‘Severance’ Season 2: What is Cold Harbor?

Severance‘s Season 2 premiere, “Hello Ms. Cobel,” has already left us with a ton of questions. Is Lumon really telling the truth about severance reform? Why is Helly (Britt Lower) lying about what she saw in the Season 1 finale? And what in the world is Miss Huang’s (Sarah Bock) deal?

But perhaps the most pressing question surfaces in the episode’s final seconds, when Mark (Adam Scott) returns to work in Lumon’s Macrodata Refinement (MDR) department. As he and his team get back to sorting numbers, images of his screen alternate with flashes of another screen, which displays Mark’s Outie’s wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman), whom he believed to be dead but who was actually working on Lumon’s Severed Floor as Wellness Counselor Ms. Casey. The screen also shows Gemma’s vitals, like her heart rate and temperature, as well as a small symbol that looks like a severance chip, highlighting that Ms. Casey is Gemma’s severed Innie. Above it all, on the top left of the screen, are two mysterious words: Cold Harbor. What in the world could that be?

What, exactly, is Cold Harbor?

Dichen Lachman in “Severance.”
Credit: AppleTV+

Cold Harbor is the name of the file Mark is working on at the moment. (Fun fact: It was also the code name for Season 2 during filming.) Like prior MDR files we’ve heard about, including Allentown and Tumwater, it’s named after a location — likely the historic district in Virginia where the 1864 Battle of Cold Harbor took place. Severance has yet to reveal the significance of these file names, but could each of MDR’s files be linked to real-world consequences in these specific locations?

We don’t know that for sure, but thanks to the end of “Hello, Ms. Cobel,” we do know that Cold Harbor is linked to Gemma in some way, and that Mark is 68 percent done with the file. Given that Lumon is tracking Gemma’s vital signs, could Mark’s progress on the file be linked to her physical wellbeing? Is his MDR work tied to the resurrection of his Outie’s late wife, or keeping her alive outright? And if Gemma is linked specifically to Cold Harbor, could files like Allentown and Tumwater be linked to other individuals once presumed dead?

While the final moments of “Hello, Ms. Cobel” leave us with several questions, they also give us some helpful hints about MDR’s work. Chiefest among them is what MDR’s numbers actually mean.

What do the numbers in Severance mean?

Adam Scott in “Severance.”
Credit: AppleTV+

At the bottom of the screen monitoring Gemma and Mark’s progress on Cold Harbor, we see the five boxes Mark has to sort his number clusters into. Unlike on Mark’s screen, though, these boxes have four smaller boxes under them, labeled WO, DR, FC, and MA. These are almost certainly abbreviations for the Four Tempers established by Kier Eagan: woe, dread, frolic, and malice. That would explain why Mark tells Helly the numbers should make her feel different ways back in Season 1.

This theory is further backed up by Severance‘s 2022 companion book Severance: The Lexington Letter. The last section of the book is an orientation booklet for Macrodata Refiners. It’s the first confirmation that the numbers are divided into subgroups WO, DR, FC, and MA, and it gives specific details for the reactions these numbers should prompt. WO numbers, for example, “elicit melancholy or despair.” FC numbers, on the other hand, “elicit joy, gaiety, or ecstasy.” Sounds like woe and frolic to me!

But now that we know what the numbers mean, a whole new crop of questions arise. What is Lumon hoping to achieve in sorting Kier’s Four Tempers into different combinations? Are they trying to build a person with the perfect balance of the Tempers? Is Gemma just the latest in a series of guinea pigs in pursuit of this goal? Or maybe Mark is unknowingly rebuilding the late Gemma’s personality so that she can be resurrected in earnest. In which case, are these numbers how Lumon cracks immortality? And perhaps most pressing of all, what will happen when Mark completes Cold Harbor? My head is spinning, and we’re only one episode into Season 2!

Severance Season 2 is now streaming on AppleTV+, with a new episode every Friday.