Right, what exactly is Cold Harbor in Severance and why its name is actually so disturbing

If there’s one menacing omnipresence sitting over Severance and dominating the minds off both the Innies and the Lumon higher ups on the outie side of things – it’s Cold Harbor. The mysterious project Cold Harbor is what Mark S has been working on as an Innie, and he’s 68 per cent. Harmony Cobel is fixated on it, determined to return as manager of the severed floor so she can oversee Mark complete Cold Harbor and has said this season that “nothing is more important” than the completion of it. But what the hell is Cold Harbor in Severance and what does this all actually mean for the show?

The files that severed Lumon employees work on are named often after real life place names – and Cold Harbor is a town in Virginia. We saw Mark work on a project called Allentown in season one. “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.”

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We also know it’s involving Ms Casey – from what we’ve seen so far. Ms Casey is also of course connected to Outie Mark’s wife, Gemma – who is apparently dead.

It also looks like we see vitals on the Cold Harbor screen – and a temperature reading. It looks like Lumon is recording vitals with Cold Harbor in Severance – which really could boost a lot of the popular theory with us viewers that something at Lumon is cloning. Potentially, in order to give life to past Lumon CEOs.

One theory on the Severance Reddit really gives a graveness to the name of Cold Harbor – and it’s harrowing. But I believe this could indeed be bang on the money.

“Maybe we’re meant to look at the name ‘cold harbor’ on a more surface level. ‘Harbor’ being used here to mean ‘home’ or ‘shelter’, per these definitions:

• shelter or hide (a criminal or wanted person).
• give a home or shelter to (an organism). “the water can become stagnant, harboring bacteria and other micro-organisms”

“’Cold,’ in this case, meaning ‘dead.’ ‘Cold Harbor,’ then, could be inferred to mean ‘dead shelter,’ which could give credence to the idea that Lumon could be using young, dead bodies to harbor the consciousnesses of dying Lumon CEOs.”

Bleak, but Lumon are twisted enough to be making this happen I fear.

Season two of Severance is on AppleTV. For more like this, and the latest pop culture updates, like The Tab on Facebook.