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.
