Mark telling Gemma before he injects her “you hate writing thank you cards” and then her being in the room forced to write Christmas cards for eternity…..
Maybe after Lumon selected Gemma, they bugged their home to gather inside info about personal experiences that Gemma dreads or fears. They used that info to guide creation of the testing rooms.
I think mark and the team are creating the testing rooms, with the number things. That's why Mark is so important, since he knows Gemma well. And that's also why Gemma hasn't gone to the cold harbor room, mark hasn't completed it.
A lot of the Kier stuff is super inspired by the weirder offshoot movements of Christianity. so you're definitely not imagining things. Lots of people have commented about Mormon vibes, but I don't think it's specifically targeting Mormonism. There are a looooot of bizarro denominations out there. Some of the things in the show remind me of the fringe pentecostal group I belonged to as a kid.
(for people who see my comment and want to argue the Mormon point: no, Dan Erickson did not grow up Mormon. People just googled his name, saw that another Dan Erickson wrote a book about Mormonism, and jumped to conclusions. But the show's creator was a kid when it was published, and he's never said anything about growing up Mormon)
The book referenced twice in the episode, the death of Ivan Ilych, has a major theme of reversal throughout the book. I believe this is one of many references to that.
I think the most important revelation from this episode, among many HUGE revelations, is that severance is not just on/off. There's clearly the ability to sever someone many, many times.
I think this follows from the pseudoscience this season has been developing. Severance appears to be taking your five brain waves and phase shifting them, and the shifted set is a new consciousness. You could have some arbitrary high number of possible shifts, based on the minimum required.
Yes. It’s frequency based. Every room and the severed floor has a different frequency. So it’s the same chip, same brain but because of the different frequencies they created multiple versions of the innies. Brilliant.
This makes sense with the speculation that Irving worked at Lumon longer than iIrving realized, maybe. And maybe something with Burt’s timeline too (20 years or 10?)
I always figured that’s why Irving’s outie was seeing the black door. He’s been with Lumen a loooong time and they just keep making a new innie in a different office when the old innie gets out of control. He might have even been getting the Gemma treatment in an earlier experiment. He’s been there so long he’s got the black elevator is bleeding into his subconscious.
The scene where the cops are coming to Mark’s door to tell him Gemma is dead and you can barely see his face as the darkness consumes him??? Get the fuck out of here, it’s just too good.
Also visually the top of his head is chopped off by the shadow, similar to the top of his head missing in the intro (mostly the S1 intro, but also briefly the S2 one).
Some of the reviewers received the entire season and let slip some key details about S2. There is an entire thread about the info gleaned from the reviews on this sub.
And the picture for the episode reminds of like an IUD being inserted. Looks like maybe the really made sure that Gemma would not conceive with their bullshit “IVF.”
Your comment got me thinking, and I think I understand what actually happened.
I disagree that they gave Gemma an IUD. In fact, it would make perfect sense if the fertility shots were actually the birth control themselves. One type of birth control is the Depo Shot. We didn't need to see Mark giving Gemma the shots; we already saw them at the fertility clinic, so her getting shots is already implied by this fact alone. The fact that we actually saw the shots being given leads me to believe they're significant in some way.
Fertility shots are given daily for up to two weeks. Depo is given once every 12 weeks. The first "fertility" shot could be birth control, while the rest could be saline. The doctors would pretend to do the rest of the IVF process and then say nothing worked.
Side note: I got an IUD placed yesterday and watched last night's episode hopped up on painkillers and cuddling a heating pad. Lol.
There have been a ton of theories that time plays differently with the innies - for instance milchick says they will take 9 seconds of silence and it's more like 6 seconds. That's about 67%. What's the average run time of an episode? 55 minutes? And this next episode is 37 minutes? What's the percentage of that... I'll let you guess.
First episode of the series principally directed by its usual ‘director of photography’ Jessica Lee Gagne. That is so fucking cool and it truly shows in every single frame of this unbelievable episode.
I am full of rage at all the people complicit in this sick shit
Mr. Milchick, the nurse lady, the delusional creep who lied to Gemma about Mark moving on and probably secretly hopes the project is never complete so he can continue torturing her in his cosplay of replacing Mark as Gemma’s husband.
The fact that Gemma couldn’t escape because she is below the severed floor and when she went up in the elevator she became Ms. Casey is absolutely gut wrenching.
Knowing her and Mark have been missing and longing for each other (with Mark thinking she was dead this entire time) is so soul crushing.
Her slow walk down that dark hall was such a contrast with Mark running through the brightly lit halls at the start of the season. They’re searching for each other but still so completely separated
Some more symbolism--her last conversation with him was about Denali. When you hear Denali, you think of Alaska, which famously almost touches Russia but is separated by the Bering Strait. Such a narrow stretch of water, but without technology, it renders travel/communication virtually impossible. Not only that, but the international date line runs through there, which means tomorrow in Russia is always still yesterday in Alaska. So it goes with the American history professor and the Russian literature professor--so close, yet so far apart, separated by a small but seemingly unbridgeable divide. And by one definition, Denali's technically the tallest mountain in the world, which signifies the immensity of the obstacle between the two.
Meanwhile, as you probably know, scientists believe there was once a walkable route between Alaska and Russia, back when the area was the Beringia land bridge. The separation occurred when sea levels rose and flooded the land bridge. So it's ironic that Reghabi's trying to connect Mark with Gemma by flooding the barrier that separates them.
Yeah, this hit me harder than the theories of her being maybe not totally conscious. Or even being secretly evil. This is definitely the most depressing option in my heart to see yearns for this beautiful beautiful couple. .
For some reason it reminded of the most recent Spiderverse film where spoiler at the end of the movie Myles finally gets “back” to his universe and suddenly he (and the audience) realize he’s in the wrong universe. The feeling of “yes! We did it!” immediately turning into “oh no” is just good entertainment.
Seriously! It was a really elevated version of the classic dead wife flashback and I LOVED how it had the lighting/texture of a film camera, and an almost Wes Anderson feel to it-- particularly the books piling up and down on the desktop reminded me of him-- creates an inherent sense of nostalgia
And the flashbacks absolutely worked on me. Within 20 minutes I already loved Gemma, mourned her loss from Mark, felt angry that she’s stuck in this endless loop.
At first I was kind of sour on it being a flashback episode (I just don’t like when stories go in reverse) but it was all managed so well and fit perfectly with the ongoing story.
In Buddhism, the Chikhai Bardo (ep title) is the first stage of death the soul enters. There’s six stages—coincidentally, the number of rooms Gemma is told she’ll go into.
The bardo relates to the severance of consciousness from the physical form
Yup—should have clarified. Three “alive” states of the soul before it. Then you get to the Chikhai Bardo, which is described as the “Bardo of the Moment of Death”
the doctor lying to her and saying that Mark not only got remarried but also had a child (her greatest unfulfilled dream) made my blood boil like omg we need to kill him
Don't want to be one of those guys who hyperanalyzes an irrelevant detail to make a theory buuut I wonder if the Lumon blood donation thing somehow tied to her inability to conceive/carry a baby to term.
The doctor is an evil motherfucker telling her Mark had a baby with another woman. He needs to get stuck in the dentist room permanently. Or maybe the Pulp Fiction Zed room.
And we know that Lumon was founded as a medicine company making salves, and that it has something to do with Diethyl Ether. Ether was abused recreationally, perhaps by soldiers with PTSD from the American Civil War and WWI.
Ether was abused at parties called "ether frolics" too which I just learned from Wikipedia, so that's neat.
Maybe a little bit of a reach but it feels maybe connected/
I almost forgot about this somehow. Gotta say they probably gave me the worst feeling in the entire episode. The fact that they all sort of looked like our crew and have been watching them nonstop all this time just gave me some deep creeps - like they’ve been watching us all throughout S1 too.
I had assumed that it would be her reliving the circumstances of her own "death". In the intro, we see a car tilting into the water of the frozen lake. When questioned by the doctor, she responds that she's more afraid of drowning than suffocation, and reacts with strong emotion. Recreating that memory could be Cold Harbor?
If she masters fear of death, they have completely depersonalized her.
On the other hand, it could be that she never "died" at all, and merely walked in of her own free will after being misled. There's still a lot of ambiguity there, but the above is my working theory.
I still think that the theory that Cold Harbor is when they kill her (so the chip can take over the control for every traumatic situation) is more plausible.
Imagine a chip that, when you're going to die in a painful way, the innie takes over and you don't have to live that situation?
The car in the intro is confusing because if she drowned or ended up in a lake, how did Mark identify her burnt body(note I don’t think the accident happened at all and they faked it but it would be strange to show a burnt fake body if she crashed in to a lake)
With each room being designated for an unpleasant task, I think Cold Harbor might be Death. I can see how putting off something unpleasant like hospice or assisted suicide might seem appealing to Lumon acolytes. It would explain why the Lumon doctor seemed to allude to his time with Gemma coming to an end there.
My personal opinion is that Cold Harbor is not going to be as "earth-shattering" as the Lumon higher-ups have made it seem like it's going to be. The show is, on some level, a critique of corporate culture. It would make sense for executives of a corporate environment to claim that they have this amazing, life-changing thing in development internally that most people would just go "meh" at. Places like Apple, Facebook, etc. always say they have these things in development that are going to change people's lives and 99% of the time they are just kind of "okay" at best. I think the importance of Cold Harbor is going to be vastly overexaggerated as a parody of that idea.
So Reghabi is right - the only way to get Gemma is through reintegration. It’s the only way to get down to the testing floor and back whilst maintaining memory of not only where you are, but what you’re supposed to be doing
ETA: it seems my phrasing is confusing people. Gemma doesn’t need to be reintegrated, but a severed employee who has been reintegrated is what is needed.
One tragic outcome for the show could have outie Mark sacrifice himself somehow for Gemma, setting up a scenario where innie Mark and Helly R are able to live real lives, but Gemma loses Mark much like he lost her. Outie Mark strikes me as not likely headed for a happy ending.
But the only way to get her out is to destroy the place. If they try to reintegrate her they will get christmas wife, dental ptsd, turbulance torture survivor, and many other unpleasantly traumatized counciousnesses along with the original Gemma. Sounds like a surefire way to go insane.
Oh fuck yeah. She'd benefit of not remembering anything that her innies have experienced. Ideally having those memories wiped. I think she's the only one who can benefit from a simple chip removal because we don't care about those memories. She'll go insane if she remembers everything.
If innie Mark makes it down the hallway and down the elevator and outie Mark wakes up in a strange, sterile location I think he would know to look for Gemma. He knows she is alive, he knows Lumon has her. He would go searching without reintegration at this point.
Something like this seems to be foreshadowed by iMark saying in an earlier episode that he just has to get Gemma to an elevator and then "my outie will know what to do." I think his reintegration is going to remain messy/partial for a while, iMark will go down to the testing floor, switch to oMark and oMark will know enough to continue the mission.
The big question is... Helly's the one who said she'll retrieve the testing floor sketch and directions, and she's not gonna let Mark go on a dangerous job alone. She's gonna come along to help. What will oMark do when he wakes up on the testing floor next to Helena Eagan, who he already suspects?
I for real was like wow they actually put in some comedic levity only to be abruptly smacked with the shlong of a hypothetical patriarchy that makes A Handmaid's Tale look tame
i laughed so hard i had to pause it when he dissed the sweater out of nowhere. this also made me realize that not even Mr. Drummond knew what he was about to do with the christmas card test? or maybe he was wondering why he’d dress up for it? so confusing but hilarious
I think Drummond knew what he was going to do but, along with the "I Love You" thing, and the 'We're going to have to get rid of her' it's being suggested that Dr. Mauer is way too personally invested beyond his job with Gemma.
So does that guy not even know fully what’s going on in those rooms? Is it possible that guy set up that room himself for him to play house with Gemma? He immediately became my most hated character on the show.
That was absolutely ridiculous writing. The women, who at one point you thought stole your child and has mysteriously disappeared for days on end, is the person to call in that moment? Got it.
This (Reghabi) is the one thing about this show that bugs me, and it’s my biggest pet peeve in TV and movies in general. I can’t stand it when an entire plot point is created simply from an implausible failure to communicate. I can suspend disbelief enough to buy into the severance procedure, but not enough to believe that Mark or Devon would put up with Reghabi’s silent bullshit.
This has really bothered me with the show. Every episode my wife and I are screaming to every character “WHY AREN’T YOU ASKING THAT PERSON A MILLION QUESTIONS?!?”
Every time one character knows a little more information — I’m flipping out. I would be non-stop interrogating them.
Telling Gemma that Mark has moved on and implying that her severed self might also have moved on (without her outies knowledge…) in one of the rooms…disgusting work I hope that chair brained him
He’s also creepy asf and I was so afraid he was gonna try and assault her or something in one of the rooms since she’s severed and wouldn’t remember it when she left. So glad she clocked him with the chair.
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u/UltraDangerLord Feb 28 '25
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