Severance revolves around a group of people who have voluntarily undergone a medical procedure that makes them capable of dividing their consciousnesses in two. When they're at work, they remember nothing of who they are or what they've done in the outside world, and vice versa. Their work selves, or "innies," toil in the basement of Lumon Industries, in the Macrodata Refinement Department, where they stare at numbers on a screen until they feel a twinge of fear, and then isolate the grouping of numbers that inspired the feeling.
What does that do, exactly? They have no idea and neither to we. We have no idea what's at the end of the long dark hallway Irving (John Turturro) keeps drawing. We have no idea what happened to Mark's wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman), who has shown up in (we presume) severed form as a Lumon employee named Ms. Casey. We have no idea why there are goats running around the severed floor. There's a ton we don't know about just what Lumon is up to, but as of the second episode of Severance season 2, we can at least put a name to what we don't know: Cold Harbor.
As revealed to us by Helena Egan (Britt Lower), an influential figure within Lumon, Cold Harbor is the name of some project that Lumon is trying to complete. Typically, we don't know the details, but we know that they need Mark S. (Adam Scott) to complete it. After the MDR team rebelled against the higher-ups at Lumon in the season 1 finale, the company fired Mark's team members but retained him, and only brought them back when it became clear that he wouldn't progress with his work if they weren't there. He in particular is special. We just don't know why.
Let's speculate wildly about Cold Harbor
We do know that Lumon envisions a future where the severance technology goes mainstream. We've already seen a potential application for it: in the first season, the wife of a severance-friendly congressman seems to switch over to a severed personality so she can give labor, the wife coming back online later without having to deal with the pain of giving birth to a child. Of course, the severed person will have to deal with that pain instead. They may exist just to deal with it, which seems very cruel.
What are Lumon's ultimate plans for this technology? At this point, you can probably guess: we don't know. But the implications are pretty horrific. Perhaps Lumon wants to create a population of severed people who basically know nothing about the world, which is when they'll come in and help them fill in the gaps in a way that is very beneficial to Lumon. As for everything happening on the severed floor, it may be Lumon testing and refining the limits of the severance procedure; that way they'll better understand the technology before moving onto the next phase of their plan.
Perhaps "Cold Harbor" is the name they've given to the win state for their plan. As for why they need Mark specifically, I honestly don't know. It likely has something to do with why they've kept his wife around. We've seen a couple instances of Lumon manager Ms. Cobel (Patricia Arquette) watching to see if Mark S. and Ms. Casey recognize each other, so far to no avail. Perhaps getting them to recognize each other is key to Lumon fully understanding the severance technology.
Another idea could be that they want Mark to continue doing what he was doing in the first season and reaching out to other departments on the severed floor, joining everyone together in a kind of severed union. Lumon takes special care to make sure the various departments don't trust each other, but Mark and his friend have managed to overcome their blocks. Perhaps he's pushing their ideas of what a secrered person can do further than they thought possible, and they want to see where it goes.
But really, I'm speculating. The show is designed to be inscrutable and your guess is as good as mine. If you have one, leave it in the comments, because I will accept any ideas. I just want to know!
New episodes of Severance drop Fridays on Apple TV+. Bring on the answers, please.
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