Season 2 Episode 7: Chikhai Bardo
Aired: February 28, 2025
Synopsis: An old romance intersects with a deadly present threat.
Directed by: Jessica Lee Gagné
Written by: Dan Erickson & Mark Friedman
Season 2 Episode 7: Chikhai Bardo
Aired: February 28, 2025
Synopsis: An old romance intersects with a deadly present threat.
Directed by: Jessica Lee Gagné
Written by: Dan Erickson & Mark Friedman
I’m surprised, it felt like they revealed much more than I would have expected to ever get this season, without opening too many new questions. Any in particular?
Everything to do with the testing floor is a question. Who are the people watching the computers? What do the rooms mean? Why do they have the same name as the files? We know Cold Harbor is important, but now it’s a room also, what’s in it? Somebody said the doctor is going to have to let Gemma go, why? And go where?
Also, we know now she’s still alive, but Mark said he saw her dead body. What did he look at?
I feel like there’s more questions, but that’s just off the top of my head.
While we don’t know their identities, it clears up who the “twins” were in Woe’s Hollow. They seem to be individuals that are deliberately similar to our refiners, basically “shadows”.
And this tells us a lot about the severed floor! Now we definitely know that there’s more staff on the Lumon back-end, and all their actions are being analyzed.
The episode implied that the rooms are scenarios that Gemma strongly dislikes, with each room having a separate severed version.
The implication is that MDR is responsible for something in relation to the room - they probably either “uncover” the scenarios the test person hates, or they prepare/change the innie versions in some ways. I’m thinking it’s the earlier since Cold Harbor isn’t done yet, and Mark is still working on the file.
It’s going to be a scenario like the other rooms, and the episode foreshadowed that it will involve drowning (or suffocating).
Presumably this will be the topic of the next few episodes.
Rhegabi explained that Lumon has people at the morgue. They found a corpse that looks similar to Gemma, and burned it (Mark mentioned something about identifying her charred remains).
I definitely missed this. When mark mentioned earlier that he saw the body, he didn’t mention it was burned and couldn’t tell it was her. It seemed like he knew it was her. So that’s not a very satisfying answer, at the same time, I get that grief fucks with your perception.
As for the others, you are just guessing the answers to the questions. Fact is, the show created more questions than it answered. For instance, telling us there is more staff on the Lumon back end is not answering a question we previously had, it is creating new questions. Who, what and why are these people? That’s 3 questions.
Sorry, I went through the transcripts again, and I made that “charred remains” thing up. Mark indeed identified her body. My assumption is that they pronounced Gemma dead, even though she was only knocked out/in a coma. Mark identified her, and at the morgue they replaced her with an actual corpse, and she went to a Lumon hospital or something. We saw in this episode that the cops came to Marks house - more than enough time to pull a Romeo and Juliet maneuver if necessary.
Most of it isn’t guessing, it’s just reading the subtext. There are still questions left open (season’s not done yet), but so many questions are either fully answered or have only a couple of remaining possible answers. Not everything has to be explicit!
“Are there more employees watching over/controlling the severed floor” was one of the biggest questions in the community, and we now have an answer (which also answered questions like “who were the twins in Woe’s Hollow?”, or “who pressed the OTC buttons while Milchick talked to Dylan”). Soooooo many small questions have been answered like this throughout the season.
Why do you expect to know all the details of the mystery at this point? We’re now asking questions that result from the answers to our previous questions. This is how good shows are supposed to work.
This makes sense either way. I just missed that line in the episode.
100% I disagree with this comment. You are guessing what you think the answers are. You don’t know the purpose of sending her into a room where she exists only to write Christmas thank you cards. It’s a cool concept, but we have no idea the purpose.
No, I don’t expect all the answers. My only point was that the episode brought up more questions than answers. I honestly don’t think that is even a controversial statement.