Severance – Chikhai Bardo

By: Kelly Kearney

Pour yourself a cup of Outie Mark’s egg-drop slop and get ready to tumble down the rabbit hole of Gemma Scout.

In a series of glitchy, fragmented flashbacks, Chikhaki Bardo finally offers tantalizing hints about Cold Harbor and why Mark has been tasked with its completion. It also answers one of the show’s biggest lingering questions: If Gemma didn’t die, what really happened to her? And at what point did she sever into Miss Casey?

With only a few episodes left and more mysteries emerging than we have time to unravel, Episode 7 peels back the curtain on Gemma’s harrowing two-year entanglement with Lumon, revealing disturbing clues about the company’s true endgame.

In the Beginning…

It all began with a flirtatious, chance encounter at a blood drive on the school campus where Mark (Adam Scott) and Gemma (Dichen Lachman) worked. While Lumon’s presence looms over the campus—its logo scattered around the library—it remains unclear just how involved the company was in orchestrating this meet-cute.

After a few exchanged smiles and some awkward attempts at jokes, we cycle through their relationship milestones: first dates, quirky gifts (she said she liked plants, Mark—not ants), moving in together, and eventually, falling into marital bliss. The cinematography shifts to a warm, sunlit glow—a stark contrast to the gloomy winter landscapes that have dominated the series. We watch as Mark and Gemma decorate their home, plant flowers, share dinners with Devon (Jen Tullock) and Ricken (Michael Chernus), and even set up a crib in anticipation of starting a family.

But as we learned in Season 1, when Mark attempted to date Alexa (Nikki M. James), having a child wasn’t easy for the couple. They tried everything, and when in vitro—courtesy of a company bearing that familiar Lumon logo—finally worked, it seemed their happiness was complete. But just as life seemed to be falling into place, tragedy struck: Gemma suffered a miscarriage, shattering their world.

We see the couple grieve separately—Gemma breaking down alone, while Mark, overcome with anger and heartbreak, destroys the crib they had so lovingly hoped their child would sleep in. Their loss created a deep fracture in their relationship, widening the emotional distance between them. By the time of the accident, they were almost strangers. These flashbacks finally offer clarity on a character we’ve only known through smiling photographs and wellness recitations—and they also explain why Mark was so consumed by guilt over her death that he chose Severance to escape the pain.

While Mark numbed himself with alcohol, Gemma found herself entangled in something far more insidious—a plot that would rob her of her freedom and place her directly in Lumon’s grasp.

Interwoven with the Scouts’ happier memories are chilling scenes of Gemma’s torturous time in Lumon’s Exports Hall, where she is held captive by the obsessively smitten Dr. Mauer (Robby Benson)—who, in a disturbing twist, was also her fertility doctor. Alongside his coldly efficient nurse assistant (Sandra Bernhard), we see how Gemma became one of the first to fall for Lumon’s promise of a pain-free existence.

We don’t yet know how long Lumon had been plotting to use her as a test subject, but Dr. Mauer’s remarks make one thing clear: she was chosen to help bring Kier’s Severed utopia to the masses. The fact that her marriage was crumbling and her dreams of motherhood had slipped away only made her the perfect Lumon guinea pig.

The final gut punch comes in the form of one last, heartbreaking night. Mark, unaware it’s his last chance to tell his wife he loves her, stays home sulking while Gemma goes out with friends. Cut to later that night—a dazed Mark is roused by a late-night knock at the door. It’s the police.

There’s been an accident.

Gemma didn’t make it.

The loss is too much for Mark to bear. He drinks himself into oblivion until, eventually, he too falls into Lumon’s sights. And in the cruelest twist of all, he ends up Severed—unknowingly working in the same building as his supposedly dead wife.

Testing, Testing, Rooms 1, 2, 3, 4…

What Lumon is doing to Gemma winds up answering the show’s biggest mystery: Can the chip permanently erase negative emotions? And just how far is this monstrous company willing to go to prove it?

We watch as Gemma is subjected to a series of brutal experiments, each designed to push her to the limits of discomfort and pain. She’s strapped into a dentist’s chair, forced to endure simulated plane crashes, and even molded into a dutiful wife for Dr. Mauer—tasked with writing hours of thank-you notes using her non-dominant hand (a task she once told Mark she hated).

Each room is a new version of Hell for her Innies.

Mauer’s purpose? To determine whether Gemma retains any emotional residue from one room to the next. After each session, he or his nurse methodically questions her: “Did you feel any despair?”

The chip appears to strip her of fear, sadness, and rage—but it doesn’t erase her longing for Mark. And that, above all, is the flaw Mauer refuses to accept. He is determined to sever her completely from her past, forcing her into his twisted vision of a perfect relationship—something Lumon’s higher-ups have warned him to avoid.

Gemma’s Fighting Spirit

Despite being unable to escape these horrors, Gemma never loses her spirit. She knows what Dr. Mauer is up to, harboring deep resentment and fear over his obsession with her. But she also never loses her need to escape this evil indentured servitude. As her testing nears its end, she takes a chance—when Dr. Mauer isn’t looking, she bashes him over the head with a chair, steals his badge, and runs. Unlike the bright white walls and fluorescent lights of her husband’s Severed floor, the halls of the testing level are dark and winding. Gemma darts from corner to corner, unsure which direction is safest. She manages to avoid detection and nearly reaches the MDR’s floor—only to be met not by Mark or Helly, but by Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman). His eerie presence stops her cold. Without a word, he turns her around, forcing her back the way she came. Before she loses sight of him, she asks, “Where’s…?”—presumably about her husband.

It remains unclear how much of Gemma’s Innie remembers her Outie life, but hints throughout the episode suggest she has been hiding the truth from her nurse and Dr. Mauer. Even her interactions as Miss Casey with Mark seem laced with a quiet familiarity, as if she is torn between her real self and the traumatized test subject Lumon has enslaved. This feeling of being trapped between life and death explains the episode’s title—a reference to a Tibetan Buddhist term for the transitional phase of continuous rebirth.

In another flashback leaning into the theory that Lumon orchestrated Mark and Gemma’s relationship,  we see how Gemma first landed on Lumon’s radar: she was placed on a mailing list for their fertility clinic, and along with that, she received a pictorial test. The test card—identical to the ideographic design Dylan (Zach Cherry) stole from O&D last season—depicts a man locked in arm-to-arm combat with his own severed Outie. In a past conversation with Mark, Gemma described this as “a man fighting himself, defeating his own psyche.” a sort of ego death. This Easter egg foreshadows the unraveling of both of their identities and the fight to preserve their true selves.

As Mark struggles to recover from his reintegration–he wakes up to a concerned Devon asking him where he went, and Gemma remains trapped in an endless cycle of torture, the couple stands on the precipice of total destruction. Can love overcome the severed mind? It’s hard to say—but if they do manage to preserve their consciousness, where does that leave Helly/Helena (Britt Lower) and their burgeoning relationship/agenda with Mark’s Innie and Outie? Considering those numbers Mark’s been dumping are directly correlated to the torture his wife is suffering through, a wake-up from this Hell could catapult them all into another.