My Severance Theory: What is Cold Harbour

Severance is amazing. Just everything about it. I enjoy the bleak humour in it too. It’s a very funny show.

Anyway, one thing that has bothered me for a while is what is Cold Harbour? What are they doing on those computers?

I think season 2 episode 7 (Chikhai Bardo) was very telling.

But to explain my theory, I have to provide some context.

I think Lumon provides a service where people can avoid events in their lives. We’ve now seen examples of this where the woman doesn’t recall giving birth, and Ms Casey visiting the dentist repeatedly. Events that are unavoidable.

What we saw in Chikhai Bardo is Ms Casey visiting different scenarios that some people may want to avoid.

My theory is these are tests for their product, to check that they work in common scenarios.

Each of these tests have codenames next to the doors named after places. Cold Harbour is one of those doors.

So my theory is that Cold Harbour is the test for a working environment, which if successful, leads to selling it as a new product.

Within Cold Harbour they have lots of different kinds of jobs from menial data entry to art production, to shepherding.

So what I’m suggesting is that what Mark and the team are up to by moving the numbers around, is absolutely nothing. It’s work that simulates work.

And I think that is the biggest joke in the show. Lots of people do menial work with arbitrary goals that doesn’t really do anything. Macro Data Refinement is no different to that.

My only question about that, is it seems like a service that only rich people are either aware of or can afford.

So would someone in a menial office job be able to afford this product?

Or perhaps companies would pay for it as a benefit?