‘Severance’ Recap S2, Ep. 7: Eternal Sunshine of Mark’s Mind – Vulture

Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission.For more on Severance, sign up for Severance Club, our subscriber-exclusive newsletter obsessing, dissecting, and debating everything about season two.Severance is really great at two things: eliciting genuine emotion and making viewers spiral down untold rabbit holes. This episode, which I’m going to call “the Gemma episode,” is a rich tapestry of visual and narrative beats that lifts the curtain on what Lumon is really doing beyond that foreboding elevator. It also leans heavily on the idea of liminal spaces, both psychic and physical. Raise your hand if you Googled “bardos” or “Tolstoy” after the credits rolled. [Raises hand.]“Chikhai Bardo” is the first television episode that Jessica Lee Gagné has directed, and it makes sense that she would take the reins on this one. As one of the principal cinematographers on Severance, Gagné has had a hand in building much of the visual language that defines the series. Her ability to converse with the audience by using evocative lighting cues and clever framing is master-level, and she takes on the challenges of unspooling this unconventional narrative with grace and ease.The episode is the first to feature Gemma, and while it catches us up on the completely surreal life she’s been living as a prisoner inside Lumon’s walls, we also flit in and out of Mark’s reintegration-addled brain. Thematically, it’s a challenging episode, but it’s also achingly gorgeous and achingly emotional. Gagné creates an ephemeral, dreamlike state that beautifully weaves all the narrative threads together throughout the hour. However, in the interest of breaking it all down in a recap format, let’s say that there are three prongs at play here: Mark’s memories of his and Gemma’s relationship, Gemma’s experience at Lumon, and Devon’s involvement with Mark’s reintegration.Devon and Mark’s story line is straightforward enough, with Devon and Reghabi disagreeing over what needs to happen in the wake of Mark’s seizure. Mark is unconscious on the couch, so he doesn’t really have a say. Reghabi is pretty sure he’s okay, but Devon is freaked out. She draws a line in the sand, telling Reghabi that Mark won’t be pursuing the reintegration process anymore. (“It’s settled fucking law, lady” is just a great line, and I dearly love the fierce sibling energy that Jen Tullock brings to this episode. Yay for more Devon!) She also recalls that there’s an “Innie” cabin at the birthing center she was at last season and thinks that maybe they could take Mark there … with Harmony Cobel’s help. Reghabi absolutely freaks at the mention of Cobel’s name, like she’s the boogeyman or something, and bolts, leaving Devon to anxiously wait for her brother to wake up. Come to think of it, where is Cobel? It’s literally been four episodes without her. Let’s pray to Kier for her return next week.As Mark lies on the couch, it’s full-on Eternal Sunshine up in his brain. And even though the creative inspiration for these sequences seems to come, at least in part, from Michel Gondry’s wondrous direction in that film, Mark’s memories aren’t being erased like Joel Barish’s; quite the opposite, as his Innie life is being added to his Outie’s. However, the voyeuristic and electric feeling of journeying through someone’s brain remains very much intact. The courtship of Gemma and Mark takes place in chronological order, with the two of them meeting as they give blood at a Lumon drive. They’re seriously adorable, two bookish beauties connecting in an altruistic moment. As they make goo-goo eyes at one another, the camera pans down to the Lumon logo on the blood-draw equipment, making us wonder if this is the moment when Lumon also became enamored of Gemma.Mark and Gemma’s relationship takes the usual gooey course. They canoodle in bed, dance in the middle of the day (that red dress!), have dinner with Ricken and Devon, and read lots and lots of books. It’s all gauzy and light and full of idealized love, and the sequence would be giving dead-wife-montage vibes, except for the fact that we know Gemma is alive.At one point, the happy couple decides to start trying for a baby, and their fertility issues begin to fray at the fabric of their relationship. In previous episodes, Mark had made mention of the fact that he and Gemma were unable to have a baby, but now we see their struggle in a series of crushingly intimate memories. At first, a giddy Mark buys a crib, and Gemma lightly ribs him about assembling it, but they’re both very excited. Soon after, she experiences a miscarriage, sinking to the floor of her shower in psychic agony. As their attempts progress, they go to a Lumon clinic for fertility treatment. They do three rounds of IVF, and they are all devastatingly unsuccessful. At this point, Gemma has begun receiving mysterious ideographic cards (including the very same one we saw Dylan pilfer from O&D) in the mail. Here, it starts to seem as if Lumon sabotaged her chances at having a child by giving her something innocuous like saline to inject instead of the requisite hormones.The cards are only featured in a brief scene, but it’s a pivotal one. After the events of season one, it’s a shock to see the images strewn so casually on Mark and Gemma’s kitchen table, and Gemma says that she somehow got signed up for the mailing list at the Lumon clinic. Gemma notes that the card of two men fighting is really one man fighting himself; it’s a depiction of “ego death” or “Chikhai bardo.” Mark thinks the cards are weird, but Gemma likes them, and the two begin sniping about the cards, but it’s not really about the cards. After Gemma says that she feels “beat to shit,” they decide to stop trying for a baby. At least for now.But they never get a chance to try again. Mark angrily dismantles the crib one night, and he begins to throw himself into his work. Ah, Mark! Always reliably using work to escape from his feels! He’s so absorbed in something one night that he decides to skip an outing with friends and Gemma goes by herself. He almost forgets to say “I love you” as she walks out the door. Later, emergency lights bathe the darkness outside of his house. In a wordless montage we watch him slowly realize that his wife — his life — has been taken from him. Gagné defines the moment by delivering an arresting portrait of Mark meeting the cops at the door, the top half of his face completely obscured by shadow.At this moment of loss, both Mark and Gemma enter into suspended states of being. Mark is hamstrung by his grief, and it’s heavily implied that Gemma has been taken by Lumon. “Chikhai Bardo” delivers some satisfying answers about Gemma: Yes, she’s alive. No, she’s not a clone or a robot. Yes, they’re basically torturing her. Yes, Mark and the other refiners are unknowingly helping to torture her by refining various rooms on the testing floor. (How do you refine a room? I don’t know!) No, she wasn’t in cahoots with Lumon the whole time. Yes, she’s trapped down there and cannot leave. (Score one for Petey’s map.) Yes, she still dreams of seeing Mark. There’s more, but you get the point.When we finally see Gemma down on the testing floor, she’s an unwilling captive, but she still seems to be herself. She has a dedicated nurse who is mostly kind, but treats her like a science experiment. She tracks all of her stats every morning, including some sort of weird Scientology-like device that measures her response to the question, “If you were caught in a mudslide, would you be more afraid of suffocating or drowning?” Her nurse, played by ’90s icon Sandra Bernhard, shepherds her through her hellish days. Each day she wakes up and finds an elaborate outfit in her closet, like some sort of demented Barbie. Then she is escorted to a handful of rooms, nightmares looming behind each door.Dranesville, Siena, Loveland, Wellington, Billings, St. Pierre, Carins, Zurich, Allentown … the list goes on. Gemma doesn’t remember what’s beyond each door, except for the ones that cause her lasting physical pain. (The body keeps the score, y’all.) The rooms sprawl before her in a series of sterile hallways that seem to never end. One door leads to an Innie persona who only ever experiences painful two-hour dentist visits. Behind another door, she’s on an airplane with horrid turbulence. And one, Mark’s famed Allentown accomplishment, is a room where Gemma must write dozens of insipid thank-you notes on Christmas day at her husband’s behest until her hand is no longer able to write legibly. These experiences seem designed to specifically target Gemma’s fears, as earlier in the episode we hear Mark mention that she hates writing thank-you notes.Later, when Gemma speaks to her “doctor” — a.k.a. the smitten man who also functions as an actor in many of the nightmare rooms, a.k.a. teen idol Robby Benson — she starts to push back, and we get the sense that it’s not the first time she’s tried to escape. Gemma has identified that she’s been in all the rooms except for one: Cold Harbor. She wonders out loud what will happen to her once she enters that room, and the good doctor assures her that she’ll “… see the world again, and the world will see you.” She asks if this means that she will see Mark, and the doctor smiles, saying, “Mark will benefit from the world you’re siring. Kier will take away all his pain, just like he has taken away yours.” Gemma speaks for the audience when she says, “Can you just please talk like a normal person?”Gemma attempts to escape, smashing the evil doctor over the head and making a run for it. She manages to get to the elevator, but at the top there’s a severance barrier where she transforms into Ms. Casey. Mr. Milchick is there to greet her, serving her a story about how her Outie got turned around when visiting the building for an art exhibit, and that she must return to the elevator. At first, Ms. Casey balks, but then she turns around and does as she’s told. Oddly, it seems like many of the iterations of Gemma we see are relatively compliant, even when asked to do terrifying things, and this is likely a reason she was selected by Lumon for whatever experiment they’re running on her. Even though Helly isn’t in this episode, it’s kind of fun to imagine her in these situations, because you just know that she would never ever have willingly sat in that dentist’s chair, written those thank-you notes, or headed back down that elevator.At the conclusion of the episode, Gemma is back in her cell with her books. Unlike the Innies on the severed floor, she gets access to a bookshelf of her favorites, including The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy. I’m sure this text is rich with meaning and symbolism, but if we simplify the plot, it’s about a man on his deathbed retroactively contemplating the meaning of his life. Tolstoy’s novella dovetails with the title of this episode, “Chikhai Bardo,” or the Bardo of the Moment of Death. In Buddhism, there are six bardos, or states of being. The first three states relate to bardos of life, but the last three relate to dying, death, and rebirth.A bardo can also be considered a liminal state or a transition from one state of being to another. With Lumon’s endless white hallways and Mark’s stark condo, Severance has built its world upon the idea of eerie and disorienting liminal spaces providing a platform for potential metamorphosis. Most of the characters on the show are in states of transition — that’s what makes it so thrilling to watch — so the idea of the Chikhai bardo doesn’t necessarily need to be taken literally here. As Gemma mentions when she contemplates the ideographic cards, death doesn’t have to only be physical; it can also be the death of an ego or the death of a self.Now, what does all this mean? Both Mark and Gemma are certainly in bardos throughout this episode. Mark has been swept away on a journey in his mind, potentially on the threshold of death after Reghabi flooded his chip. And Gemma is in a suspended state, going through her days in survival mode, devoid of purpose or meaning. While the episode layers Mark and Gemma’s journeys together here, it feels like the loaded title refers more to Gemma and the mysterious transition that Lumon seems to be preparing her for. She’s trapped in a non-consensual bardo, and all I know is that Mark cannot be allowed to complete Cold Harbor, or something terrible is going to happen to her … and maybe all of us, too. The dread is real.It’s time for my staggered exit, so I’m going to go grab the elevator. Until next time …• For what it’s worth, Lost did the bardo thing, too.• At points throughout the episode, we see Mr. Drummond overseeing a room full of overseers. They’re watching the MDR crew as they refine their files. This seems like overkill, no? But the concept and staging serve to heighten Drummond as an increasingly sinister and frightening figure in the Lumon world.• Robby Benson, who plays Gemma’s doctor, is also well known as the voice of the Beast in Beauty and the Beast. Oddly, that’s another story where a dude holds a woman who loves to read captive against her will. Belle eventually falls in love with her captor, but Gemma isn’t so naive. Belle also didn’t have to go in and out of torture rooms all day, so.• Speaking of the evil doctor, there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpse of him walking past Gemma and Mark when they visit the Lumon fertility clinic. They totally sabotaged that poor woman’s IVF treatments.• Sorry to the Miss-Huang-is-Gemma-and-Mark’s-baby theorists, but given what we learned this week, I don’t think that one is going to pan out.• The eye chart they show Gemma features goats. LOL.• This episode was incredibly dense, but I believe I’ll be thinking about “All Quiet on the Western Blunt” for the rest of my days.Already a subscriber? Sign inBy submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us.Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission.

Source: http://www.vulture.com/article/severance-recap-season-2-episode-7-chikhai-bardo.html