Maybe you want to give the lion’s share of the credit to Dichen Lachman, the strikingly telegenic actor who plays the severed and stranded Gemma Scout/Ms. Casey. Maybe you want to tip your cap to Adam Scott, who traces his character Mark Scout’s progression from happy college professor meeting cute with his future wife to widower finding out the terrible news for the first time. Maybe you appreciate the work of Sandra Bernhard as a scowling Lumon technician, or Robby Benson as Dr. Mauer, Gemma’s torturer and would-be lover during her multiplicitous, mysterious severed simulacra of life.
I submit to you, however, that the real star of “Chikhai Bardo,” an episode destined to go down as one of Severance fans’* favorite Severance episodes, is Jessica Lee Gagné. Believe it or not, but as best I can tell, this swirling, tumbling, brilliantly filmed and assembled episode marks the veteran cinematographer’s directorial debut. From the flips and fades and segues and other weird tricks that mark scene transitions to the high-stakes performance she coaxes out of the actors, it’s hard to imagine a more auspicious debut.
So why do I feel so frustrated?
Laid out in a more linear fashion than the dreamlike ebb and flow of the episode itself allows, this week’s events are fairly clear — to a point. Flashback material takes us through the entire Mark/Gemma relationship, from their love-at-first-sight chance encounter during a blood drive, through their PG-13-level sexy courtship, into their painful and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to have a baby, and out the other side as a sadder but wiser couple, until a car crash takes her away from him, and he from her.
Meanwhile, we get a glimpse of what Gemma — who, when she hasn’t been severed and rebranded as “Ms. Casey,” is very much aware of who she is and very much wants to get back to her husband — has been going through. Bernhard’s character leads her through an entirely different, more diagonally oriented white-hallway labyrinth to various rooms, each one with a label corresponding to one of the macrodata refinement team’s case files. Inside, she is subjected to various physically painful procedures by Dr. Mauer (Benson), a cheesy, deeply sinister “master of disguise” type who does little to disguise his feelings for her.
Sometimes he’s a flight attendant on a crashing plane. Sometimes he’s a sadistic dentist. Sometimes he’s an even more sadistic husband, forcing her to write hundreds of thank-you notes on Christmas. Always he’s the creepy technician who asks her how she is (she’s always in pain) and which room got her that way. Benson, who is the voice of Disney’s Beast just so you know, is immediately the second-creepiest Lumon employee we’ve ever met, with only Tramell Tillman’s Milchick beating him out.
Indeed, it’s Milchick who sends “Ms. Casey” back down the long black hallway into the elevator when she brains Mauer with a steel chair pro-wrestling style and escapes, however briefly. She’s trying to get back to Mark, but the moment she gets in that elevator or steps into one of those many rooms, she of course forgets this entirely. On the long list of shitty, menacing things Milchick has done, this is right near the top.
Meanwhile, in the outside world and the present day, Devon spars with rogue anti-Lumon operative Reghabi over Mark, who’s basically comatose following his most recent reintegration procedure. He finally wakes up at the end of the episode, though which version of Mark he is — Mark, “Mark S.,” or some combination thereof, or some wholly new entity — is unclear.
All of this is well and good. New floor, new hints at what the refiners are refining, a showcase for Lachman and Scott, very nice. A link between Mark and Gemma’s troubles with pregnancy and Bauer, who has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance in her OB/GYN office, which later sends her weird Lumonesque activities to perform in the mail, and thus some vague indication of why they have her in the first place. We even get an insight into what the hell Devon is doing with her absurd husband Ricken — apparently he’s a hell of an outdoorsman, believe it or not. And again, absolutely rapturous filmmaking by Gagné.
But it’s not enough.
Let me ask you some questions.
What is happening in the rooms Gemma visits? Not what looks like it’s happening, painful dentistry and scary plane crashes and so on — what is actually happening?
Why doesn’t Reghabi answer Devon’s questions when she first asks them? Why doesn’t Bauer talk to Gemma like a normal person? Why must both Devon and Gemma actually ask this shit out loud in the script and on the screen? Does drawing attention to these strategic absences in the writers’ game erase the fact that they are, in fact, absences?
Why does Devon want to call Cobelvig, of all people, to (let me get this straight) help Mark by sneaking him into one of the severed cabins at the birthing center she attended? Why would she trust this woman? Why would she risk losing Reghabi’s help over it? What does she even think would happen if Cobel did help?
Why, why, why, why, why does anyone do what Milchick tells them to do? Is he a bodybuilder? Is he armed? If the answers to these questions is no, why does every single character back down from him like a scalded dog?
Why does Gemma, who remembers she is in fact Gemma and who wants to escape, placidly follow Bernhard’s character’s instructions? If she’s willing to break the fingers and the skull of Bauer, what’s different here?
What the fuck is going on on this show?
It’s possible you hit that last question and excitedly said “I don’t know!” If that’s the case, I wish you the very best. Mystery-box television, a shell game in which under every shell there are three more shells, is the storytelling format for you. Have fun theorizing, have fun guessing, have fun being confused.
But please note that a mystery box is neither a mystery (a simple question that needs answering, where the answer appears retrospectively inevitable when it is finally revealed) nor mysterious — a Twin Peaks situation where the atmosphere of near-cosmic uncertainty is the selling point, not the idea that by the end of the series you’re going to get answers to all the questions the show has studiously avoided answering up until that point.
Severance creator Dan Erickson has been honest to a fault about the influence the ur-mystery-box show, Lost, has had on his show. Severance has a leg up on several other shows in that category, from Westworld to Yellowjackets, because of its steely command of its own aesthetic sensibilities and its use of the characters’ outies to communicate real emotional pain. Drama has pain at its heart. Mystery boxes have “huh???” at their heart. In this sense, at least, Severance is closer to the former than the latter.
But the bottom line is that unless it’s a Twin Peaks scenario where the journey is the destination, mystery box shows like Severance are an exercise by the writers’ room to see how long they can go without telling you things any normal human being — any normal character — would tell you within thirty seconds of meeting you. It’s why I found it so exciting when Mark S. divulged the events of his outie excursion to his coworkers right away, and why I found it so dull when “Helly”/Helena did not.
I am simply not interested in marinating in a show the point of which is that the writers know more than I do. Yeah, no fucking shit they do — they’re the writers! But to paraphrase Janet (Miss Jackson if you’re nasty), what have they done for me lately? Surely I can’t be the only person watching this who thinks it would all be a lot more interesting if — like many of the show’s acknowledged touchstones, from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to1984 — it was clear from the start what was happening. That way, we could focus not on trying to crack the code of the thing, to solve it like a Wordle, and directly focus instead on what these hideous cult-like one-percenters and their willing fascist servants have done to these poor people. Considering the world we live in, which do you think is the more rewarding path to take?
Maybe the simplest way to put it is this. There are mystery stories (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Big Lebowski), there are mysterious stories (Mulholland Drive, Stalker), and there are mystery-box stories (Heroes, Yellowjackets). Are you picking up what I’m laying down here?
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
