What is Cold Harbor? What's with the goats? What really happened to Gemma? What is Lumon Industries up to? What does it all mean?
These are just a few of the questions that occur to Severance fans during any given moment of the show. The knotty sci-fi office drama has fascinated fans since its very first episode dropped on Apple TV+ back in 2022. Now that we're approaching the end of the second season, speculation is at a fever pitch.
In this post, we'll go over some of the biggest theories out there that explain the who, what, and why of Severance, all so we can be proven wrong in the coming weeks. Let's dive in!
"The whole world is Lumon"
Let's start with a broad question: where does Severance take place? Well, somewhere cold, obviously; whenever we venture outside the Lumon offices, it's frigid out. The two where the Lumon officers are located is called "Kier," named after Kier Eagan, the founder of Lumon. We learn that Mark used to teach at a college in the nearby town of Ganz. In the fourth episode of season 2, the Innies are taken on a retreat to the Dieter Eagan National Forest. None of these are real places.
Both Ganz and the two of Kier are located in a state abbreviated as "PE." There is no such state in our world. It gets weirder. The Lumon introductory video says that the company has branches in "all 206 countries" around the world. Right now, the world only has 197 independent states in it.
The conclusion most have come to is that while Severance takes place in a world that's like our own, it's not our own. It's a kind of parallel dimension where everything is a bit off. Lutheranism exists in this world. The music of Gordon Lightfoot exists. But no one seems to have a smartphone. All the cars look like they're from the 1970s. Speaking of cars, a lot of license plates we see have a picture of Kier on them along with the Latin phrase” “Remedium Hominibus,” which translates to “A Cure for Mankind.” In this world, the religion of Kier is practiced far and wide.
Lumon itself is also embedded into everything. Future newlyweds Mark and Gemma meet while giving blood, and the medical equipment bears a Lumon logo. "The whole world is Lumon," said Dichen Lachman, who plays Gemma. "Even [the restaurant] Pip’s is owned by Lumon."
Being set in an alternate reality gives Severance a little more room to maneuver. The rules may not be quite the same as they are in our world.
Lumon has been manipulating Mark and Gemma for a very long time
At the start of the series, we learned that Mark, the main character, voluntarily got himself severed to deal with the grief of losing his wife Gemma, who died in a car accident. In the episode "Chikhai Bardo," we find out that Gemma has been alive this whole time, kept in deep sub-basement below the Lumon building, where she's subjected to a variety of experiments.
We don't know exactly how Gemma ended up there, but the closer fans study the episode, the more it looks like everything that happened was by Lumon's design. We see that Mark and Gemma are having trouble conceiving. They visit a clinic which is, of course, run by Lumon. For a split second, we see Dr. Mauer (Robby Benson) walk by; he's the same doctor who will experiment on Gemma much later in the offices under the Lumon building, where she's basically held as a prisoner.
"They’ve definitely been watching them for a long time," Lachman said. "My theory is that it has something to do with Lumon deciding to pick this couple and monitor them. You also see Dr. Mauer [Robby Benson] at the fertility clinic — he just walks by...My theory is that they picked something up with Gemma’s blood work when she went to the fertility clinic, and that’s got something to do with why they picked Mark and Gemma."
After that, Lumon starts closing in. The episode gets its title, "Chikhai Bardo," from some cards depicting body movements that Gemma gets in the mail. In an earlier episode, the innie worker Dylan G. swipes these same cards from the Optics and Design department, theorizing that they're guides to some kind of paramilitary fighting style. Apparently they're actually about "ego death," but the point is that they're proprietary Lumon artifacts.
So Gemma and Mark go to the Lumon clinic to get help having a baby, Lumon decides she's a good candidate for whatever experiments they're performing, and they go about planning to fake her death. Gemma suffers her "car crash" when driving to (or from) a party one night. Mark even positively IDs her body, which means Lumon went above and beyond to make it look real. "My theory is that they gave her some Shakespearean potion, that Lumon has made salves and balms and stuff," Lachman said. "Maybe it’s something that stops your heartbeat and breathing for enough time to fake her death."
As for why Lumon wanted Gemma, let's get into those experiments...
What is Lumon doing to Gemma, and why are they doing it?
Mark and the other Lumon employees in the Macrodata Refinement department — Dylan, Irving and Helly — have all been severed but once. So when they're at work, their Innie personalities are in charge. When they're at home, their true personalities — their Outies — run the show. But on the testing floor where Gemma is being held captive, things are different. She has been severed many, many times, and has potentially dozens of personalities knocking around inside her.
A typical day for Gemma involves her going into a variety of rooms with names like Cairns, Dranesville and Siena, each of which corresponds to a project worked on by the Macrodata Refinement team. Whenever Gemma enters a new room, one of her severed personalities comes online, and then has to undergo some unpleasant experience. These severed personalities are only online when she's in these rooms, meaning that there's a version of Gemma whose entire existence is going to the dentist, or writing thank-you notes until her hand cramps, or suffering through a turbulent flight. Because of how severance works, the original Gemma doesn't remember any of this when she exists each room, but her many Innies are being tortured.
So what is Lumon doing here? The answers seems pretty obvious: they're testing how far they can push the severance technology. That's why Dr. Mauer and the nurse are always asking Gemma how she feels after she exists the rooms; they're trying to see if anything from her Innie's experience has bled over.
Now, let's revisit how each other rooms corresponds to a project being worked on by the Macrodata Refinement department. Although they don't understand what they're doing, Mark and other MDR employees sit at their computers all day, staring at sets of floating numbers until they feel scared. Then they isolate the offending numbers, the "bad data," and put them in a little bin at the corner of their screen.
My theory is that the numbers are representations of the data collected whenever Gemma (and potentially other test subjects) does something in one of those rooms. Although the exact details are slippery, by "refining" that data, MRD is fine-tuning the severance technology. They're making sure there's as little crossover as possible between an Innie's experience and an Outie's, even when the Innie experiences something very unpleasant.
The end goal seems clear: Lumon could create a severance chip that, when implanted, could enable the user to switch over to another version of themselves whenever they were about to undergo an unpleasant experience. Then, once the experience is over, it would switch back automatically. This means a whole life never having to do anything you don't want to do. You simply switch over to your Innie and come back to yourself when it's over.
Of course, that also means you're basically creating a slave who shares your body whose entire life is pain, but no one ever said Lumon was responsible.
What is Cold Harbor?
There's only one room on the testing floor that Gemma hasn't been inside: Cold Harbor. That's also the name of a project that Mark S is working on up in Macrodata Refinement. And it's not just any project: everyone at Lumon is working hard to make sure he finishes, since apparently it's a job only he can do. After he's done, we're told something magnificent, great, and terrible will happen, but we don't know what.
All of the other rooms on the testing floor force Gemma's many Innies to undergo an unpleasant experience. So what's inside the Cold Harbor room? A popular theory among fans is that, once Gemma enters Cold Harbor, she'll be put at risk of imminent death. If the severance technology holds even in those most extreme of circumstances, Lumon will know that its product is airtight and ready to ship.
According to the theory, the death scenario may involve drowning; at one point, the nurse asks Gemma whether she'd be more afraid to drown or suffocate, and Gemma picks drowning. Another theory is that Cold Harbor will involve someone else's death, possibly Mark's; perhaps they want to test whether the severance technology would still hold if an Innie is exposed to the death of someone very close to their Outie.
There are issues with this theory. For one, if MDR is refining data gathered from Gemma's experiences in the rooms, and if Cold Harbor is the one room she hasn't been in, how is it that Mark has working on the Cold Harbor file this entire time? Maybe he's setting up the room somehow, and his connection to Gemma gives him an edge.
Miss Huang is Mark and Gemma's daughter
Season 2 introduced a new mystery: who is Miss Huang (Sarah Bock), the teenage deputy manager of the severed floor? How is it okay for a literal child to manage all these people?
We are not told where Miss Huang came from, although some fans were quick to guess that she's actually Mark and Gemma's daughter. We know the couple was trying to conceive and having difficulty, and we don't know quite how long ago they put a pin in that plan.
Dichen Lachman has heard about this theory, although she has some misgivings about it. "I have seen that. I don’t blame people for having that theory, because when Mark looks at her in the first episode [of Season 2], there is some sort of flash, isn’t there?" she said. "Initially, I even wondered if she had something to do with Gemma. I wasn’t 100% sure. I didn’t ever get to ask, but I don’t know whether I like or dislike that theory. I can see why people might think there is a link."
"The time frame would be off, because of her age. But it is interesting: why would a young teenager be in this place? Why isn’t she in school? It does raise a lot of questions. Sarah is an extraordinary actress. She did such a wonderful job, and the ambiguity there is really intense."
Indeed, the timeline is off; we don't know exactly how long ago Mark and Gemma were trying to get pregnant, but it doesn't seem like it was 14 years ago. And you'd figure they would remember Gemma being pregnant and losing the child; we see her miscarry in a flashback, but she isn't very far along. It's possible that Lumon severed them both and that neither of them knew about Gemma giving birth to Miss Huang, but that seems like a big stretch.
More likely, Miss Huang is just a child raised in the cult of Kier, much like how Harmony Cobel was; we know she was working for Lumon at a very young age, with her friend from her hometown describing what they did as "child labor." We know that Miss Huang is a “Wintertide Fellow,” which definitely sounds like a program Lumon would come up with.
It's all about the clones
There's another theory that Miss Huang is not Gemma's child but rather her clone. In fact, there's a lot of talk about cloning among the Severance fandom, although it mostly feels to me more like a loose association of references than a coherent theory.
One Redditor posits that Lumon is cloning people, perhaps in an attempt to bring back the late members of the Eagan family, stretching all the way back to Kier Eagan himself. You know how there are a bunch of goats in the Mammalians Nurturable department in the Lumon building? The goat milk, the theory goes, would be used to feed the baby clones, goat milk being pretty similar to human milk.
There are other references to birth and lactation throughout the show, like Harmony Cobel posing as a lactation consultant for Mark's sister in the first season, or the governor's wife using the severance procedure so she doesn't have to experience childbirth. But again, those feel more like loose associations to me, not a theory.
Perhaps it's less about cloning than using the severance technology to somehow revive the consciousness of the deceased Eagan family members; one Redditor noticed that, during the experiments on the testing floor, Gemma is dressed like some of the women of the Kier family as we saw them in Lumon's Perpetuity Wing. Yet another theory posits that the goats are somehow used to store the consciousness of Innies.
How would that work? I have no idea, but I'm not prepared to rule anything out on this show. Still, this next theory is a little more solid:
Irving's Outie took a job at Lumon specifically to investigate the company
Let's talk about Irving for a minute. At the start of the show, of all the employees in the MDR, he's the one most dedicated to Lumon and Kier. By the end of the first season, after his passionate affair with Burt, he hates Lumon more than any of them.
In the season 1 finale, Irving's Innie wakes up in his Outie's home, where he sees that Irving has been obsessively painting a long dark hallway we now know to be the path to the testing floor where Gemma is being held. This obsession is so powerful that even Irving's Innie feels it, like when he hallucinates black paint oozing onto his desk. Fans theorize that this is exactly what Irving's Outie wants to happen.
According to this theory, Irving's Outie already knew about the testing floor and joined the company specifically so he could get inside and investigate. We know that Irving was in the navy, which means he may have facility with codes, which can help explain how he can get messages to his Innie when others, like Mark, have had difficulty with that.
Why is Irving doing this? In the season 1 finale, we see Irving's Innie open a trunk containing old navy medals, articles about Lumon mistreating workings, and a photo of his father, who was also in the military. Fans thinks that Irving's father may have been subjected inhuman treatment that Gemma is suffering on the testing floor, that Irving knows about it, and is trying to infiltrate the company to get justice.
Irving has accomplices; on two occasions, we see him talking about his mission in a phone booth to some mysterious person on the other end of the line. We don't know who that person is yet. Perhaps it's Ms. Cobel, a former Lumon employee who seems to be turning on the company?
Burt is a Lumon official working to sabotage Irving's plan
Irving's Innie turned against Lumon after striking up a romance with Burt, another severed worker; after Lumon fired Burt, purportedly because of this "romantic entanglement," Irving quickly soured on the company.
Now, Irving and Burt's Outies have met. First, Irving's Innie showed up at Burt's house pounding on the door, lovesick and in pain. Later, Burt's Outie stalks Irving's Outie and invites him to dinner with him and his husband Fields.
Burt claims he's just curious to meet the Outie of the person who got him fired, but fans think there might be more to it; Burt was tailing Irving with what seemed like more than personal curiosity, and there are some inconsistencies in the stories that he and Fields tell at dinner. For instance, Fields first says that Burt had worked at Lumon for 20 years, but Irving points out that the severance procedure has only existed for 12 years. Burt waves it away as an innocent mistake, but fans wonder: Is Burt more ensconced at Lumon than he lets on?
Perhaps Burt has been a faithful Lumon company man for a long time, and is interacting with Irving specifically to throw off his investigation. While Irving is dining with Burt and Fields, Lumon security operative Mr. Drummond breaks into Irving's empty apartment and rummages around while Irving is away; it's hard to believe that's a coincidence.
What is the board?
Lumon is controlled by a mysterious board who have appeared only in the form of an intercom with a camera. They make their wishes known through a Lumon employee named Natalie, who hears them through an earpiece and relays what they say.
There are no shortage of theories about the board. If they're like a normal board, they're a bunch of people who control the direction of the company; Lumon CEO James Eagan, Helly's father, could be on it. The congressman who's wife was severed so she would have an easier time giving birth could be on. Some fans think Rickon Hale is on it.
But the board is treated with an extreme level of mystery and dread, so it just being a collection of people seems a bit too simple. Some fans think that's it's an artificial intelligence directing the company to a point where they can use severance chips to control every person on Earth. Perhaps this AI is modeled after deceased members of the Kier family, or Kier Eagan himself.
Then there's Natalie herself. Some fans think that she isn't just relaying what the board says, but is actually being controlled by them via a specialized severance chip. But I think it's more likely that she's just another religious zealot in thrall to Kier, which is why she seems so eerily calm and robot-like.
The meaning and message of Severance
We've talked a lot about the specifics of Severance, but what overall is it tryin to say? I like what one Redditor has to say about how the show relates to The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a novella by Leo Tolstoy that Gemma was teaching in her class. Later, Dr. Mauer dismisses the novella as unimportant.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich is about a man who spends most of his time climbing the social ladder, only to contract a serious illness and realize that he's been living an inauthentic life. According to the CliffsNotes, the novellas "argues that it is possible to find meaning and clarity through suffering, but only by embracing it and allowing it to strip away illusions."
This relates to the situation in Severance, where Lumon is trying to create a world where no one ever has to suffer. That has some benefits, but it would lead to people living frictionless, inauthentic lives. Characters like Mark are running away from their pain by getting severed, but the way to an authentic life may be through the pain, rather than around it.
Will any of these theories prove remotely true? New episodes of Severance drop Thursday nights on Apple TV+.
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