Severance has at all times been a horror story, albeit one set in a mostly generic office. That blandness is a big a part of what makes it so scary: beneath the company converse, drab decor, and unflattering fluorescent lighting is one thing very sinister. And within the present’s newest episode, it makes use of that power to faucet into a brand new, much more terrifying type of concern.
Spoilers forward for Severance, as much as season 2, episode 7.
The episode, known as “Chikhai Bardo,” picks up with Mark (Adam Scott) recovering from a course of known as reintegration that’s designed to reunite the 2 halves of his thoughts: the outie who lives a standard life, and the innie who’s confined to the unyielding hell of the basement of tech large Lumon Industries. Due to this, it has an virtually Everlasting Sunshine of the Spotless Thoughts vibe to it. As Mark is handed out on his sofa post-surgery, and his mind is seemingly stitching itself again collectively, we get flashbacks of how he met his spouse Gemma (Dichen Lachman) and the way their relationship grew to become strained after they struggled to conceive.
Gemma is healthier identified to Severance viewers as Miss Casey, the disturbingly calm wellness director at Lumon. Within the outdoors world, she is believed to be useless following a automotive accident. Her loss of life is the principle purpose Mark grew to become severed within the first place, as an try and keep away from the grief, at the least just a little bit. However one of many present’s greatest mysteries has been not solely simply how it’s that she’s nonetheless alive but additionally how she ended up dwelling this mysterious life in Lumon’s basement.
“Chikhai Bardo” gives just a little perception into this. Along with Mark’s flashbacks, we additionally get to see how Gemma was remodeled into Miss Casey. The method entails all types of disturbing assessments, which largely contain sending her innie into unusual rooms — in a single, she’s experiencing a aircraft crashing; in one other she undergoes hours of painful dental work — after which seeing how her outie reacts afterward. Lumon tracks every thing about her bodily and psychological state and, it appears, makes use of that data to good the severance process and make her the perfect wellness teacher, a job that entails serving to different innies keep calm and productive. The objective is to topic the innie to brutal circumstances and for it to impression the outie as little as potential. The torture is each psychological and bodily.
However this additionally factors to an extremely disturbing revelation. Up till now, the severed characters within the present have seemingly all been there by selection. For their very own private causes, characters like Mark, Helly (Britt Decrease), and Dylan (Zach Cherry) all made the choice to separate themselves in half. That doesn’t erase the hellscape that their innies should stay by, however it does clarify how we received to that time. Miss Casey is completely different. Whereas it’s not fully clear how or why she received concerned with Lumon, it positive looks as if the corporate was concerned in faking Gemma’s loss of life — and used that as cowl to do all of those experiments in secret underneath the idea that nobody would ever discover out about it since she’ll by no means be capable to go away.
We already knew that Lumon was a terrifying megacorporation that will do unseemly issues within the identify of effectivity and secrecy. And we knew there was some messed-up stuff happening in that basement — the goat farm and the break / torture room are simply two examples. However Gemma’s transition into Miss Casey reveals simply how far this company will go to make severance work, and the way a lot management it has to tug it off.
The severance process is spatially dictated, that means that folks change from innie to outie based mostly on the place they’re. Up to now, that has been fairly easy: outies exist out within the large world, and as soon as they go all the way down to the basement in an elevator, they grow to be their innies, who can solely exist elsewhere with particular Lumon permission (like when everybody went on a retreat in episode 4). However issues are way more complicated for Miss Casey and Gemma; they change forwards and backwards consistently as they enter new rooms, in a means that enables Lumon full management over the place they will go and when. There actually is not any escape for both of them. And the truth that Lumon can get away with faking a loss of life to create a human lab rat, properly, that’s fairly a bit scarier than some goat farmers who appear like Midsommar extras.
What’s been nice concerning the second season of Severance is how every revelation results in a brand new, even darker thriller. Discovering extra about Miss Casey has solely made me need to know much more about her, notably how she connects to Mark’s massive venture, which we all know is “mysterious and necessary” — and the extra mysteries are uncovered, the extra necessary all of it appears.