‘Severance’ Season 2 Episode 7 Recap: “Chikhai Bardo”

Possibly you need to give the lion’s share of the credit score to Dichen Lachman, the strikingly telegenic actor who performs the severed and stranded Gemma Scout/Ms. Casey. Possibly you need to tip your cap to Adam Scott, who traces his character Mark Scout’s development from blissful school professor assembly cute along with his future spouse to widower discovering out the horrible information for the primary time. Possibly you admire the work of Sandra Bernhard as a scowling Lumon technician, or Robby Benson as Dr. Mauer, Gemma’s torturer and would-be lover throughout her multiplicitous, mysterious severed simulacra of life.

I undergo you, nevertheless, that the true star of “Chikhai Bardo,” an episode destined to go down as one among Severance followers’* favourite Severance episodes, is Jessica Lee Gagné. Consider it or not, however as finest I can inform, this swirling, tumbling, brilliantly filmed and assembled episode marks the veteran cinematographer’s directorial debut. From the flips and fades and segues and different bizarre tips that mark scene transitions to the high-stakes efficiency she coaxes out of the actors, it’s laborious to think about a extra auspicious debut. 

So why do I really feel so pissed off?

Specified by a extra linear vogue than the dreamlike ebb and stream of the episode itself permits, this week’s occasions are pretty clear — to a degree. Flashback materials takes us via all the Mark/Gemma relationship, from their love-at-first-sight likelihood encounter throughout a blood drive, via their PG-13-level attractive courtship, into their painful and finally unsuccessful try and have a child, and out the opposite facet as a sadder however wiser couple, till a automobile crash takes her away from him, and he from her. 

In the meantime, we get a glimpse of what Gemma — who, when she hasn’t been severed and rebranded as “Ms. Casey,” may be very a lot conscious of who she is and really a lot needs to get again to her husband — has been going via. Bernhard’s character leads her via a completely completely different, extra diagonally oriented white-hallway labyrinth to numerous rooms, every one with a label akin to one of many macrodata refinement group’s case information. Inside, she is subjected to numerous bodily painful procedures by Dr. Mauer (Benson), a tacky, deeply sinister “grasp of disguise” kind who does little to disguise his emotions for her. 

Generally he’s a flight attendant on a crashing airplane. Generally he’s a sadistic dentist. Generally he’s an much more sadistic husband, forcing her to jot down a whole bunch of thank-you notes on Christmas. All the time he’s the creepy technician who asks her how she is (she’s at all times in ache) and which room bought her that manner. Benson, who’s the voice of Disney’s Beast simply so you realize, is straight away the second-creepiest Lumon worker we’ve ever met, with solely Tramell Tillman’s Milchick beating him out.

Certainly, it’s Milchick who sends “Ms. Casey” again down the lengthy black hallway into the elevator when she brains Mauer with a metal chair pro-wrestling fashion and escapes, nevertheless briefly. She’s attempting to get again to Mark, however the second she will get in that elevator or steps into a kind of many rooms, she after all forgets this fully. On the lengthy record of shitty, menacing issues Milchick has completed, that is proper close to the highest.

In the meantime, within the outdoors world and the current day, Devon spars with rogue anti-Lumon operative Reghabi over Mark, who’s mainly comatose following his most up-to-date reintegration process. He lastly wakes up on the finish of the episode, although which model of Mark he’s — Mark, “Mark S.,” or some mixture thereof, or some wholly new entity — is unclear.

All of that is properly and good. New flooring, new hints at what the refiners are refining, a showcase for Lachman and Scott, very good. A hyperlink between Mark and Gemma’s troubles with being pregnant and Bauer, who has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it look in her OB/GYN workplace, which later sends her bizarre Lumonesque actions to carry out within the mail, and thus some obscure indication of why they’ve her within the first place. We even get an perception into what the hell Devon is doing together with her absurd husband Ricken — apparently he’s a hell of an outdoorsman, imagine it or not. And once more, completely rapturous filmmaking by Gagné.

But it surely’s not sufficient.

Let me ask you some questions.

What is occurring within the rooms Gemma visits? Not what appears prefer it’s taking place, painful dentistry and scary airplane crashes and so forth — what’s really taking place?

Why doesn’t Reghabi reply Devon’s questions when she first asks them? Why doesn’t Bauer discuss to Gemma like a traditional individual? Why should each Devon and Gemma really ask this shit out loud within the script and on the display? Does drawing consideration to those strategic absences within the writers’ sport erase the truth that they’re, actually, absences?

Why does Devon need to name Cobelvig, of all folks, to (let me get this straight) assist Mark by sneaking him into one of many severed cabins on the birthing heart she attended? Why would she belief this lady? Why would she danger shedding Reghabi’s assist over it? What does she even assume would occur if Cobel did assist?

Why, why, why, why, why does anybody do what Milchick tells them to do? Is he a bodybuilder? Is he armed? If the solutions to those questions is not any, why does each single character again down from him like a scalded canine?

Why does Gemma, who remembers she is actually Gemma and who needs to flee, placidly observe Bernhard’s character’s directions? If she’s prepared to interrupt the fingers and the cranium of Bauer, what’s completely different right here?

What the fuck is happening on this present?

It’s attainable you hit that final query and excitedly stated “I don’t know!” If that’s the case, I want you the perfect. Thriller-box tv, a shell sport by which below each shell there are three extra shells, is the storytelling format for you. Have enjoyable theorizing, have enjoyable guessing, have enjoyable being confused. 

However please word {that a} thriller field is neither a thriller (a easy query that wants answering, the place the reply seems retrospectively inevitable when it’s lastly revealed) nor mysterious — a Twin Peaks state of affairs the place the ambiance of near-cosmic uncertainty is the promoting level, not the concept that by the top of the collection you’re going to get solutions to all of the questions the present has studiously averted answering up till that time. 

Severance creator Dan Erickson has been trustworthy to a fault in regards to the affect the ur-mystery-box present, Misplaced, has had on his present. Severance has a leg up on a number of different reveals in that class, from Westworld to Yellowjackets, due to its steely command of its personal aesthetic sensibilities and its use of the characters’ outies to speak actual emotional ache. Drama has ache at its coronary heart. Thriller containers have “huh???” at their coronary heart. On this sense, no less than, Severance is nearer to the previous than the latter.

However the backside line is that until it’s a Twin Peaks situation the place the journey is the vacation spot, thriller field reveals like Severance are an train by the writers’ room to see how lengthy they will go with out telling you issues any regular human being — any regular character — would inform you inside thirty seconds of assembly you. It’s why I discovered it so thrilling when Mark S. divulged the occasions of his outie tour to his coworkers immediately, and why I discovered it so uninteresting when “Helly”/Helena didn’t. 

I’m merely not desirous about marinating in a present the purpose of which is that the writers know greater than I do. Yeah, no fucking shit they do — they’re the writers! However to paraphrase Janet (Miss Jackson for those who’re nasty), what have they completed for me these days? Certainly I can’t be the one individual watching this who thinks it could all be much more attention-grabbing if — like lots of the present’s acknowledged touchstones, from Everlasting Sunshine of the Spotless Thoughts to1984 — it was clear from the beginning what was taking place. That manner, we may focus not on attempting to crack the code of the factor, to resolve it like a Wordle, and immediately  focus as a substitute on what these hideous cult-like one-percenters and their prepared fascist servants have completed to those poor folks. Contemplating the world we stay in, which do you assume is the extra rewarding path to take?

Possibly the only approach to put it’s this. There are thriller tales (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Huge Lebowski), there are mysterious tales (Mulholland Drive, Stalker), and there are mystery-box tales (Heroes, Yellowjackets). Are you choosing up what I’m laying down right here?

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Instances, and anyplace that can have him, actually. He and his household stay on Lengthy Island.