Spoilers

This episode gives us something we’ve only learned through the gaps to this point – Mark and Gemma’s history.

And what a history it turns out to be – not because they led extraordinary lives, far from it – but because it gives a depth of emotional weight to Mark and, finally, gives us a window into Gemma and Ms Casey.

The direction, by Jessica Lee Gagné, is sublime, taking a very complex narrative that jumps both perspectives and time periods, to deliver something that weaves all this disparate components into something I think resembles a memory of the past combined with how those memories impact upon the present. It’s a rare feat to make a flashback truly feel like a memory, with its inconsistencies, its dreamlike nature (after all, our recollections are concatenations, not high fidelity replays) rather than a ‘here’s what happened earlier’. Severance has aimed to create something that deserves to be watched carefully, not just because of the labyrinthine story but because the craft is simply masterful.

All that aside, and it’s a very big aside, we focus exclusively on Mark and Gemma. We learn about their past relationship but, crucially, we do so in the context of what is happening to Gemma now.

And if there was any doubt that Lumon was nothing more than an extremely laissez faire corporate then we are now firmly into some seriously dark stuff. Detention without right to leave, extended solitary confinement, medicalised sexual harassment and physical abuse, and, back to the original theme – slavery. Lumon is doing it all.

They cannot fall fast enough and one suspects that the world, which has been shown to despise the concept of severance itself, would really come for them if they truly knew.

Gemma has, I think it’s safe to say, been put through hell physically and emotionally. Lumon isn’t just happy about this but they see her as completely expendable.

Yet what are they trying to achieve through their systematic abuse of one woman and all the different versions of Gemma they have forced onto her?

I think the key is in the title to the episode – it refers to Tibetan Buddhism, especially the Bardo (or stage of death through which a body and soul traverse) linked to death. Not just physically dying but, in this particular bardo, the moment at which the soul becomes free of all physical and emotional ties and is free to travel.

I have been shouting for a while on social media that this process is meant to help the Egans perfect the transmigration of souls, their souls, to allow for eternal physical life. They have, I think, been working on cloning (the goats, the body doubles for the MDR team etc) and they have been working on perfecting the severance procedure so they can live in anyone.

I think they’ve come unstuck with memory bleeds, of severed people finding themselves connected to others even though they have no conscious memory of it and I think the very name Cold Harbor tells us that they are working to ensure that the arrival of a soul into someone else’s body is met not by that person’s memories but by emptiness, room for them to take over and make this new body their home.

The show has carefully suggested that the body itself is the thing that makes the shape of experience and memory – that consciousness is instantiated and has hinted it is this that keeps undermining the severance process – which works only on the brain.

As a full person is both mind, experience, memory and body then severance can’t work without something more and Gemma and Mark appear to be central to solving that problem.

I’m sure to be wrong, but right now it feels like it explains everything we’ve seen so far.

It’s also horrifying – the taking over of other people, switching them to their ‘severed’ versions permanently, the deployment of this beyond the severed floor (which we saw in Season 1). All of it speaks to a group of elites who want to live forever and are willing to consume others, lesser in their mind, to achieve their ends.

The ultimate in human resources.

As you can imagine this is shown to us through emotion – there’s no doubting for us as the viewer of the emotional damage and violence being done to Gemma, the fear and hopelessness, the disgust and hatred she is feeling. It could have been cold, could have been detached but Severance showed us the actual cost to those being exploited. It has never given a moment of time to those seeking to benefit and it does not waver in siding with the victims here.

Lumon must be stopped.

10/10 oddly named rooms

Stewart Hotston