, titled “Chikhai Bardo,” opened with a flashback to him and Gemma first meeting at a blood drive at Ganz College, the university where they were both once professors. We know that Mark taught history, specializing in World War I, and Gemma taught Russian literature, a fact that’s hammered home when they read the titles of the essays they’re grading aloud to each other (Mark’s is focused on drug use by enlisted soldiers during WWI and Gemma’s on themes of religious conversion in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich). We then see the medical equipment at the blood drive has the Lumon waterdrop symbol on it, seemingly signaling that Mark and Gemma’s history with Lumon goes back way further than either (or, at least one) of them thinks.
In a 2022 interview with Variety that was published following the Season 1 finale, series creator Dan Erickson responded to a question about why Mark and Gemma are involved in this situation with the following: “There’s a question of sort of who was targeted first: Was Mark targeted because of his relationship to Gemma, or was it the other way around?…That’s the big question, what is special about Mark? And is it actually that there’s something special about him or is it more about Gemma, and he was sort of pulled in?”
Episode 7 doesn’t necessarily directly answer these questions, but it does give us way more insight into what’s been happening to Gemma, how much she knows, and her potential role in Lumon’s master plan.
What is Lumon doing to Gemma?
We last saw innie Gemma, a.k.a. Ms. Casey, being sent down the Exports Hall elevator to what has now been confirmed to be a testing floor of sorts. But it turns out Ms. Casey isn’t the only innie version of Gemma. There appear to be numerous distinct innie Gemmas, each of whom’ exists solely within a different room on the testing floor. Whenever outie Gemma enters one of these rooms, her corresponding innie regains consciousness and is forced to partake in one of Lumon’s sick little severance experiments—whether that’s undergoing a painful dental procedure, experiencing extreme simulated flight turbulence, or writing Christmas thank-you notes to the point of torturous hand-cramping exhaustion. We don’t know yet how Lumon was able to sever one person into multiple innies, but her innies’ complaints about the monotony of each environment seem to indicate they only experience whatever is in that room.
Outie Gemma tells her Lumon handler—a man she knows as Dr. Mauer (Robby Benson) who, unbeknownst to her, is the one overseeing every innie experiment and seems to have a perverse obsession with her—that she never remembers what’s happened to her in the rooms, but the physical pain often lingers. At one point, Gemma questions him about why the only room she hasn’t been in is Cold Harbor and what will happen when she finally does enter that room. “You will see the world again, and the world will see you,” he cryptically tells her.
In the flashbacks we get of Mark and Gemma’s marriage, the show drops a number of additional hints that Lumon was manipulating their relationship from the start. Not only does Dr. Mauer briefly appear in the scene where Mark and Gemma arrive at the fertility clinic following a devastating miscarriage, but there are also a few clues that that Gemma has either previously spent time on the testing floor or Lumon is eerily aware of every interaction that took place between her and Mark. “You hate writing thank-you notes,” Mark says to her at one point, seemingly referencing the dreaded Christmas card experiment room where Dr. Mauer makes her pretend to be his wife—or perhaps the latter interaction refers to the former. Same with Dr. Mauer and Gemma’s forced exchange of “I love you’s,” which echoes a scene with Mark.
Later, there is a scene where Gemma has a deck of cards laid out on the table in front of her. She and Mark discuss the image on one of the cards, which appears to depict Chikhai bardo—a Buddhist term for the fourth of six stages in the cycle of life, death, and rebirth that represents the transitional state between the onset of the first signs of death and someone’s final breath. Gemma tellingly describes the image as “the same guy fighting himself, defeating his own psyche. Ego death.”
While sitting at the table, she is also filling out a form, which she says she received after somehow getting “onto the mailing list at the clinic,” seemingly implying that Lumon has arranged for her to receive those materials. The form seems potentially related to her future as a human guinea pig, though the specifics remain murky. As things stand now, it seems like Lumon needed Gemma to eventually get to Mark rather than vice versa. But they are both clearly vital to the overall mission.
What is Lumon up to?
Now, here’s where things get even stickier. Every testing floor room name we see or hear about in Episode 7, from Allentown to Cairns to Rhodes to Wellington, seems to be a reference to either the name or site of a famous battle or siege, or a historical military figure. So, as far as Cold Harbor goes, we have to assume there’s something significant about that corresponding battle that might clue us in to Lumon’s master plan.
The Battle of Cold Harbor was fought during the American Civil War in Virginia and is considered Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s last major victory. It’s also remembered as one the bloodiest and most lopsided battles in American history. We know Lumon is relying on innie Mark to finish Cold Harbor and, in a previous episode, Lumon security chief Mr. Drummond (Olafur Darri Ólafsson) stated its completion would result in “one of the greatest moments in the history of this planet.”
Prior to Episode 7, some fans had already zeroed in on the historical lore surrounding Cold Harbor, and started theorizing about it. In a series of recent TikToks, user Annie Shaffer speculates that Lumon, which was founded in 1865 (a.k.a. the year the Civil War ended), is gunning to create a workforce of unfeeling innie slaves to do their bidding.
“What are the colors of the innie severed floor? Blue. The Union. What’s the overall thesis of this show? Corporations don’t care about their workers, they just want corporate slaves,” she says in one video. “Remember when they picked Mark S.? What appealed to them so much is that he said he was so depressed every day felt like a year. I think he’s sorting the numbers into feelings so they can figure out how to sever someone without any emotion. So they can have corporate slaves. They don’t want innies feeling sad or angry.”
We know the macrodata refiners sort the numbers on their screens into bins based on the emotions they elicit. And according to Lumon’s official Macrodata Refiner’s Orientation Booklet, the four categories of numbers are WO (deep melancholy or despair), FC (joy, gaiety, or ecstasy), DR (fear, anxiety, or apprehension), and MA (rage or a desire to do harm), each of which corresponds to one of Kier’s four tempers of woe, frolic, dread, and malice. This could lend some credence to those theorizing that MDR is refining the severance process itself, in order to figure out a way to completely erase the types of emotions that essentially make a person a person.
If that’s indeed the case, Mark and Gemma might be integral to the project as their connection seems to have been one of true love and the show has given us many hints that, despite Lumon’s best efforts, love transcends severance. Even when the Ms. Casey version of Gemma briefly regained consciousness at the end of Episode 7, she seemed to be on the verge of asking Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman) where Mark was before he shut her down and forced her to go back to the testing floor. Cold Harbor could potentially be some sort of final test of severance’s ability to destroy the inherent bond between Mark and Gemma and, therefore, the strongest and most complicated human emotions. That would also explain why Mark has been stuck at 96 percent on Cold Harbor since his nosebleeds, a.k.a. his reintegration, began: the intrusion of his outie’s consciousness into his innie’s work environment removes the boundary that was allowing him to make so much progress. Is it possible that by reintegrating in order to increase his chances of finding Gemma, Mark may be dooming her to a purgatory of never finishing the experiments to which she’s being subjected?
As for why Lumon wants to create a legion of unfeeling, conscienceless soldiers, it seems important to consider the contents of The Lexington Letter, a free companion e-book written by the creators of Severance to flesh out the world of the show. The book is considered Severance canon and contains a series of correspondences between an editor at the fictional newspaper the Topeka Star and a reporter who has received an apparent whistleblower letter from a former MDR employee whose innie found a way to exchange messages back and forth with her. In the letter, the refiner claims Lumon is—shocker—up to no good and explains she believes her innie’s completion of a MDR file led to a horrific explosion that destroyed a truck belonging to Lumon rival Dorner Therapeutics. The book ends with the editor, one Jim Milchick, telling the reporter to stand down and revealing that the employee has passed away from complications from a car accident.
If Lumon is hoping to use its severed employees as mindless weapons of war who carry out increasingly evil acts of violence, it seems best not to have to deal with the threat of any pesky emotions seeping through, no?
