(This essay/article will contain spoilers from the above-mentioned shows.)
There is a universal truth: that we all have, or will, experience loss at some point in our lives. The longer of a life you live, the more you will lose. That doesn’t come without its counterpart, though—you will love more too, if you open yourself up to it. It can be seen as a tradeoff, a way to make the magnitude of grief feel fair. After all, you can only balance one all-consuming emotion with another of similar hunger.
Something that is unique about the loss that takes place in The Bear, Severance, and Pluribus, is that it happens when the main characters are adults—and it happens suddenly. Carmen Berzatto is a chef in New York when he gets the call that his older brother, Michael Berzatto, has passed away by suicide in Chicago. Mark Scout is at home when his wife, Gemma Scout, is allegedly involved in a car accident on her way to/from a friend’s house. Carol Sturka and her life partner, Helen Umstead, are having a drink together at a bar when Helen begins seizing outside due to the alien virus and passes away.
The common thread: these deaths act as the catalyst for the unraveling and (hopefully) eventual rebirth of these main characters. Even when it isn’t spoken outright, you can feel the weight of Mikey, Gemma, and Helen hanging over their heads—and ours. They infiltrate still shots, pauses in the dialogue, and are painted all over the characters’ insides.
Carmy can’t bring himself to attend his brother’s funeral, but he throws himself completely into managing and saving The Beef, his family’s restaurant that Mikey had been running until his passing. Especially when Carmy finds the money his brother had left for him, hidden in tomato sauce cans, he is almost possessed by the need to make good on his promise to Mikey—the reason he started cooking in the first place. He is only able to face his grief in increments. At first, in the form of dissociation and nightmares, causing him to set the stove on fire and lose his shit on everyone. Each of them is a mirror that Carmy can’t stand looking into. But working with the staff at The Beef—later known as The Bear—gives him the footing to take one step forward. Through watching and helping them through their own struggles, he is able to take accountability, apologize, make mistakes, and allow himself to do the thing he fears most: feel happy.
Having this outer ring of support grants Carmy access to the more raw, messy inner ring—his family. Up until Mikey’s death, and even after, he had done a superb job of fighting with Richie, the Berzattos close family friend, or pushing his sister, Natalie, and mother, Donna, out. But slowly, they learn to open up to each other and confide in one another about the pain of losing Mikey. I feel like this culminates in Season 4, Episode 9, named “Tonnato,” where Carmy brings a photo box found at the restaurant to drop off at his mother’s house. While the pair is looking through photos, Donna gets tearful when they see one of Mikey, which makes Carmy visibly uncomfortable. Up until this point, he had only seen her emotions turn into outbursts. As he attempts to withdraw, his mother pulls him in even deeper by revealing a letter she’d written in the event of an opportunity for a heart-to-heart. Carmy slowly crumbles as he listens to Donna repent for her sins and acknowledge the pain she’s caused. Her ability to truly take accountability lies in the fact that she’s a little over a year sober at this point. Although she admits “it’s not much,” there is an unspoken nod to the addict in the room who didn’t make it—her eldest son.
When Donna expresses a desire to be part of Carmy’s life again, he’s the one who pulls her in this time. He tells her that she “did good.” His family in the kitchen and by blood show Carmy, through their own storylines, that suffering is not what makes you good. Richie clutches onto what’s familiar for dear life, as if keeping things the same will keep Mikey alive in some way. But embracing change is what leads him to finding himself. Natalie enters motherhood while managing finances at The Bear, juggling the stress of running a restaurant, the grief of losing her brother, and the complicated relationship with her mother. Her openness to put in the work to break the Berzatto cycle and the support of her loving husband, Pete, gives Natalie the ability to overcome it all.
And finally, Sydney Adamu, Carmy’s sous-chef and The Bear’s eventual CDC, is arguably Mikey’s counterpart. Where he symbolizes grief and being stuck in an endless loop, she is the spirit of Carmy’s dream. Although she comes into The Beef idolizing him—in the end, he recognizes that Sydney is everything he’s not, an integral element to the restaurant’s success. Sydney is The Bear.
His connection to food has always been rooted in his connection to Mikey, and over time, through resentment, anger, and obsession, it became a twisted, gnarled root. The only way to unknot it is to put it down in the hands of people he trusts.
While Carmy walks away to put himself back together, Mark Scout and his innie, Mark S., run back into the burning building to find what they’re looking for. And although Severance is still not complete at the time of writing this, Gemma and her disappearance, disguised as a death, form the scaffolding of the show's plot. The sludge of grief that Mark finds himself in after losing his wife suddenly, amid their struggle to conceive a child, is the impetus for him to become a severed employee at Lumon. In Season 2, Episode 2, “Goodbye, Mrs, Selvig,” Mr. Milchik says to Mark, “You said since she died, every day feels like a year. That you felt like you were choking on her ghost.”
Becoming severed is no simple ordeal, either. It is an active and conscious effort to have a chip surgically implanted in your brain for the sole purpose of getting through the workday without remembering a goddamn thing. In the world of Severance, this procedure is looked down upon and protested by the public. Everyone has their own reason for doing it, but one must imagine the suffering Mark must have been living in to go through with it—and feel relief from it, too.
Before finding out that Gemma is still alive and is, in fact, Ms. Casey from the Wellness Department at Lumon, Mark’s day-to-day life feels depressing and purposeless. His apartment is dim and sparse, with the sterile interior design choices typical of a real estate listing. This is even more jarring when compared to the home the couple had lived in prior: warm and plush, books everywhere, flowers and plant life breathing oxygen into the space. Even the homes of his coworker’s outies feel more lived-in—Mark is a ghost, drifting from room to room, leaving it basically untouched.
Although the plan at the end of Season 1, for the innies to take control of their outie’s bodies, is driven by unjust working conditions and abuse, it hits “resume” on something Mark had silently packed away. He hadn’t moved on or healed from the grief of losing Gemma; he had frozen himself in time and continued to live on. One foot in front of the other–facing an endless sea of ice. Mark begins the process of reintegration soon after receiving confirmation from Asal Reghabi, a former surgical worker from Lumon, that his wife is indeed trapped in the building where he works. This would mean that his innie and outie have access to each other’s memories and knowledge. The only other person who attempted this process before was Mark’s former coworker, “Petey,” who ultimately passed away from a brain hemorrhage as a result of the unsuccessful procedure.
When we finally get to see where Gemma’s been since being forced down a dark hallway and into an elevator as Ms. Casey, it’s hard to watch her listlessly move from one testing room to another. Each one is uncomfortable or disturbing—a never-ending dentist appointment, a plane crash, or sitting on the floor writing “thank you” notes for Christmas gifts until your hand spasms and aches—all while a strange man who claims to be your “husband” watches from the couch. The final room, named “Cold Harbor,” has her put on the same outfit as the evening of her accident and enter a room where there is only a single crib with a screwdriver in it. She is asked to take it apart. This is a cruel recreation of when Mark had to take apart the crib in their home when they stopped trying for a baby, after a long and taxing time trying to conceive. In a flashback, he breaks the pieces in frustration as Gemma sits at the dining table downstairs with her face in her hands, flinching at the sounds coming from upstairs.
And so, when Mark barges into the testing room and tells Gemma that he’s her husband, despite not knowing him, she takes his hand and follows him out into the hallway. There, she becomes her outie again, and they finally embrace—reunited at last. Though this does not last, due to Mark becoming his innie when they reach the severed floor, he makes good on his promise to save her. Then, he turns back for Helly.
There isn’t a single character in Severance that isn’t touched by grief. Being part of Lumon, whether severed or unsevered, requires a surgical separation of the self. No one leaves that building unscathed after entering. It is a cult, at the end of the day. And I hope we get to watch it burn to the ground by the end of the show.
Speaking of cults, Season 1 of Pluribus does not shy away from making parallels to high-control environments we have seen throughout history and the present day. The alien virus that takes Helen Umstead ends up taking every life on Earth besides thirteen people, including Carol Sturka. Unlike Helen, who doesn’t survive being taken over by the virus to become part of the hivemind, others who are immune still have their loved ones—but not really. A woman named Laxmi’s entire family has joined the collective, but she chooses to keep living with them as if nothing has happened, insisting that they are misunderstood and still her family. Another young woman, Kusimaya, is the only person in her village who was immune to the Joining. She expresses a longing to become part of the hivemind, so that she can be reunited with her family, which she eventually goes through with towards the end of the season. But Carol has completely lost Helen, regardless of what happens.
Carol buries Helen’s body in her yard and, for much of the season, is combative. She lashes out at the Others, leans into her alcoholism more than ever, and expresses suicidal ideation at one point. Her anger is an open flame, which threatens to burn anyone who comes close. In a recording, she injects herself with sodium thiopental to see how it affects her before attempting to use it on Zosia to get answers. Carol, who is usually bitter and numb, openly sobs as she clutches the back of the couch and sinks to the ground—mumbling “I miss you” over and over again. She is visibly uncomfortable watching this back, her eyes instantly watering and her tongue prodding the inside of her cheek as she hits fast-forward on the remote.
Outside of the metaphorical ways Helen haunts Carol throughout the season, there is a “fuckable” (Carol’s words, not mine) physical reminder in the form of Zosia, the woman the Others send as a kind of chaperone. Although Helen didn’t survive the Joining, her consciousness and memories were still uploaded to the hivemind before she died. Meaning the Others, and especially Zosia, continuously try to make Carol happy by using the information they’ve gathered from Helen—twisting the knife deeper with each “thoughtful” detail.
And Carol almost gives in, too. After being completely abandoned for weeks and forced into complete isolation by the Others, a manipulation tactic, she begs for them back. Zosia returns, and after a back-and-forth of awkwardness, tension, and confrontation, kisses Carol. They end up sleeping together, which puts Carol in this domestic trance. Manousos’s arrival only pushes her into Zosia’s arms even more, as she then feels protective over her and is afraid of his experimentation on the Others in an effort to save the world.
Carol leaves with Zosia to a ski resort, genuinely happy in their time together. She has found a distraction from her reality and grief. This shatters when Zosia reveals that the Others have accessed her stem cells through her frozen eggs, which Carol had preserved with Helen in the past. They are hard at work to figure out how to make her one of them, and they could have the answer in a month’s time. Crushed and angry once again, Carol returns to join Manousos—this time, with an atomic bomb.
Grief—our oldest feared friend—is taken and made into something familiar and new through these series. Obviously, The Bear is set in our world, so the grief feels the most tangible and raw there. Many people have lost loved ones to addiction. But Severance and Pluribus are science-fiction series. They offer the experience of loss in circumstances that are alien to us, yet represent something more sinister. We do not have Lumon or the Others, but we do have governments that separate families unjustly, leaving people not knowing if their loved ones are alive or dead. We do have groups that smile eerily and believe everyone should be homogeneous. We do live in a world where people suddenly die from sickness or a virus.
Still, it’s beautiful to watch these characters fight back against the structures that resulted in the sudden loss of their loved ones. The common thread here is community. They are only able to claw their way out of their grief, anger, and suffering by grabbing the hand, or hands, reaching out and allowing themselves to be pulled out. There is strength in recognizing that we cannot do this alone.
I hope we can all see ourselves in these characters and understand that grief, healing, progress, and growth—it all stems from the same root. Love.
