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[ktriesoutlayouts]

I think this really sent me deeper into the feeling I got all season.

It's not that Mark S doesn't love Gemma and that Mark's love for her doesn't transcend Severance. It's that as it is, Mark S can't love Gemma because he was created to not love her.

The entire reason Mark S exists is because Mark desperately wanted to forget his love for Gemma. He wanted for there to be a part of him that kept on living while being blissfully ignorant of how much it hurts to lose the person you love the most in the entire world.

Even Mark himself, who has spent every waking day since he lost Gemma choking on her ghost, had to have a literal hole dug in his brain for his memories of Gemma to come washing over him. That's how deeply buried he has tried to keep her.

So it makes perfect sense to me that when Mark S sees Miss Casey, he may feel a little twinge of something he cannot understand. But Mark's love for Gemma doesn't bleed through because how could it? It would be going against the very reason for Mark S's existence.

But that doesn't mean that Mark S doesn't have the same Gemma-shaped hole that Mark lives with everyday on the outside world. Petey said so himself, that Mark's grief seeps through and that Mark S feels it down there, he just doesn't know what it is.

And what is grief if not love persevering, right?

So it also makes perfect sense to me that Mark S is unknowingly, unconsciously, fiercely filling that Gemma-shaped-hole with H.R. Because who is the woman most alike Gemma in the Severed floor? It's certainly not Miss Casey, nice but passive and almost robotic. It's fierce and real H.R, and the show showed us this through the parallels established between both women during Gemma's flashback episode.

Gemma was the center of Mark's universe. Without her, he was off-kilter. So it's only natural that Mark S has been swiftly turning H.R. into the center of his, because he's been off-kilter, too—he just never realized it before because he had nothing to compare that emptiness to.