SPOILER ALERT: This post contains major spoilers for the finale and entirety of Season 2 of Severance.
Some of the biggest questions underlying Season 2 of Apple TV+’s Severance revolve around the mysterious Cold Harbor. The nature of the title and what it represents also provides the key to a question posed from the pilot episode — what exactly are the Macrodata Refinement employees doing at Lumon?
The ominous name was first introduced in Episode 2 of the show’s second season, titled “Goodbye, Mrs. Selvig” when Helena Eagan (Britt Lower) stresses that Mark S. needs to finish his work on the file. The percentage of completion by Mark of the MDR file rose from 68% to 85% between Episodes 2 and 5, and as of the penultimate episode, it’s at 96% completion with Mark’s innie raring to finish sorting it.
Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) informed Mark in the ninth episode that Cold Harbor is the last file he will work on for Lumon. A momentary relief for him came when she declared that if he had finished refining the numbers, his wife Gemma Scout (Dichen Lachman) would already by dead. The finale of Severance Season 2 finally answered what the intimidating project was, but not exactly the overall aim of it.
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“The Cold Harbor experiment, we don’t quite know what the purpose of it is, but we do get the sense that [Gemma]’s been severed into, like, a number of different consciousnesses,” director and producer Ben Stiller told Deadline. “It’s something that’s very important to Lumon, and what that is, I think we don’t quite know yet. I do think it sets up, obviously, the stakes of what they’re doing down there.”
Episode 9 also revealed that the MDR files Mark has been sorting each correspond to a room downstairs below the Severed floor on the Testing floor, where Gemma is being experimented upon, as shown in her standalone episode “Chikhai Bardo,” a nod to a Buddhist term referring to the moment immediately following death. A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpse of all 25 files Mark has been working toward completing suggests Gemma has had 25 innies replicated, all immune to certain types of emotional pain.
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“We left some of it up to interpretation on purpose,” series creator Dan Erickson said of Cold Harbor. “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.”
Specific examples in Episode 7 provided context for the big Cold Harbor reveal in the finale. Gemma’s dental work in the Wellington room, the physical toothache of which lingers even after she has exited that room and left that Wellington innie behind, as well as the after-effect of a sore hand or wrist from Allentown, the room in which she writes thank you notes, suggest that physical pain stored in the body can transcend the severed barriers. Mental trauma, however, is a completely different story, and it seems that “Kier’s eternal war on pain” is targeted specifically to avoid grief.
“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 added. “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.”
The climactic Cold Harbor room into which Gemma enters — watched by Drummond, Dr. Mauer (Robbie Benson) and Jame Eagan (Michael Siberry) himself, as part of an “Efficacy Test” — presents her 25th consciousness with the task of dismantling a wooden crib like the one shown in Episode 7 when Mark bought it on sale ahead of their attempts to conceive a child. Many eagle-eyed viewers pointed out that the label on the crib’s box spelled out “Col D’Arbor.” The crib’s test of the severance barrier harkens back to Gemma’s miscarriage in Episode 7, and even Billie Holiday’s “I’ll Be Seeing You,” is played as another sensory memory jog attempt to test the divide between her outie and this new iterations.
The application of the completed 25 MDR files was left unclear, though fans have their theories, a popular one being to somehow reincarnate Kier Eagan, the founder of Lumon. While the extension of the experiment itself has yet to be scene, viewers can finally start to grasp what exactly it is that the severed employees are doing for Lumon, and the answer is chilling indeed.
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The post ‘Severance’ Creator Dan Erickson, Director Ben Stiller Explain Cold Harbor Following Season 2 Finale appeared first on Deadline.
