The Latest ‘Severance’ Gave Us Nothing and Everything

The odd premise of Severance, coupled with its ever-rising popularity, means that social media is now rife with observational jokes and skits. Fans are getting a whole lot of mileage out of imagining what it would be like to learn that your outie is an unbearable jerk. My favorite Severance content can be summarized as “Ms. Casey shows up with the sole purpose of serving face,” the punchline being, as you can probably guess, actor Dichen Lachman enigmatically staring at the camera and working the hell out of that otherworldly bone structure throughout the series’ run thus far. But last week finally gave us a whole hell of a lot more of Gemma (that bone structure persists, however). It’s a great episode, both for its dramatic tension and Lachman’s performance, but it mostly gave what Severance normally excels at, which is answering a whole lot of questions without solving any of the mysteries. Here’s what we do know now:

Mark and Gemma’s marriage

Seeing the evolution of Mark (Adam Scott) and Gemma’s marriage, from their serendipitous meeting while donating blood—note that the subject of the essay she’s reading, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, is the same novel she’s permitted to have in her Lumon quarters—to a husband and wife navigating fertility issues is exceedingly sad for a show that’s rife with emotional stings. Although it’s delivered only in brief flashbacks over the course of the episode, it’s a deft summarization of the highs and lows of marriage, including the moments where overfamiliarity breeds, not contempt, but indifference; Mark discovering Gemma on the shower floor in the midst of a miscarriage is an unhappy memory that would stay with anyone over the rest of their life, but it doesn’t carry the same ruefulness as spending the rest of your days remembering that you were slow to say “I love you” back the last time you saw your spouse. In some ways, what’s happening to them now is almost worse than the car accident story because, despite the finality of death and the trauma that comes with it, which can be brutal, it’s a great deal more straightforward than the extended torture of being an unwilling test subject for an evil corporation.

Gemma’s purpose at Lumon

First hinted at in season one, when Devon (Jen Tullock) realizes severance can be used as a means of bypassing the memory of childbirth, we now know this is only the tip of the iceberg for Lumon; they’re expanding the capability of severance, which was used previously for the sole purpose(?) of preserving company secrets, and preparing to put it out on the market for anyone who wishes to avoid some of life’s less pleasant experiences, as long as you’ve got the money to pay for it. Hate flying or undertaking boring tasks? Now you can skip it and only ‘show up’ when it’s finally over. Nothing unsettling about a company having direct control of your mind at a moment’s notice.

The dentist scenario is the latest addition to severance user testing, as shown by Gemma cursing at the sight of the day’s outfit (burgundy must equal hurt mouth day), and her innie’s dismay over what she experiences as an immediate return to the dentist’s chair, which is run by the frightening Dr. Mauer (Robby Benson) who oversees all of Gemma’s innie scenarios and is obsessed with her (“Maybe you felt things behind those doors you never felt with Mark. Maybe I’ve seen it.”). Yet as terrible as Gemma’s plight is, her innie may have it even worse when you consider the nightmarish scenario of your life’s experience revolving only around a dentist’s scraping and prodding.

But this, along with the fact that Gemma’s clearly no longer interested in continuing these experiments (we can now officially dub her a captive of Lumon Industries), is one of the only real insights we’re provided in this episode. Once again, several answers bring us a world of new questions, including how Lumon sunk their claws into her—we know their ventures to the Lumon-owned fertility clinic (noted by the teardrop-shaped logo on the intake form, the same one that appears on the equipment at the blood clinic) got her flagged as a potential test subject, but still does little to explain her agreeing to the extended process or how far the religious aspect comes into play (Dr. Mauer: “Kier will take away all his pain just as Kier has taken away yours”).

It does seem likely now, though, that rather than Mark being Lumon’s target, he’s actually little more than a convenient extension of a grander experiment, one that’s focused squarely on his wife. It’ll be quite some time before we learn what exactly it is that makes her a rare enough testing candidate for Lumon to go to this extent (faking a person’s death and keeping them captive is a production, even for a company with those kinds of resources), but we do know that Mark’s reintegration attempt is throwing a wrench into the Cold Harbor project. Whether it’ll be enough to actually stop the project from advancing further is gonna come down to just one thing: whether or not it finally worked. Because right now it seems Gemma’s best chance of having her mind spared from being fractured even further is for Mark to first reintegrate his.

Kaleena Rivera is the TV Editor for Pajiba. She can be found at Bluesky here.