Severance Season 2: What Is Cold Harbor?

Now that Season 2 of "Severance" has come to a close — and executive producer and director Ben Stiller has promised we won't have to wait another interminable three years for the next go-around — let's dive into some of the major mysteries presented throughout this season. Specifically, let's talk about Cold Harbor. What is it? Why is it important?

Hold on! Let's back up for one second and go over the essentials of "Severance." Created by Dan Erickson, the series is set in a world where you can "sever" yourself, meaning that your "innie" goes to work — at Lumon Industries, the company that created the procedure — while your "outie" lives in the real world. By splitting yourself in two, you can avoid unpleasant things like your job, dentist appointments, turbulence on flights, or even the act of childbirth ... if you're the "outie," that is. If you're an "innie," you're going through all of that and you're not even really considered a person by any "outies," despite the fact that you are living and breathing with your own unique habits, memories, and thoughts.

The point here is that the severance procedure is ... not supposed to look fun, cool, or even good in the slightest, and this is precisely what Mark Scout (Adam Scott) discovers at the end of Season 2 when he has an argument with his "innie" (and, ultimately, when his "innie" makes a major decision that will adversely affect his "outie" in a big, big way when the show does return for Season 3). This brings us back to the mysteries of Cold Harbor, a project first mentioned in the series' inaugural season that finally got some clarification in the Season 2 finale, aptly named "Cold Harbor."

Throughout the second season of "Severance," we learn that Cold Harbor is the name of a macrodata refinement project spearheaded by Mark Scout's "innie" Mark S., and we also slowly learn that a lot of the projects in this particular department at the (largely mysterious) Lumon Industries are named for towns and cities (others include Allentown, Zurich, Cork, and Wellington). Then, in the standout Season 2 episode "Chikhai Bardo," we finally see behind a few of the doors named for Mark's projects — specifically, Allentown, Dranesville, and Wellington — and learn that Mark's real-life wife Gemma, played by the incomparable Dichen Lachmann, didn't die in a car accident (as Mark's "outie" believes; his grief over Gemma's apparent death is what sparked his interest in the severance procedure). 

The real Gemma — whose "innie" is Lumon's wellness counselor Ms. Casey — is trapped on a testing floor in the bowels of Lumon, where she visits different rooms and is subjected to situations that range from mildly unpleasant to flat-out torture. In Allentown, she's forced to write endless thank-you notes; not only does Gemma hate writing thank-you notes (which we learn via flashback), but she appears to be writing them with her non-dominant hand until it cramps. In Wellington, she goes to the dentist, and in Dranesville, she's on board for a very turbulent flight. Again, all of these names correspond to Mark's different projects, so we eventually realize that Cold Harbor is the final boss, so to speak — and it's the last thing Gemma will have to endure to test the limits of the severance procedure. 

What this means is that they want to ensure that severed people experience absolutely zero remaining connections between their "innies" and "outies," and when we learn what Cold Harbor really is, it all clicks into place. 

It's important to note that, throughout the back half of Season 2 of "Severance," every higher-up at Lumon, from Mr. Drummond (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) to Mr. Milchick (Trammell Tillman) to Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette), is obsessed with the idea of Mark completing the Cold Harbor file, but we don't know why. Again, this comes up in "Chikhai Bardo," the Season 2 episode that explains what's been happening to Gemma since her "death." As a married couple who didn't partake in the severance procedure, Mark and Gemma have trouble conceiving, and in one of the series' most heartbreaking experiences to date, Gemma experiences a miscarriage. Afterwards, Mark violently breaks apart the crib they built for their baby.

When Mark — who, through a series of frankly insane events, manages to send his "outie" to the testing floor — finds Gemma, she's being forced to take apart the very same crib. This points, yet again, to the idea that Lumon is trying to create a version of severance that's so air-tight that nobody will ever have to experience any sort of negative feeling ever again, so they force Gemma's "innie" to participate in something incredibly traumatic to ensure that she doesn't remember it. 

In an interview after the Season 2 finale of "Severance" aired, Dan Erickson weighed in on the Cold Harbor of it all. "What we had seen previously in the season, was Gemma being put in these different rooms and having these different innies who are going through all of these different torments," Erickson told Deadline. "I think that what makes the Cold Harbor room different is that there she is. She is doing something that calls back to a very painful element of her Outie life, and so as opposed to seeing 'Does the pain transfer from the innie to the outie?' we seem to be sort of looking at the reverse here now in terms of what that means and why that's important. I think there's a lot of room for conversation there."

Still, Erickson was careful to note that we still don't know everything about Cold Harbor or, really, any of Lumon's incredible messed-up experiments. "We left some of it up to interpretation on purpose," Erickson clarified. "We didn't want to sort of walk people through exactly what was being tested and why. In part, because such a big part of this, of this show, has become the conversations that take place after the fact, and so we trusted that people would think about it and would talk about it, and would have different ideas about it, and that would just make it that much richer."

You can stream the first two seasons of "Severance" on Apple TV+ now.