Spoilers below.
The Severance season 2 finale draws a lot of essential pieces together, connecting the dots between Lumon’s Macrodata Refinement squad; the Mammalians Nurturable team; Mark Scout and his wife, Gemma; and the Lumon overseers themselves, the Eagans. We also learn what is behind the mysterious door labeled “Cold Harbor” on Lumon’s underground Testing Floor, shedding light on a mystery that’s been building up all season long. What we still don’t know? If Lumon’s work on Cold Harbor is finished.
Prior to the Severance season 2 finale, appropriately titled “Cold Harbor,” here’s what we understood: The MDR crew spend their working hours sorting strange groups of numbers into five distinct boxes, which bear the markers “WO,” “DR,” “FC,” and “MA.” (Those markers correspond with the Four Tempers of every human soul, as proposed by Lumon’s founder, Kier Eagan: Woe, Dread, Frolic, and Malice.) The five boxes into which those Tempers are sorted comprise one file, each of which bears a place name: Dranesville, Allentown, Wellington, Cairns, Tumwater, Siena, Kingsport, Lexington, Astoria, Cold Harbor, so on and so forth.
Of these files, Cold Harbor bears the most significance to Lumon’s executive overlords. As Lumon lackey Mr. Drummond (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) tells severed-floor overseer Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman) in season 2, episode 5, the “completion of Cold Harbor will be remembered as one of the greatest moments in the history of this planet.”
Now that the file has indeed been completed, let’s break down what it signifies.
So, what is Cold Harbor?
Well, first and foremost, it’s the file Lumon enlists Mark S. (Adam Scott) to complete after he’s rewarded for finishing the Allentown file in season 1 (and, later, the Dranesville file). As Severance creator Dan Erickson told Variety in 2022, Mark came into MDR and was “inexplicably better at refining the files than others were—at least for that first file that he worked on, which was called ‘Allentown.’” Why might he have been so “inexplicably” good at refining Allentown? As the season 2 finale reveals, it’s because Mark has been “refining” the Four Tempers of his long-thought-deceased wife, Gemma (Dichen Lachman). Who better to navigate “a doorway into the mind of your Outie’s wife” than her grieving husband’s Innie?
In season 2, episode 7, we learn that every one of these MDR files has a corresponding room on Lumon’s Testing Floor, one level beneath the severed floor. On that Testing Floor, a very-much-alive Gemma is kept against her will. Each day, she wakes up, reads 50 pages of a book, does a calisthenics workout, and has her weight and vitals measured. She then visits a predetermined number of rooms, for which she wears a predetermined number of strange costumes. In each room, she becomes a different Innie. Each Innie has only ever experienced their respective room, and in all of the rooms, they are subjected to some form of discomfort. Allentown is a Christmas scene, in which one of Gemma’s Innies must endlessly write thank-you notes for holiday gifts. (Gemma, as an Outie, hates thank-you notes.) Wellington is a dentist’s office, where Gemma’s Innie must undergo two hours of painful treatment. As of episode 7, the only room she has yet to visit bears the name Cold Harbor.
When Gemma asks Doctor Mauer (Robby Benson) what will happen once she’s visited every room, he tells her, “You will see the world again, and the world will see you.”
“So, I’ll see Mark?” she asks.
“Mark will benefit from the world you’re siring,” he says. “Kier will take away all his pain, just as Kier has taken away yours.”
Finally, in the season 2 finale, Mark completes the Cold Harbor file and the door to the Cold Harbor room opens. Gemma walks inside and encounters a sterile white space holding only an infant’s crib, which she is tasked with dismantling. For this task, she’s dressed in the same clothes she wore on the night she disappeared—and the crib she encounters appears to be the one Mark purchased whilst they tried (and failed) to have a baby. All these parallels to Mark and Gemma’s Outie life points to Cold Harbor’s intent.
What is Cold Harbor’s purpose?
It seems that Lumon is using Gemma to test the severance chip’s ability to erase unpleasant life experiences. Every time an Outie wants to avoid discomfort or pain—such as might be caused in a dentist’s office or during plane turbulence—they can phase to an Innie, who must undergo the experience in their stead. By hopping from room to room and Innie to Innie, then checking to ensure she remembers nothing of the experience, Gemma is testing the severance chip’s limitations to perfect it for eventual commercial use.
Thus, Cold Harbor is the ultimate test: By confronting one of Gemma’s Innies with her Outie’s deepest trauma, Lumon can test the severance barrier’s capacity to separate a person from their most powerful emotions. If the chip can indeed disconnect Gemma from such a visceral source of pain, then it has the power to do more than eliminate commonplace discomforts: It could eliminate trauma and grief altogether. That, Lumon understands, is a multi-billion-dollar invention. No matter that each human being is a sum of their joys and their pains. No matter that thousands, if not millions, of Innies would be created to only know pain. Lumon is focused solely on profit.
Why was Gemma going to die after Mark completed Cold Harbor?
As we know from the season 2 finale, Gemma does not die after Mark completes the Cold Harbor file. Instead, his Innie and Outie collaborate to break her out of the Testing Floor and out of Lumon itself.
But Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) made it clear to Outie Mark that Gemma was intended to die. Why was this the case? Perhaps so that Lumon could cover its tracks: The company needed Gemma and Mark unknowingly working together in order to test the severance chip’s capacity. But Lumon couldn’t let Gemma walk free afterward, lest her kidnapping become public knowledge and Mark understand the extent of his employer’s betrayal. This solution, then, was to kill her (and fire Mark) after the experiments had concluded.
With Mark having interrupted the Cold Harbor proceedings, however, we can’t know where the status of their testing stands now. Might Lumon try to get Gemma back? Or will they trap Innie Mark on the Testing Floor to take her place? Is Cold Harbor really finished? We’ll have to wait until season 3 to be sure.
This story will be updated.
