The mystery surrounding 'Cold Harbor' continues to unravel in Severance Season 2.
Thus far the hit thriller's return to Apple TV+, fans have gotten more questions than answers after Mark S (Adam Scott) and his team of mentally-severed coworkers got their message to the outside world at the end of Season 1.
One of the key conundrums from Season 2 so far has been where Mark's dead wife is, and does it have anything to do with why his employer Lumon needs him back at work so quickly?
Cold Harbor Continues Coming Up
Season 2 of Apple TV+'s Severance series has not been subtle in its reference to something known as 'Cold Habor.'
The phrase first appeared at the end of Episode 1, popping up on a split-second shot of what seemed to be a screen featuring Mark S's thought-to-be-dead wife/the Lumon innie guidance counselor Ms. Casey (played by Dichen Lachman).
At the top of the screen in this shot, the words "Cold Harbor" can be seen overlayed onto whatever this close-up of Ms. Casey's face may be.
The phrase was brought up again in Episode 2, as Britt Lower's Helly (who lied to her innie coworkers at the end of the last episode), explains to her cohorts in Lumon management that she "needs Mark S back to work long enough to complete Cold Harbor:"
"I don't need chemistry. I need Mark S back to work long enough to complete Cold Harbor."
Thus far mentions of the phrase have come with little explanation, just that it seems to be a Lumon project and Adam Scott's Macrodata Refinement (MDR) manager is key in making it happen.
What Exactly Is Cold Harbor in Severance Season 2?
This is where the speculation wheels start to turn. Seeing as no solid description of what Cold Harbor is and why it is so important to Lumon has been given, it is hard to provide a solid answer as to what it means for the series.
Some seem to think Cold Harbor is simply the name of the new file Mark S and his team are working on. Cold Harbor is famously a real-life place in the United States, situated in northeast Virginia. It was the place of a famous Civil War battle that took place in the Summer of 1864.
A previous file Mark mentioned in Season 1 was the file, which also is a real-life U.S. location, potentially pointing to the files in the series being named after real-life American places. However, this does little to explain why Lumon management would be so hell-bent on making sure Mark S and his team complete it.
It could be simply because Mark is an accomplished MDR specialist and they know that no one else could complete the file without his help, but it feels like there may be something even deeper than that at play here.
Lumon has proven it is not afraid of venturing into the world of the bizarre (just look at the goats in Season 1 and the introduction of Ms. Huang in Season 2), and this Cold Harbor project could be the key to the company's most preposterous venture yet.
As pondered by a fan on the Severance subreddit, this Cold Harbor project could potentially be Lumon dipping their toes into cloning, perhaps to revive their once-great founder Kier Eagan.
This would justify the goats in Season 1 as cloning experiments have long started with farm animals such as goats before. It could also explain how Mark's wife has seemingly returned from the dead as Ms. Casey.
Perhaps Lumon collected Mark's wife's corpse from the scene of her death, attempting to clone her for their own use. However, as evidenced by Ms. Casey's unusual demeanor in Season 1, the cloning process may have not gone 100% right.
Lending further credence to this theory is the fact that the screen with Ms. Casey's face that flashes in Season 2's premiere includes supposed references to things like a build number and data packets (via Reddit).
These are all terms used in programming, potentially pointing to the iterative process that would come with an AI cloning project at Lumon.
Maybe Cold Harbor is helping to perfect a sort of algorithm that would produce an exact clone of Kier with his emotions all sorted and everything, and it is Mark's acumen in MDR that is needed to solve the file as soon as possible.
Or could Mark S have also died in the car accident with his wife, and he has been selected as a cloning host as well, with his outie potentially being the clone of Kier himself? That may seem far-fetched, but the series has proven it is not afraid of a wild twist or two, so it is not completely out of the picture.
Severance Season 2 continues with new episodes debuting every Friday on Apple TV+.
