spoiler
Complete the Ms. Casey project specifically? All of MDR was working it, weren’t they? Why did he need to get to 100% specifically. What if after they had kidnapped Gemma, that they never managed to get Mark to join Lumon?
Remember the “Allentown” glass cube with Marks head, which he got for his “freshman fluke”? And later we saw that it’s the room where Gemma is forced to write “thank you” cards, which Mark knows she hates? He completed his first file very quickly due to his connection with Gemma, and he’s presumably the only one working on her files. We know she has 25 rooms, and Mark has completed 25 files. His outies’ connection with & knowledge about Gemma are being used to speed up the refining process.
As for why nobody else was working on her files, it’s something I hope we learn about in season 3. My current theory is that Gemmas personalities are supposed to come pre-loaded onto the Severance chips, so essentially they’re condemning her innies to an infinitely-copied hell in other peoples bodies. But Lumon can hold people only for so long before they find a way to end themselves. Once they found that the personal connection between Mark and Gemma allowed him to quickly go through her files, all the focus was on getting all the 25 personalities finished ASAP. The other refiners were probably just preparing the chips for new severed workers.
My take on it was they were all contributing their fears as part of the refinement process, and those were her other personalities. Those fears were pretty generic (dentist, plane crash, writing Christmas thank you cards), so it didn’t really matter who did what. They needed Mark for the final fear of not being able to have a child as their ultimate test to see if they could remove her deepest fear from her personality.
Presumably it’s related to whatever Harmony was seeing in season 1 when she kept putting Mark and Ms Casey together—something the board didn’t initially seem to expect.
Maybe this was the first time the process got this close to completion, and the Mark/Gemma relationship was the missing ingredient.
Maybe, but a wider point is that the gambit also seemed to rely on Mark joining Lumon in the first place. Which seem like a jump for them to make.
I don’t think that was part of the initial plan—they selected Gemma based on tests from the fertility clinic, faked her death, and took her to the testing floor, which was all routine (Petey says there are others like Gemma who can’t leave). Mark joining Lumon was a coincidence which no one thought anything of until Harmony saw the potential of using them together. She pursued that on her own initiative, experimenting with exposing them to each other and moving next to Mark’s outie to get more information. It’s the results of her experiments in season 1 which convince the board that the Mark/Gemma relationship is the key to achieving a new breakthrough, which only becomes their goal in season 2.
Maybe. But I’d like it if we had a few more instances of severed disappeared people on the basement floor rather than just Ms. Casey to reflect that it’s something beyond just one person.
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We see refiners from other locations, so they must have test subjects in other offices.
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The conversation between Drummond and Lorne implies that there have been many previous goat sacrifices (presumably with a corresponding human for each goat).
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Petey talks about a whole secret department full of trapped innies.
But I suspect that test subjects are used one at a time at a given location, which is why we don’t see others on the testing floor while Gemma is there.
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