Severance Season 2 Episode 7 Goes Full Lost With The Show's Best Episode Yet

Your outie is kind and doesn't divulge any of the major spoilers from the following article for the latest episode of "Severance."

"Severance" has always flirted heavily with the notion of becoming the heir apparent to the throne left behind by "Lost" — a similar mystery-box experience about a group of characters thrown into strange circumstances and that seems to uncover more questions than answers with every passing season. Season 2 has somehow raised the bar of quality even higher than it already was the first time around, diving deeper into the complex world-building details of this workplace satire and making us fully invested in our quartet of heroes as we learn more about their inner lives. But episode 7, titled "Chikhai Bardo," might ultimately go down as the moment when the creative team took the torch from "Lost" showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse and made it official.

This very welcome development is less about all the unmistakable parallels that "Severance" shares with "Lost," and more about the idea of resurrecting that show's approach to television writing that seemed to vanish into the dustbin of history along with its divisive series finale. A few weeks back, the well-received episode "Woe's Hollow" brought a certain familiar flavor that "Lost" fans remember well, diving headfirst into the kind of explorations into lore and surrealism that the best that network TV always had to offer back in the day. Prior to that, the more grounded feel of "Trojan's Horse" helped bring the focus right back to our main cast of characters, reminding us that we keep coming back again and again because of the personalities involved.

But, finally, episode 7 has gone farther than "Severance" ever has before to blend its most undeniable strengths — its sci-fi genre trappings, the profoundly dark subject matter at its heart, and a welcome dose of tragic love — and produce what may very well go down as the best hour of the entire series.

If you're going to evoke "Lost," you might as well go all the way. Director Jessica Lee Gagné (who usually serves as cinematographer and executive producer on "Severance") and credited writers Dan Erickson and Mark Friedman clearly had the same thought, packing the episode to the gills with references and homages to the castaway series — both overt and otherwise.

The biggest and most obvious (and most unusual for this series) involves the use of flashbacks, of course, breaking out this narrative trick for the first time in such a significant manner. The present-day storyline continues with Mark Scout (Adam Scott) unconscious after the reintegration procedure goes horribly awry, using this downtime as a clever excuse to jump headlong into old memories of his previous life with his long-lost wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman). At the same time, we receive our first real look at Gemma as a prisoner in the deepest recesses of Lumon Industries, having somehow survived her car accident and forced to endure a battery of medical tests from scientists in lab coats and multiple rooms that switch between various severed personas. (If this feels similar to the mysterious Dharma Initiative and the underground hatch that once housed Henry Ian Cusick's Desmond Hume, we get the feeling this was not coincidental.) Throughout the episode, Gagné uses every editing tool at her disposal to link between Mark's coma-induced dreams and Gemma's escapist memories ... including close-ups of eyes, a recurring visual used throughout "Lost."

And speaking of Desmond, there's probably a good reason why "Severance" viewers might be drawing connections to arguably one of the biggest fan-favorite characters in all of "Lost." The time-hopping episode "The Constant" tops the episode rankings from most "Lost" fans and the various scenes of Mark and Gemma's romance are filled with all the aching sincerity previously seen between Desmond and Penny Widmore (Sonya Walger). Both shows took great pains to keep these love interests apart, while using that extended separation to make us desperately want to see them reunited again. As with Desmond and Penny, we get to experience the thrilling ups of Mark and Gemma's courtship and the devastating downs of their uneasy marriage and their struggles to have children, a slow-motion train crash that ultimately ends in tragedy when Gemma fails to return one night after a seemingly deadly car crash.

If there's anything that best connects "Severance" with "Lost," it's the former's ability to hit viewers with an emotional sledgehammer when they least expect it. Throughout season 2, creator Dan Erickson and his writing team haven't been subtle about emphasizing what matters most to our main protagonist: his closest loved ones. For Mark S., his slow-burning romance with Helly R. (Britt Lower) gains such narrative importance that their Lumon bosses realize the two simply won't complete any work whatsoever if they're driven apart. As for his outie, Mark Scout is fiercely protective of his sister Devon (Jen Tullock) and his overwhelming grief over the presumed loss of his wife Gemma is precisely what leads him to take the drastic step of undergoing the severance procedure in the first place. Where "Lost" spun a web of improbable connections between its ensemble and used that to build to a finale that was all about why they belonged together all along, "Severance" distilled all of that into a single heart-wrenching hour that ended on as powerful a final shot as any other in either season.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but episode 7 is a perfect example of the type of writing that shows like "Lost" churned out on a near-weekly basis ... but has largely fallen by the wayside in the years since. In the heyday of so-called Prestige TV, shows would often have the benefit of upwards of 20 total episodes per season to take these sorts of big swings and vast departures from formula. In an era where streaming shows get anywhere from nine to 12 episodes to tell their stories, that only makes it all the more remarkable that "Severance" slammed the brakes on its ongoing narrative and instead opted for a character-focused hour focused entirely on Mark and Gemma's interiority.

Sure, we could focus on the purely cosmetic similarities (including the bookended use of that Leo Tolstoy novel "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," since "Lost" wore its love of philosophy on its sleeve), but that wouldn't quite do "Severance" the justice it deserves here. "Chikhai Bardo" is somehow both an unapologetic throwback and an episode that further reinforces its own unique identity. And it's the best, most devastating hour of TV I've seen in years.