Apple TV+Severance Season 2 Episode 7 may be the most pivotal (and emotional) chapter of the series to date, revealing exactly what’s going on with Gemma at Lumon and exploring her relationship with Mark.
Severance’s greatest moment has yet to be topped: Mark’s Innie screaming out, “She’s alive!” after realizing that his Outie’s supposedly dead wife is Ms Casey.
Beyond everything else (the Exports Hall, the Glasgow Block, whatever the hell was going on with the goats), what happened to Gemma and how she’s alive are the show’s most pressing questions.
Get ready, because Season 2 Episode 7 is extraordinary, overwhelming, and revelatory – and it doesn’t shy away from big answers about Cold Harbor and Gemma. Severance will never be the same again.
Mark meets Gemma
Apple TV+We open in the past at Ganz College, with Gemma sitting down next to Mark to donate blood. He asks what she’s reading, and she tells him, “Themes of Religious Conversion in Tulstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” (This is a seminal text that explores mortality and the meaning of life, as well as religious conversion, all big themes in Severance.)
“Oh my god, spoiler alert,” he jokes, before revealing what he’s reading: “All Quiet on the Western Blunt: Drug Use by Enlisted Soldiers During World War One.”
It’s all very playful and flirty; she says the student who wrote it is clearly a genius, which he agrees with. They introduce themselves, and so it begins: the start of a beautiful and traumatic relationship.
We cut back to the present, with a Lumon nurse taking blood from Gemma. “Where did you go?” she asks her, as she drifts between her memories of Mark and her frightening reality.
Devon finds out about Mark’s reintegration and Gemma
Apple TV+Meanwhile, Mark remains unconscious after collapsing at the end of Episode 6. Reghabi thinks he’ll be okay and there won’t be any long-term damage – but she also ignores Devon’s panicked questions. Reghabi reveals that Mark has been reintegrating, and Devon doesn’t take it well; she threatens to throw her off a bridge if she goes anywhere near him.
“It’s what he wants,” she says. “What he wants is to know whether or not Gemma is alive,” Devon replies, and Reghabi delivers the jaw-dropping news: “She is… alive.”
Severance reveals what the MDR file names mean
Apple TV+Back at Lumon, Gemma gets a thorough medical check-up; weight, sight, blood pressure, and balance. The nurse asks if she’s eaten, done her reading, and calisthenics, before asking a weird question: “If you were caught in a mudslide, would you be more afraid of suffocating or drowning?”
“Drowning,” Gemma says, causing the levels on her “woemeter” to briefly spike.
“How many rooms today?” she asks, and the doctor tells her: “Six.”
Gemma walks to her room (her living quarters are pretty big) and sees what she needs to wear today: a red dress with a bob wig. “Sh*t,” she reacts, and it’s (initially) unclear why.
She walks along the corridor, passing by names like Allentown, Cairns, Dranesville, Siena, Loveland, and Tumwater – all of which are the names of files the MDR team has been working on since Severance Season 1.
Gemma has dozens of Innies
Apple TV+She arrives at her first room: Wellington. To access it, the nurse has to place her hand on a scanner that takes a finger-prick of blood.
As she walks inside, she switches to her Innie – the one specifically linked to this room (and file). At this point, it looks like she’s Gemma when she’s in the corridor and her living area, but as soon as she walks into one of the named rooms or the severed floor, she’ll switch to one of the dozens of Innies in her brain. Yikes!
If that wasn’t bad enough, Wellington is a dentist clinic – so this Innie spends her entire life at the dentist. It also resolves a mystery from Episode 5: the man whistling the ‘Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ returns, and his name is Dr Mauer.
“Please can I get a break, just for a little while,” she asks. “But it’s been six weeks,” he says, and she says she was “just here.”
Fearfully, she sits down and he begins his exam. Two hours later, she emerges from the room (with no memory of what happened beyond her mouth feeling a bit sore).
She walks past Cold Harbor, but she doesn’t walk in. Who knows what’s inside – but it’s clearly the most important room of them all (Mr Drummond said it’ll be one of the greatest moments in the history of the planet).
Mark remembers his life with Gemma
Apple TV+As Devon tearfully tries to wake Mark up, his mind journeys back to the start of his relationship with Gemma.
He pops into her office as she’s about to rush away for a lecture. They’ve already been on a date or two at this point, and he remembers that she said she liked ants – so he bought her an ant farm.
It turns out, he misheard her. She likes plants, not ants. They kiss, and the scene fast-forwards to later in their relationship, and Gemma finds a flatpack crib box. “It was on sale,” Mark says with a smile, and they tease each other about him not being “handy” enough to build it.
We then enter a montage of their peaceful life together, scored to Jacques Brel’s ‘La Valse à mille temps’, up to a dinner party with Devon and Ricken… where Gemma slyly reveals to Devon that she’s pregnant.
Unfortunately, this is where things go irreparably wrong. Weeks, or perhaps months later, Gemma suffers a miscarriage. Mark finds her sitting down in the shower and quickly realizes what’s happened.
Gemma’s miscarriage paved the way for Lumon to find her
Apple TV+Closer to the present, we see Ms Casey speaking to Mark before the shot travels through the cables beneath the MDR team’s computers, arriving at an observation room deep underground in Lumon. Here, a small team (that eerily mirrors Mark and co.) watches them through their monitors, studying everything they do.
“Are the severance barriers holding?” Mr Drummond asks, and the same man in Wellington (now dressed in a tracksuit and sporting a mustache) says, “Yes, the technology is working… she’s easy to like. She’s fond of me too, of course.”
“Didn’t she try to break your fingers?” Mr Drummond asks, but before he can reply, we see Gemma walking down the corridor in a blue playsuit and entering a room.
However, the scene shifts back to the past as Gemma and Mark walk into the Butzemann Fertility Center (if you look closely, you’ll see the same man from Lumon walk past Mark while taking an ominous glance at Gemma).
“This is the next step for a lot of people, I love you,” Mark tells her, and she apologizes (even though she has no need to). She starts to fill in a new patient intake form… and in the top left corner, you can see Lumon’s logo.
Cold Harbor is Gemma’s final room
Apple TV+This is where things get a little weird. As they sit in the clinic, the scene cuts back to Gemma alone at Lumon, before the camera flies through its endless, blinking corridors with flashes of the past (and someone making a small statue out of clay, for some reason).
It eventually stops at another memory between Gemma and Mark; specifically Mark administering a fertility injection. She tells him she’s nervous, and while he seems a little absent-minded, he tells her, “There’s a kid just out there waiting for us, just gotta reach out and grab her.”
Back at Lumon, Dr Mauer asks Gemma questions about her day; specifically how many rooms she went into and if she remembers anything that happened in the rooms. He wants to know how she felt when she left the rooms, and if she felt any “despair” or “fervor.”
She points out that she’s still never stepped inside one room: Cold Harbor. “What happens when I’ve been in all of the rooms?” she asks, and he says, “You’ll see the world again, and the world will see you.”
“So, I’ll see Mark?” she asks. “Mark will benefit from the world you’re siring. Kier will take away all his pain just as Kier has taken away yours,” he tells her.
“Can you please just talk like a normal person,” she says, and he bids her good night. “Dream sweet,” he says.
Reghabi leaves
Apple TV+The next morning, Mark remains unconscious, but Reghabi says he’s “stable… he’s journeying now” and he’ll wake up when he’s ready. Devon asks her if she thinks reintegration will actually work, and Reghabi says they have no other choice.
Devon tells Reghabi about the Damona Birthing Retreat, where severed people “become their innies.” Reghabi doesn’t think it’s a good idea.
Devon says she could call Harmony Cobel, as she might know how to get into the cabin. Reghabi thinks she’s “Lumon through and through… she was raised by them, she’s a soldier.”
It’s too much of a risk for Reghabi, so she packs up her things and leaves. “Do not call that woman,” she stresses, and as she walks out, Mark starts to mumble in his sleep.
The Ideographic Cards return
Apple TV+The episode enters another flashback. This time, Gemma is looking at Ideographic Cards – the same ones we saw in Season 1. “Chikhai Bardo,” Mark says (this is also the name of the episode) as he holds up a card of one man seemingly fighting another employee.
“It’s the same guy fighting himself and defeating his own psyche. Ego death,” Gemma explains.
If you pause the episode right at the start of this scene, you’ll see they came in the mail as part of a survey, and respondents can win a cash prize if they fill it in. The cards can’t be a coincidence: it has to be an early step of Lumon’s infiltration of their lives (especially since she got onto the mailing list via the fertility clinic).
Things are tense between Mark and Gemma. He says she’s wasting her time with the survey, she says he’s acting like an asshole. She asks him to stop telling her how she’s feeling, he says he doesn’t know how she’s feeling. He says they should “stop” (meaning Gemma’s fertility treatment).
Gemma celebrates Christmas… forever
Back at Lumon, Gemma begins another day in captivity and walks into another room. This one simulates extreme turbulence on a plane (and she’s given some disgusting food).
As she goes about her usual day, Mr Drummond tells Dr Mauer that Mark’s Cold Harbor has been stuck at 96% since his nosebleed. “When he’s done, you’re gonna have to say goodbye to her… for Kier,” Mr Drummond warns him.
Gemma gets ready for another room – and this one takes place in perpetual Christmas! As ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ plays softly in the background, her Innie writes a letter to “Mr Tisdale” for the “thoughtful gift” he got her and her husband. She isn’t talking about Mark – in this mini-reality, she’s married to Dr Mauer.
There’s an unsettling detail, though: she writes the letter with her left hand, and it’s clearly a struggle (not to mention barely legible).
“It’s the last one,” he says. “How long do I need to keep doing this?” she asks. “You’re done, but Christmas has a funny way of coming back around each year,” he says. “It’s always Christmas,” she replies.
As they’re about to walk out, he tells Gemma (or whoever this Innie is) that he loves her. She sniggers, but she says it back when he calls her out. As she walks back to her room, the sound of Billie Holiday’s ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’ triggers a memory of Mark angrily dismantling their unborn child’s crib.
Gemma tries to escape
Apple TV+The next morning at 7:30am, Dr Mauer appears at her door. Gemma says her hand is still sore after leaving the Allentown room. “I wanna go home,” she says.
“Your husband remarried last year,” he tells her (which is a total lie, obviously). “And he has a daughter now… you’ve been gone a long time, Gemma. He’s moved on. Maybe you’ve moved on too… in one of the rooms, what do you think?”
He asks her if she’s ever gravitated towards one door more than another. “Maybe you felt things behind those doors you never felt with Mark? Maybe I’ve seen it,” he says.
As he picks up The Death of Ivan Ilyich from her shelf, she hits him over the head with a chair and knocks him out. She steals his keycard, quietly exits her room, and makes it to the elevator.
However, when she reaches the severed floor… she becomes Ms Casey, and to make things worse, she’s confronted by Mr Milchick, who tells her to go back into the elevator. Ms Casey knows something isn’t right, but she can’t do anything.
The night Mark lost Gemma
Apple TV+In another flashback, Gemma heads out to a party while Mark stays at home. Later that night, the police turn up at his door to deliver the worst news he could imagine: his wife died in a car accident. However, questions still remain about exactly what happened to Gemma; was she in a crash and Lumon recovered her body, or did she go straight to Lumon that night?
The scene fades between this moment and Gemma in the elevator, sobbing and softly saying, “Mark.” The nurse helps her up and walks her back to her room.
The episode ends on a somewhat positive note: Mark finally wakes up. “Where’d you go?” Devon asks, and all he can think of is Gemma.
Until next week, keep our Severance Season 2 release schedule bookmarked. You should also check out the theory that Helly is pregnant, and if you want to refresh your memory, we have recaps of Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 3, Episode 4, Episode 5, and Episode 6.
