Clones? Severance May Have Just Revealed What Lumon Is Really Doing
The seemingly nonsensical tasks of the Innies may mean way more than we think.
One of the most intriguing parts of Severance is how uncanny the severed floor of Lumon Industries is. The finger traps, the sad parties, and the formal language all feel like — and, essentially, are — a simulation of office life. But defining just what the work these employees actually did was almost impossible. Viewers knew they instinctively sorted numbers, but there’s no clue as to why or what categories the sorted numbers belonged to.
It’s a small part of the bigger Severance mystery, but the Season 2 premiere revealed how these numbers could be the key to what Lumon is doing entirely — and to why Mark’s seemingly dead wife is alive as Ms. Casey.
Spoilers for the Severance Season 2 premiere, “Hello, Ms. Cobel,” follow.
The “Cold Harbor” screen seen at the end of Severance Episode 1.
Episode 1 of Severance Season 2, “Hello, Ms. Cobel,” followed Mark S. as he slowly finds his way back to the status quo, reunited with his old coworkers and going back to his old workload sorting a bunch of numbers into buckets. But in the final moments of the episode, we saw a brief flash of an image that may have revealed exactly what all the numbers are doing. When Mark sorts some numbers into a category, we see the progress bar increase on both his screen and then a second screen — one displaying a picture of Gemma/Ms. Casey and reading “Cold Harbor.”
This implies that Ms. Casey isn’t Gemma herself, but some sort of copy — be that a clone or A.I. technology — that Mark is actively refining through his work with the numbers. This theory is supported by a closer look at the “Cold Harbor” screen. At the bottom of the display, where we see progress bars that reflect the ones seen on the Severed floor, there are categories labeled “WO,” “DR,” “FC,” and “MA.” These correspond with the four tempers Kier Eagan believed made up a human: woe, dread, frolic, and malice.
Mark’s “Allentown” fluke may be his first attempt at refining Gemma’s identity.
This also could explain Mark S.’s “freshman fluke” from Season 1. Of course, he would be excellent at refining a file if he had a personal connection with the subject. Perhaps these “files” are all possible cloning subjects, so when the rest of the Innies were discussing how the files “expire” after a few days, it really meant something with the process, be it cloning or revivification, went wrong.
It’s only the first episode of Season 2, but this may be the first domino that leads to fans learning exactly what Lumon is doing and why Gemma is seemingly resurrected. Hopefully, we’ll get more glimpses of “Cold Harbor” in the weeks ahead, but this is enough to fuel theories for a while.
