Severance Season 2 May Just Have Revealed Lumon's Bizarre Endgame

This article contains major spoilers for "Severance" Season 2, Episode 7, "Chikhai Bardo."

"Severance" Season 2, Episode 7, "Chikhai Bardo," focuses on Gemma (Dichen Lachman), Mark Scout's (Adam Scott) supposedly dead wife. The fact that she's still alive and in Lumon Industries' custody is revealed in Season 1 when we find that Lumon wellness counselor Ms. Casey is her innie, but the rest of Gemma's strange Lumon existence has been largely unknown ... until know.

"Chikhai Bardo" replaces the show's usual method of drip-feeding clues with a sudden and violent info dump. The episode unspools the terrible mysteries surrounding Gemma, whose brain hasn't been severed as much as it has been utterly shattered. The real Gemma is effectively imprisoned in the secret Lumon Testing Floor, and she has multiple innies who have to regularly spend time in rooms that are named after the files Mark's Macrodata Refinement Team is working on. The innies are room-specific and stuck in a loop where they have to go through tasks that seem custom designed to elicit particular emotions. These are all but confirmed to be the same ones MDR uses to refine the files — and are very likely connected to the Four Tempers, a crucial concept in Lumon's corporate mythology about its founder, Kier Eagan.

By now, it's obvious that Gemma and Mark are intrinsically connected to Lumon's global-scale goals, and if we unpack the clues in this episode, it may just have finally revealed what said endgame is: The company is trying to stage a second coming of its messiah, Kier, in order to have him lead Lumon's worldwide innie cult/religion. Does that sound like a far-fetched theory? Before you say so, take a moment to remember that Kier-faced baby in the "Severance" Season 2 opening credits and read on.

The fever dream opening credits and "Severance" composer Theodore Shapiro's eerie theme play a large part in putting the viewer in the show's claustrophobic mood. Still, the creepy baby with Kier Eagan's face at the end of the Season 2 credits sequence is even stranger than usual because it seems so utterly unconnected to everything else.

The thing is, the baby might actually be very connected to the larger story. "Chikhai Bardo" drops hint after hint that Gemma's tragic miscarriage is the reason she ended up with Lumon in the first place. Not only does her overseer Dr. Mauer (Robby Benson) tell her that Mark "will benefit from the world you're siring," but the flashbacks also reveal that her quest to have a baby put her on Lumon's radar in the first place. While she doesn't enjoy her situation anymore, it seems that she originally agreed to disappear and go with the company because it promised it could help her out with the situation. But why would Lumon do so?

To get their beloved founder and prophet back, that's why. The ending of "Severance" Season 1 reveals that Lumon is planning to go global with the severance procedure, and the elaborate nature of the Kier cult that Lumon imposes on the innies suggests that they'll roll that out in a large scale as well. Since cults need frontmen and the Eagans are clearly deathly serious about Kier, it makes sense that they only see one prophet that's suitable for leading a global Kier-based religion: Kier Eagan himself. As it happens, Lumon Industries is specifically stated to be a biotechnology company, which means that the Eagans are uniquely suited to bring back Kier — either by bioengineering a baby clone of the founder or by otherwise recreating him.

So, if Gemma is being positioned as the Holy Mary figure for a bioengineered Kier messiah child, what's the whole deal with the rooms her various innies are visiting and their connection to the Macrodata Refinement Team's files? If this theory is correct, Gemma's experiments revolve around Kier's Four Tempers — his essence, if you will. Since the rooms she visits correspond with the files the MDR team is solving, the data being refined might just be the genetic code that's needed to either bring back Kier as a clone or help Gemma carry a Kier baby to term. Thanks to Mark's emotional connection to Gemma, he would naturally be adept in solving some of the files, which explains why he cracked the Allentown file (which corresponds to the testing room where a Gemma innie has to write countless thank you letters) in a mere day.

Which brings us to the ominous Cold Harbor file/room. Since Mark solving it and Gemma entering it seems to be crucial to Lumon's plans, it's pretty likely that it's connected to the Kier baby. Perhaps the room is where he will be born once the Cold Harbor macrodata has been refined, or maybe there's a baby in there already, just waiting for that Kier personality to be bioengineered into him. Either way, this would explain why Mark seems to find the file relatively difficult. "Chikhai Bardo" reveals that Mark reacted to losing their baby by growing detached and ready to abandon parenthood, while Gemma held out hope. This is why he may have a hard time fully cracking Cold Harbor: in this particular case, he and Gemma simply don't align well.

The idea of a bioengineering juggernaut that tries to recreate its founder to head a global religion of severed people might seem staggering, but the one thing Lumon has always been open about is that its severed workers are doing extremely significant work. Considering the messianic importance the company places on Kier, bringing him back would no doubt be the most important work the company could possibly conceive. The plan to bring Kier back could also explain the religious reverence an unsevered manager like Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) seems to have toward him, and it'd be more than important enough for the Eagans to keep sending their own scion Helena (Britt Lower) in the Macrodata Refinement mix.

The baby Kier theory is, of course, still unconfirmed. Even if it proves to be correct, "Severance" will likely take its sweet time revealing the next step in Lumon's plan (because, let's face it, of course there will a next step). Would the new Kier's true purpose be to lock all of humanity's innies in strange office complexes while being force-fed religious Eagan propaganda? Or is the real endgame something even bigger — like, say, bringing the resurrection technology the Severed Floor may be developing to the public, making the Eagans not only a powerful cult but masters of death itself?

As for what all of this potentially means to the MDR members who are unconnected to the Eagans or Gemma, it remains to be seen. Perhaps Dylan (Zach Cherry) and Irving (John Turturro) are simply good workers who have shown they can refine well enough to hang with the project, or maybe they also have a mysterious connection to the greater proceedings. Now, if only the show would reveal what Mammalians Nurturables is all about ...  

New episodes of "Severance" drop Fridays on Apple TV+.