Severance fans, I’m sure you’re feeling like you could fill a notebook with theories right now. I would easily spend all day sitting here and questioning the Apple TV+ series until we’re uncertain that anyone in Macrodata Refinement is even alive anymore. So to keep us on track after the first two exciting episodes, let’s focus on Cold Harbor.
When Mark S. (Adam Scott) and his Severance team sit down to resume work on their mysterious number-sorting project, an image flashes onto Mark’s screen showing his wife, Gemma (Dichen Lachman)—AKA Ms. Casey, the wellness counselor. There’s a file name at the top that reads “COLD HARBOR,” along with many other symbols and data points showing that Mark is 68 percent complete.
We’ve seen the names of other files before. As fans may recall, Mark S. was rewarded for completing a file named Allentown back in season 1. “There’s a whole backstory there that is just kind of alluded to,” creator Dan Erickson told Variety three years ago. “The idea is that Mark came in and he was inexplicably better at refining the files than others were, at least for that first file that he worked on, which was called Allentown. Each of the files has a different name and we generally went with place names. Mark came in and was able to really quickly refine this file and then they were able to reverse engineer a better procedure from what he did. We don’t get into it super far, but the idea is that he is kind of Cobel’s golden boy in that way because he came in and sort of had this great success.”
It seems from Erickson’s explanation that each file name may not point toward the corresponding geographical place. Cold Harbor is a real town in Virginia, but Severance isn’t exactly clear about where anyone lives. For example: the company’s town is located in Kier, PE. That’s not a state I’ve ever heard of before! What is PE? It’s possible that Cold Harbor is just the name of the file—and nothing more. As we already know, Cold Harbor was also the working title for the series while the team filmed season 2 in Canada.
Following episode 2, what we now know for sure is that nothing matters on the severed floor as much as Mark S.’s progress on Cold Harbor. As Helena says in the second episode, “We don’t need chemistry. We need Mark S. back to work. Long enough to complete Cold Harbor.” To peel apart what Cold Harbor refers to, let’s look at the many symbols and pieces of information from the image of Ms. Casey.
Mark S. is 68% complete through his file of “Cold Harbor,” which appears to have some connection to his wife, Gemma.
For starters, there’s seemingly a heart rate monitor that reads 80 beats per minute. There are also images of what appears to be cells forming—as well as a temperature reading indicating 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. What’s going on here? Is Lumon keeping track of Ms. Casey’s vitals… wherever she is now?
A lot of this information really supports the popular fan theory that the severed floor is perfecting cloning technology. Goats are quite synonymous with cloning. It’s not a huge jump to say that MDR certainly seems like they’re identifying and sorting out abnormalities in genetic code.
If you look even closer towards the top of the image of Mark’s computer, you can read out “ITNO: 25.00 (BUILD).” Our best guess is that this stands for “iteration number 25,” which Mark S. is currently 68 percent of the way through building.
There are also five sorting bins at the bottom of the screen, each labeled with four categories: “WO, DR, FC, and MA.” Many eagle-eyed Severance fans have already connected these to a quote from Lumon Industries founder Kier Eagan. As he states in season 1, “Each man’s character is defined by the precise ratio that resides in him. Woe, Frolic, Dread, Malice.” He named these four principles his “tempers.” There’s also a scene in which Ms. Cobel reads from Eagan’s saying, including the quote: “Tame in me the tempers four, that I may serve thee evermore.”
Is it possible that sorting the correct ratio of these tempers is essential to the severed floor’s work? Are they crafting artificial intelligence for cloning purposes, or perhaps even creating a soul?
What happened to Ms. Casey?
If you ask Adam Scott, cloning doesn’t really excite him as the answer. “This sounds like what Lumon would be doing in a super boring version of Severance,” he told Entertainment Weekly right before season 2’s premiere.
Still, Severance theorizers may not be too far off. Maybe Kier Eagan is attempting to play God by becoming immortal. As the quote reads, “Tame in me the tempers four, that I may serve thee evermore.” The key word here is “evermore,” as is forever. Is Lumon trying to resurrect Kier? Is Mark S. is perfecting the process by trying to bring Gemma back to life as a severed employee? Maybe that’s why we’re looking at iteration number twenty-five, or why Ms. Casey is no longer working on the severed floor.
“It all comes back to Kier Eagan, who is the founder of the company, and basically this idea that everything they’re doing is to fulfill this vision that he had, that he wanted to enact,” Erickson said in his interview with Variety. “It all comes back to this weird quasi-religious, quasi-cult like reverence that everyone has for the late founder of the company.”
Fans have yet to figure out what MDR is doing on the severed floor, he continued. “That’s something that we still don’t know,” Erickson teased. “I mean, I know.”
Stick with us as season 2 continues, as we’ll surely revisit and adapt our theory. We feel close, readers! Really close.
