Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Season 2 finale of Severance.
The work is mysterious and important. And apparently involves severing your long-lost wife into a completely new person—or several people—who doesn’t remember anything about herself or the life you once shared together.
After years of waiting and wondering—at least for those who watched Season 1 when it first came out—the Severance Season 2 finale finally gave us some insight into the truth about Cold Harbor and what Lumon was really doing to Gemma (Dichen Lachman)…although it definitely didn’t answer all of our questions.
As Ms. Cobel (Patricia Arquette) explained to innie Mark (Adam Scott) after he became frustrated with his outie’s demands (i.e. that he terminate his existence and end his own love story in service of his outie’s own life and love), the numbers he’d been refining for the past two years were a “doorway” into Gemma’s mind. “What do you see every day when you look at them?” she asks him. “What do you feel?…Woe. Frolic. Malice. Dread…[The clusters are] her tempers. The building blocks of her mind…Every file you’ve completed is a new consciousness for her. A new innie…Cold Harbor is the last.”
Later, after innie Mark reluctantly completed the file with Helly (Britt Lower) watching anxiously over his shoulder, we saw Dr. Mauer (Robby Benson) and Mr. Drummond (Olafur Darri Ólafsson) finally send Gemma into the Cold Harbor room on the testing floor, wearing the clothes she wore in real life on the night she supposedly died. Once inside, her 25th and final innie form was instructed to disassemble the same crib she and Mark had planned to use for the baby they’d hoped for, a task seemingly put before her to plumb the deepest depths of her past memories and traumas in order to make absolutely sure her severed innies had no trace of emotions leftover from her outie.
However, before she could take apart the last piece, the duo of innie and outie Mark making their way, past many threats, to the Cold Harbor room stopped the process in its tracks. Despite the fact that he was covered in Mr. Drummond’s blood and holding the gun he’d unwittingly used to kill the Lumon security chief, enough of the original Gemma was left to intrinsically trust Mark and choose to go with him.
Given Mr. Drummond’s conversation with head of the Mammalians Nurturable department Lorne (Gwendoline Christie) earlier in the episode, we know that, upon the completion of Cold Harbor, Lumon was planning to “entomb” Gemma with her own personal sacrificial goat so that it could guide her spirit “to Kier’s door.” Whatever that means.
But if Lumon went through with all of this just to ultimately kill Gemma anyways, it begs the question of why they’re doing it in the first place. What’s the ultimate endgame of creating these totally detached innies? And how does it all connect back to Kier and the Eagans? Fans have theorized around the creation of an uber-efficient workforce or of some sort of manufactured heaven on Earth that would allow Lumon’s customers to sever themselves from every negative experience, but answers remain elusive.
In Episode 7, Mr. Drummond stated the completion of Cold Harbor would result in “one of the greatest moments in the history of this planet.” As for what that moment is, it seems like we won’t be getting any more insight until Season 3. Let’s just hope we don’t have to wait three years this time.
