Severance has always been a horror story, albeit one set in a mostly generic office. That blandness is a large part of what makes it so scary: underneath the corporate speak, drab decor, and unflattering fluorescent lighting is something very sinister. And in the show’s latest episode, it uses that energy to tap into a new, even more terrifying kind of fear.
Spoilers ahead for Severance, up to season 2, episode 7.
The episode, called “Chikhai Bardo,” picks up with Mark (Adam Scott) recovering from a process called reintegration that’s designed to reunite the two halves of his mind: the outie who lives a normal life, and the innie who is confined to the unyielding hell of the basement of tech giant Lumon Industries. Because of this, it has an almost Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind vibe to it. As Mark is passed out on his couch post-surgery, and his brain is seemingly stitching itself back together, we get flashbacks of how he met his wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman) and how their relationship became strained after they struggled to conceive.
Gemma is better known to Severance viewers as Miss Casey, the disturbingly calm wellness director at Lumon. In the outside world, she is believed to be dead following a car accident. Her death is the main reason Mark became severed in the first place, as an attempt to avoid the grief, at least a little bit. But one of the show’s biggest mysteries has been not only just how it is that she’s still alive but also how she ended up living this mysterious life in Lumon’s basement.
“Chikhai Bardo” provides a little insight into this. In addition to Mark’s flashbacks, we also get to see how Gemma was transformed into Miss Casey. The process involves all kinds of disturbing tests, which mostly involve sending her innie into strange rooms — in one, she’s experiencing a plane crashing; in another she undergoes hours of painful dental work — and then seeing how her outie reacts afterward. Lumon tracks everything about her physical and mental state and, it seems, uses that information to perfect the severance procedure and make her the ideal wellness instructor, a job that entails helping other innies stay calm and productive. The goal is to subject the innie to brutal conditions and for it to impact the outie as little as possible. The torture is both psychological and physical.
But this also points to an incredibly disturbing revelation. Up until now, the severed characters in the show have seemingly all been there by choice. For their own personal reasons, characters like Mark, Helly (Britt Lower), and Dylan (Zach Cherry) all made the decision to split themselves in half. That doesn’t erase the hellscape that their innies have to live through, but it does explain how we got to that point. Miss Casey is different. While it’s not entirely clear how or why she got involved with Lumon, it sure seems like the company was involved in faking Gemma’s death — and used that as cover to do all of these experiments in secret under the assumption that no one would ever find out about it since she’ll never be able to leave.
Image: Apple
We already knew that Lumon was a terrifying megacorporation that would do unseemly things in the name of efficiency and secrecy. And we knew there was some messed-up stuff going on in that basement — the goat farm and the break / torture room are just two examples. But Gemma’s transition into Miss Casey shows just how far this corporation will go to make severance work, and how much control it has to pull it off.
The severance procedure is spatially dictated, meaning that people switch from innie to outie based on where they are. So far, that has been pretty simple: outies exist out in the wide world, and once they go down to the basement in an elevator, they become their innies, who can only exist elsewhere with special Lumon permission (like when everyone went on a retreat in episode 4). But things are much more complex for Miss Casey and Gemma; they switch back and forth constantly as they enter new rooms, in a way that allows Lumon complete control over where they can go and when. There truly is no escape for either of them. And the fact that Lumon can get away with faking a death to create a human lab rat, well, that’s quite a bit scarier than some goat farmers who look like Midsommar extras.
What’s been great about the second season of Severance is how each revelation leads to a new, even darker mystery. Discovering more about Miss Casey has only made me want to know even more about her, particularly how she connects to Mark’s big project, which we know is “mysterious and important” — and the more mysteries are uncovered, the more important it all seems.
