Severance Season 2 Is Hiding A Game-Changing Secret In Plain Sight

Severance Season 2 Episode 7, “Chikhai Bardo,” did for Severance what “The Constant” did for Lost: after the entire show centered on a major mystery, basically, an entire episode focused on the answers to that mystery. After a season and a half of looking for Mark’s late wife Gemma, who exists on the severed floor as therapist Ms. Casey, we see exactly what she gets up to on the day-to-day: living the lives of a bunch of different Innies as they go through unpleasant tasks ranging from the phobic, like a dentist appointment and flying, to the mundane, like writing thank-you notes.

We also saw flashbacks to Mark and Gemma’s past, and in those flashbacks, we learned exactly how they met. If you look closely, the episode also reveals how Lumon recruited Gemma in the first place—even if she didn’t consent.

“Chikhai Bardo” sparked multiple fan theories. The most popular seems to be the grand purpose of Lumon’s severed technology in the first place: a mass-market appeal for the everyman to sever the unpleasant parts of their lives to an unwitting Innie. “Mark will benefit from the world you’re siring,” Gemma is told. “Kier will take away all his pain, just as Kier has taken away yours.”

But why Gemma? Why, of all the people out there, is a Literature professor a candidate for the testing floor? The answer seems to lie in her past. For the longest time, fans have suggested the droplet in Lumon’s logo represents water, meaning Lumon has control over what people ingest. But the flashbacks in this episode reveal the droplet may actually be blood: Mark and Gemma meet during a blood drive, and the Lumon droplet is shown on the equipment, meaning the company has access to her blood. (Blood is also the key to many of the rooms on the testing floor, so it must be part of the company.)

Later in their relationship, Mark and Gemma visit a fertility clinic, and there’s a quick shot of Gemma filling out the intake form. We never see her write down her last name, which could very well be Casey if she didn’t take Mark’s name when she got married. But that’s not the most important part of the shot — the Lumon droplet appears yet again in the corner of the form, meaning Lumon is again in control of Gemma’s life and, possibly more importantly, her biometrics.

Later, we see Gemma filling out some sort of personality test at the kitchen table. “It’s one of those things where you have to draw a duck or a rabbit or whatever,” she says. It’s how she’s introduced to the ideographic cards we’ve seen previously from O&D, basically confirming this information came from Lumon itself.

From what we can tell, at this point, Lumon has access to Gemma’s DNA, her relationship status, the intimate details of her desire for a family, and her psychological information. From that, the company can judge her suitability as a test suspect and fake her demise to bring her to the testing floor. While Gemma still has memories of Mark on the floor, it doesn’t seem like she’s there willingly, and any attempt to escape has her simply dropped into another Innie. Gemma’s fate is something engineered entirely by Lumon’s Big Brother-like control.

So what does this mean for the future of Severance? It explains a lot, like how Mark’s “freshman fluke” of the Allentown room was connected to how he knows she hates writing thank-you notes. But it sets up a bigger issue: what happens when the Cold Harbor room is finished? It’s said to be the last room Gemma will ever visit, and Mark is apparently the only one who can refine it, but what will the result be? What else is lurking in Gemma’s past that Lumon can exploit for their master plan? There are only three episodes left in the season to find out.

Severance is now streaming on Apple TV+.