Severance Season 2's Project Cold Harbor, Explained

This article contains spoilers for the entirety of "Severance" season 2.

"Severance" fans are back in the waiting period — that torturous time between prestige TV seasons that seems to get longer and longer as budgets balloon and the production apparatus of streaming originals grows even more gargantuan. Hopefully, we won't repeat the three-year wait between seasons 1 and 2, but even with a shorter gap, there's plenty of time for fans to stew on the big reveals from the end of "Severance" season 2 — specifically, the mysterious "Cold Harbor" initiative.

Cold Harbor is the shadow looming over Lumon for all of season 2 — a foreboding phrase that we ultimately learn has to do with Mark Scout (Adam Scott) and his thought-to-be-dead-but-is-actually-alive-and-a-test-subject-for-Lumon wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman). It's the name of the Macrodata Refinement file Mark has been working on — one that is revealed at the end of season 2 to be a collection of emotional responses recorded on Gemma.

What we know, essentially, is this: Lumon is testing the principle of severing individual people numerous times over. Gemma seems to be ground-zero for these experiments, and we learn that she has been split a ton of times, with each new personality facing different emotional stressors, which are subsequently sorted by Mark. Why exactly the sorter needs to be someone who knows her well is unclear, as is the full extent of the Cold Harbor project beyond Gemma. But there are a number of clues woven throughout the season that give us some good material to go on.

The best theory we have so far is that Lumon's proclaimed goal is to effectively erase suffering by severing it away into slave personas. Lumon heir Helena Eagan, also known by her severed persona of Helly R. (Britt Lower), has a couple of encounters with her father, Lumon CEO Jame Eagan (Michael Siberry), that point to that end. At one point in the season 2 finale, the imposing Mr. Drummond (Darri Ólafsson) refers to company founder Kier Eagan's "eternal war against pain."

The cult of Kier, which has been unraveled slowly over the course of the show, has its basis in a theory of human emotion and behavior called the "four tempers": frolic, dread, woe, and malice. Or, to put it less creepily, joy, fear, sadness, and anger. These are the four "boxes" that the MDR team sorts "macrodata" into — data that seems to be brain activity reflecting emotional distress or excitement. The final "test" that Gemma experiences in the "Severance" season 2 finale brings her face-to-face with her most traumatic experiences (her failed attempts to have a child), and the severance seems to hold, keeping all negative connotations in her mind at bay.

That's all well and good, but it doesn't explain why Gemma and Mark are so uniquely important, nor why a group that claims to hate pain seems totally fine dumping it onto manufactured alternate personalities who will experience it all the same.

The implication with the MDR reveal is that macrodata refinement essentially creates severed personas. It's these new personalities that Mark is "sorting" and "completing," and Gemma then experiences them. That raises the question, though: Is every severed personality created in this way, by an MDR team? If so, how was the first severance achieved? And what makes the case of Gemma and Mark so exceptionally important to the higher-ups at Lumon?

The implication seems to be that after completion of the Cold Harbor file, Gemma is meant to be killed and her chip extracted for further research. This implies that no other test subject has gone as far through the multiple-severance process as effectively as she has. But we also know that there are MDR teams around the world, as Lumon is a global company. We even meet some of those employees at the beginning of "Severance" season 2.

Fans have many theories about the end goal of the Cold Harbor research, with the consensus being that Lumon hopes to sell severance as a consumer product. In essence, they want normal people to all live severed lives, cutting off any piece of themselves that induces pain or strife and pasting it onto a severed persona. This plan seems poorly conceived, to say the least, as the logistics of switching back and forth between severed personalities is incredibly complicated. It also has major moral implications, though the culty company certainly doesn't seem to care about that.

With "Severance" season 3 on the way, it hopefully won't be too long before more details about Cold Harbor and Lumon's dark plans are revealed.