We Contain Multitudes: Severance, “Chikhai Bardo”

Everyone in this episode is caught in an in-between state, a neither here nor there, neither alive nor dead. I’m just caught between wanting to pick apart every detail and simultaneously feeling like … it’s rude. It’s rude to do that to this poor woman. Hasn’t she been through enough?

The testing floor is full of spoilers.

This hour is the Severance experience in a nutshell: Here are the answers to those questions you’ve been asking! Here’s what’s up with Gemma. Here’s what’s on the testing floor. Here’s what Mark and Gemma’s life was like. Here, also, are the 4857 more questions you no doubt have now that you’ve seen these things. 

And what a gorgeous, gorgeous episode in which to reveal so much, and to braid so much emotional power with so much Lumon horror. This one’s directed by Jessica Lee Gagné, who is also the cinematographer, and who created a whole past for Mark and Gemma that is nothing like their present. There are seasons, for Kier’s sake. Flowers bloom, leaves fall, Christmas happens, and they move from a totally unremarkable meeting to the relationship that will change—and define—their lives.

I want to tease apart the strands that make up this episode’s elaborate braid, but first I just want to appreciate how beautifully it all works. Gagné and the writers—creator Dan Erickson and Mark Friedman—have a ton of ground to cover, and they do it with grace. What’s more, they do it with a minimum of dialogue, and I think that’s key to just how resonant “Chikhai Bardo” is. (That, and gorgeous performances from Adam Scott and Dichen Lachman.) We get not the details of Mark and Gemma’s life, but the feeling of it, the way their days took shape: grading, cooking, dancing, loving, and trying to have a kid. Work butts in, but it seems to be work they both care about, no matter how bad the student papers are. (The part in the montage with the piles of books growing and shrinking and moving just delighted me.) 

They grow together, and then they grow apart, full of frustration and grief, and then, maybe, they find a tenuous balance. That’s the impression I took from that last moment they have together: They might be distracted and looking in different directions, but the love is still real.

Too bad it also has Lumon’s hands all over it. From the moment Mark and Gemma meet, Lumon is present; it’s their equipment being used at the blood donation drive. Horrible, creepy Dr. Mauer is lurking at the fertility clinic they visit, eyeing Gemma even then. And the cards Gemma shows Mark—the one with “chikhai bardo,” which she explains as a man fighting his own psyche, ego death—are the ones created by Optics & Design. She thinks she got on a mailing list from the clinic. She finds it interesting. He’s pricklier, in that moment, than past-Mark is in the rest of this entire hour. 

Most of the time, though, he’s happy. We get to see happy Mark (with better hair!); we even get to see the friendship we’ve heard about among Mark, Gemma, Devon, and Ricken. The tiny little moment when Gemma reveals to Devon that she’s pregnant is just an expression, just a quirk of her eye and a little smile, and it’s outstanding. Devon’s response is perfect. They feel like people. All of the flashbacks here feel like eavesdropping, which is no doubt intentional, because Lumon is probably spying on them, even then. But for us, the viewers, it’s intimate. It’s effective and affecting; it feels like life. (Though I do want to know why Devon and Ricken were wearing matching vests.)

It’s hard to pull apart the weave of this hour, and I love that about it. The memories shift; at first it’s Gemma lost in the past (“Gemma, where did you go?”) and then, minutes later, Mark floating into his own memories. At the start, it’s clear whose memories we’re in, but that line—like so many others—begins to blur as the episode goes on. The memories belong to both of them, after all. 

And both of them are in limbo. It was easy to assume, if, say, you were to look up the meaning of this week’s episode title last week, that it referred to Mark, hovering near death, with his innie and outie selves colliding. (I’m not going to pretend to know anything more about chikhai bardo than Wikipedia told me.) But it is just as much about Gemma, who is entirely herself in her little Lumon-made home on the testing floor—until they send her into one of those oddly named rooms to have the same experience over and over again, unaware of anything that happens anywhere else. 

This is hell. (It is also almost impossible not to think, a little bit, of Dollhouse; I would almost bet that when dentist Gemma asks to have a break “for a little while” it’s a little wink at her role on that show.) It is also something to do with what MDR is refining, as Mark got a cool perk for his quick work on Allentown, which is the room where Dr. Mauer makes Gemma write thank-you notes with her left-hand over and over again. This room could be less immediately traumatizing than the potentially crashing plane or the endless dental work, but for the emotional manipulation: Dr. Mauer pauses her, on her way out, to recreate the last exchange she had with Mark before she “died.”

Are they refining memories in these rooms? Fears? Scenarios? They’re all miserable; are they tied directly to the tempers of woe, malice, and dread? It is endless, endless testing to make sure the severance barriers hold, as Drummond says. But there are so many more severance barriers than we knew there were.

The revelation that a person can have seemingly endless discrete innies is wild. None of those innie Gemmas know what the others are going through, though physical sensations obviously last. How many innies can a person have? One for each unpleasant part of life? Isn’t that torture, sending someone to the dentist over and over again? Harming yourself, over and over again, even if you don’t remember it?

I began to wonder, thinking about this episode, if some part of Lumon’s plan was, at some point, delusionally well-intentioned. If it really was meant altruistically, at some point; if it was Kier processing the death (?) of his twin (?) and wishing to erase his pain—and then extrapolating that to everyone else in the world (or this world). Dr. Mauer says something that suggests this, though he is a creep and so it sounds like a threat: “Mark will benefit from the world you’re siring. Kier will take away all his pain just as Kier has taken away yours.”

But Kier has clearly not taken away Gemma’s pain. Under all the details and hints and suggestions of this episode runs a major Severance theme: You can’t wall off your pain. You can’t bury yourself in work and ignore it (like Mark did, even when he was happier) and you can’t hide it from your loved ones (like Gemma does as the memories go on and she’s more often alone). You can’t pretend it’s not there. It will seep through. Even if you don’t know exactly where it comes from. Gemma says she can’t remember what happens in the rooms, but the pain persists, and when she sees that deep red dress that she wears to the dentist, she says “Shit” (Lachman’s delivery of that single word is delicious).

And dumping that pain onto an innie doesn’t work, either, for two reasons: One, again, it seeps through. And two, the innie is also a person, whose trauma persists, and then that seeps through, too. No matter how many bits of a person Lumon walls off into a new innie, they’re still a person, and all their experiences layer and build making them who they are. You can’t just torture your inner child and live a carefree outie life, no matter what the severance technology seems to do. But it absolutely tracks that capitalist interests would think this is a great idea for making ignorant, happy little workers. Until they revolt. (I begin to think/hope that the MDR uprising really did happen.)

What all of this means for Cold Harbor, I don’t know. If you are the kind of person who tracks the way the tempers appear in this series, you might notice that we did not see any testing rooms that had anything to do with “frolic.” 

I also don’t know what to make of the mirror-image refining team. Are they the doppelgangers from Woe’s Hollow? Why are they wearing Milchick’s season-one short-sleeved white shirts? What does it mean that they’re watching MDR work, and they seem never to move, never to speak? Drummond clearly supervises them and, in some way, Dr. Mauer, who slinks off after Drummond insults his ugly Christmas sweater.

“Chikhai Bardo” builds to parallel moments of departure: Outside, Gemma leaves for a gathering, not knowing she’s doomed. Inside, she tries to escape. It’s a horror movie, again, with the way the lights follow her, her quiet footsteps, the way she still gets caught. And it’s awful to watch her get in that elevator and realize that there is no escape. There’s only Miss Casey.

But even Miss Casey, serene and calm, is cracking a little bit; she tries to ask questions of Milchick, who clearly had to run to cut her off. “Where’s—” she says, and then back in the elevator Gemma just says, “Mark.” It’s a reminder that it isn’t just pain that transcends the severance barrier. It’s also love.

I’m grateful the show didn’t show us the car accident, though I’m also skeptical that there even was one. For Mark, in the past, it doesn’t matter: We watch him watch the cops arrive, and realization and denial dawn on him. He doesn’t want to open that door; he knows what’s on the other side. That moment is also a bardo, breaking his existence into before and after. His face is overlaid by the image of Gemma in the elevator, a heartbreaking reminder that they are always on each other’s minds. 

This episode is a masterpiece, wrenching and beautiful, but one thing worries me: SF doesn’t have a great track record with stories about pregnancy. From Angel to Prometheus, the genre is full of stories that erase female characters’ agency, turning them into vessels; outside of SF, too many stories use wanting (and often failing to have) a baby as an emotional shortcut or bludgeon. I trust this show a lot, but this narrative thread makes me anxious. “Chikhai Bardo” did a lovely job of keeping the child question present without being overwhelming; a lesser show would have pressed the button too hard, putting things into dialogue that are more affecting when we just silently watch them (like Mark struggling with the crib). It’s clear that Lumon was involved with their relationship from the start, and the true horrors there remain to be revealed (maybe there’s a baby on that testing floor, too).

But hovering over all of this is the question of Helly/Helena, and whether a pregnancy might result from either of her encounters with Mark. A lot of viewers seem to have leapt to the conclusion that Helena’s action was intended to produce a Lumon heir (this could be seen as emphasized by her remark in the following episode about having never taken anyone home to meet her father). There was a throwaway reference in an early episode to an innie getting pregnant. The hints are all there. This show loves narrative parallels and mirrors. 

And then there’s the moment when Dr. Mauer tells Gemma that Mark moved on, got married, and had a daughter. Probably he’s just fucking with her, because he’s a petty little tyrant who clearly wants to keep her for himself. But we don’t know if Gemma’s timeline is the same as Mark’s. It’s implied that it is—the way they move in and out of memories in this episode is presented so that it seems that they’re doing so in parallel—but we don’t really know that for sure. I don’t think this is the case, but the possibility feels real.

At the very end of this episode, I wondered which Mark was waking up. He seems so confused; he doesn’t speak; he barely reacts to Devon. But when she asks, “Oh, Mark, where’d you go?”—mirroring the nurse asking Gemma the same thing—he’s in a memory of Gemma in happier times. So it is outie Mark. Probably. Or it doesn’t matter, because the love is present regardless.

I am preemptively upset that next week’s episode is only 37 minutes.

Scenes from an Ant Farm:

• Dr. Mauer is played by Robby Benson, who provided the voice of the Beast in Beauty and the Beast, which is just too rich. Having Sandra Bernhard appear as Gemma’s stoic nurse is also a nice touch.

• So Reghabi worked on the testing floor, right? She neither confirms nor denies when Devon asks if she’s a doctor.

• Everything in this episode is set apart from the rest of the show, from the colors to the light. Blue persists, but in different shades; Mark and Gemma’s life is full of warm browns and burgundies, while Gemma’s testing-floor existence is a chilly mint (her outfits are blue, red, and burgundy, too). The light in their lives begins warm, but shades cooler and cooler as their frustration peaks.

• Obsessed with the goat eye poster.

• “You can scale walls like a gecko.” Ricken?? What???

• What is “the Denali thing” Gemma sent Mark? Is it about more mountaineering, like Ricken apparently enjoys?

• Gemma’s food in the basement apartment is really weird.
• So is the chart on the wall in the fertility clinic that appears to show skin tones. It’s not just paint chips; there are gender symbols in the bottom left corner. Seems like a strong suggestion they are doing some creepy bespoke baby genetic engineering stuff in there.

• Of all the scenes of Mark and Gemma in love, the moment when he unhesitatingly throws himself into the shower to hug her, though he’s wearing a whole-ass suit, was my favorite.

• The reference to Ms. Cobel having been raised by Lumon seems like an important reminder, especially coming the week after the reference to Miss Huang’s fellowship.

• Some of us have been wishing, since Dollhouse, for Dichen Lachman to get a role that really deserves her incredible talents—and now we did, and she’s stuck in a Dollhouse-like scenario again? It’s too much. Bravo.

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