What Exactly Is ‘Cold Harbor,’ and Other Severance Questions

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Seven Severance Questions is a weekly attempt to digest the events of one of television’s twistiest shows by highlighting the weirdest, most confusing, and most important unresolved issues after each episode. There will be theories. Many will be unhinged.

Well, that answers some of our questions from last week. Not all, but some. And it raises a bunch of new ones, too. Severance will do that.

“Goodbye, Mrs. Selvig,” the second episode of season two, takes us into the Outies’ world to see what transpired after the events of the season-one finale. We saw a lot of things that explained what happened in the season premiere. We now know — as assumed — that Milchick was lying about everything, from timeframes to throuples to media coverage of the MDR uprising. We got a glimpse into why and how the various team members opted to return to Lumon even after … everything. We got to see Milchick on a motorcycle. It was an eventful hour of television.

As always, the biggest questions can be found below. Expect to see the phrase “Cold Harbor” in here a lot as the season progresses and Mark gets more suspicious about the death (“death”) of his wife, Gemma. And expect to see a lot of wild speculation about whatever the heck Helly is up to. Expect a lot of wild speculation, in general, actually.

What, exactly, is Cold Harbor and why do they need Mark around so badly to work on it?

We know two things so far …

(1) Based on the image at the end of the first episode, Cold Harbor appears to be some sort of Lumon-based program that involves the MDR team and the experiments being done on Gemma, or people like her. Mark filed his little numbers into his box, it said “68 percent,” then we flashed straight to a screen with her face and another “68 percent” and various other vital signs. So let’s assume that connection.

(2) Mark is so important to the project that not only was he recruited back to Lumon using all sorts of messed-up psychological chicanery when the rest of the team was fired, he was also given his entire team back — including Helly R., more on this in a minute — when it became clear he would not finish without them.

So, knowing, or at least assuming, those two things, where does this leave us with Cold Harbor, a project Lumon is apparently very, very invested in? Part of me wants to say they’re attempting to clone a new Gemma from nothing — goats, etc. — and are seeing if Mark and Gemma ever recognize each other when their brains are severed, as a way to test how powerful the procedure is. Part of me wonders if Mark has been a key to this whole thing longer than he realizes and Lumon actually staged the car wreck to erase Gemma and lure him in. And part of me wonders if maybe I need to log off for a little bit before I start mumbling things like “Lumon exhumed Gemma’s body after Mark’s original freshman fluke because it showed them he’s essentially Neo from The Matrix and they want to harness his powers for capitalist and/or nefarious purposes before he realizes how much control he has” as I wander aimlessly around the grocery store.

What was that look in Helly’s eye?

You know the one. The one when she saw the surveillance footage of her Innie smooching Mark’s Innie. And the similar if slightly more distant one she gave Mark’s Outie from her corporate suite as he parked and shuffled into the building. That look.

There was a bunch of conversation after the first episode about whether that really was Helly’s Innie down there on the severed floor or whether her Outie was sent down as a spy. I chose to operate from the position that it was her Innie, at least in that moment, only because (a) we haven’t seen any evidence that any of this is safely reversible yet (RIP Petey) or at least something you can circumnavigate, and (b) it would take just a massive amount of preparation and acting ability for the Outie Helly to learn every single thing her Innie knows and feels and thinks and present all of that in a believable way to the three people who know her best. I am willing to accept that I could be wrong here. But that’s where my head is at so far.

But that gets us to the bigger issue: If it was Helly’s Innie down there, why did her Outie go back? We see a couple of potential answers here. The first is that Helly’s Outie is also being manipulated a bit, by the board and various silver-haired figures in her life, and that maybe there’s more to this business where a billionaire heiress to a powerful secret conglomerate chose of her own free will to have elective brain surgery and spend eight hours a day working in a dungeon.

The second is just a natural human curiosity. Maybe she’s lonely on the outside. Maybe she saw her Innie kiss Mark and it tied her into a knot. Maybe she wants what her Innie has, or maybe she at least wants to know what her Innie is feeling.

I hope she starts trying to visit Mark on the outside to see if there’s chemistry there, too. That would be funny. Like, what if they set all this up just to give us a sweet little Hallmark story about their Outies falling in love at a pumpkin patch? People would be so mad.

Did your opinion of Milchick change at all now that you know he has a leather jacket and a motorcycle?

I mean, a little bit, right? I pictured him driving a luxury sedan, or maybe a black SUV like a villain in a spy movie. I kind of pictured him having a driver, just getting chauffeured everywhere and rolling the rear window up and down ominously as he delivered messages to people. I do not know why I thought that. Cobel was his boss and she drives a clunky little hatchback. Maybe it’s the mustache that fooled me. I am often bamboozled by a mustache.

Here’s the other thing: When you saw him on that motorcycle with his leather jacket and blackout-tinted helmet, did you, even for a second, think he was going to carry out an assassination? Maybe I’ve seen too many action movies. I don’t even know who I thought he was going to shoot, possibly with an automatic weapon as he screeched up to them and whipped the back wheel of his motorcycle around. We know Dylan and Irving lived because they showed up on the severed floor later. Yes, I have definitely seen too many action movies.

Anyway, let’s go ahead and add “stand-alone Milchick origin-story episode” to the list of things I am now interested in seeing. Motorcycles will do that.

What does Burt think is going on right now?

Let’s check in with Burt:

— He retired from Lumon.

— He was having a nice evening with his partner.

— A strange man showed up at his house and started banging on his door while shouting his name.

— The man, based on the timing of the overtime shutoff, presumably had no clue what was going on by the time Burt answered the door.

— A series of as-yet-unknown events transpired over the next few days.

— He is now following the strange man around town and snooping from a distance as mysterious calls are placed from pay phones.

I don’t know why, but I find this developing Burt situation to be the most fascinating thing happening on the show right now. I kind of hope he explains it all in a monologue at some point. Maybe I just want to hear Christopher Walken talk. These feelings could be related.

Is Ms. Cobel taking that promotion or what?

My policy of never trusting a single thing Milchick says paid off pretty well this week for a number of reasons, including but not limited to “five months did not pass between the MDR uprising and their return” and “Ms. Cobel was not fired for trying to engage Mark in an Innie/Outie throuple.” In fact, just about the opposite happened, as she was offered a new job in a new department as thanks for her loyalty and/or as a way to monitor her given everything she now knows.

Here’s where it gets interesting, though: She very much still wants to be on that severed floor. And we’ve never gotten a full explanation of why she was living a double life on the outside in a house next to Mark’s. And she sure did seem to lose it a little bit when Mark cornered her to ask about Gemma, at least to the extent screaming and honking and stomping on the gas pedal counts as losing it, which I believe it does.

Lots of ways this could go. I genuinely do not have a theory about it that is reasonable enough to type out in a published piece yet. But please, go wild in the comments.

How great are the doors made by Great Doors?

I know the biggest takeaway from Dylan’s interview is that there’s a stigma out there for people who underwent the severance procedure and that this stigma could leave employees feeling stuck at Lumon because their other job prospects are limited. But all I could think about while he was there was the quality of the doors made by the company he interviewed with, Great Doors.

Maybe the doors really are great. But all I’m saying is that if you’re starting a door business and you’re making, like, B/B- doors, naming your company “Great Doors” would be a nice little marketing strategy. Potential customers looking up where to buy the best doors and then, blammo, GreatDoors dot com. “Geez,” they’d think. “I was just looking for a good door. But now I really want one of these great ones …”

As diabolical as anything Lumon has ever done.

How did Lumon get that whole stop-motion video from the first episode turned around in the few days it now appears they had between the waffle-party uprising and the present?

A couple of things here …

— If we take Milchick saying he had 48 hours to put together a new MDR team and Mark W. shouting on his way out that they were only there for three days, then we factor in a little wiggle room for various unknowns, we can probably figure it was about one week between the events of the season-one finale and the season-two premiere.

— There was even less time between the decision to bring back the old MDR team and their first day, going by Milchick’s motorcycle-based pineapple deliveries.

This would mean that Lumon slapped together that whole ridiculous training video at breakneck speed, solely for the purposes of tricking a few employees in a onetime viewing, presumably using the hilarious 1980s-ass computers everyone at the office seems to use.

Please add “the team at Lumon who makes these videos getting this rush assignment and having 24 hours to put it together, complete with narration from A-list movie star Keanu Reeves, who, until we are presented with information that expressly rules it out, we can pretend exists as himself in the Severance universe and is available for last-minute corporate subterfuge voice work” to the list of stand-alone episodes I would like to see. I will settle for a montage.