The most compelling Severance theories about wtf (respectfully) is going on.

What. Is. Cold. Harbour.

Mar 20, 2025

Okay, guys. Let’s be real and admit none of us have literally any idea what’s going on in Severance. No clue. It’s currently the most-watched show on streaming, and it’s an utter masterpiece. The performances. The dialogue. The world-building. But. For the first ~80 per cent of every episode, I’m like this.

Heh?

It’s quite incredible, really, that such a mammoth audience can be so deeply engaged in a show that is borderline impossible to explain. What is Lumon, and wtf are they doing there. What’s the end goal. Why. The. Goats.

What is Macrodata Refinement.

What’s the deal with Kier.

What is Cold Harbour.

Where… are we. What year is it. What is Irving doing, broadly. Cobel, question mark? Why does Milchick talk like that. And don’t even get me started on Ms. Huang.

So many open threads, so little time to close them.

The season two finale airs on Friday in Australia, and so far we know: a) it’s 79 minutes long, b) it has a restricted rating on its website (MA15+) due to violent content, and c) it’s titled Cold Harbor.

As was the case with Game of Thrones, fan theories slap. They often seem better than whatever actually ends up happening, because it’s far easier to sit on the internet and come up with an idea for a plot than it is to write a living, breathing episode of television. So I scoured the internet for the very best fan theories. It’s the lord’s work, frankly, because a lot of theories are complete shite. They might explain one element of the story in an interesting way, but they create more problems than they solve. These are only the theories that, to my mind, make logical sense.

Before I jump into them, a moment for these iconic memes, just to set the vibe.

Severance’s Love Triangle:

2025 so far feels like:

Whenever I ask a friend in finance to explain what they actually do:

Okay. Theory time.

Helly’s pregnant

Obsessed. No notes. Mark and Helly have had sex twice now - once as Helly’s outie, and once as her innie. In last week’s episode, Helly’s father made a comment about how he wished she’d eat her eggs raw, which you can’t do if you’re pregnant. The episode also ended with him barging in on Helly R and yelling “you lied,” so perhaps he’s discovered her secret.

Helly being pregnant also ups the stakes of the entire show, setting the stage for a near-impossible decision for Mark. Does he save Gemma and choose to never return to Lumon, and therefore the innie version of Helly that he’s fallen in love with? Who is now pregnant with his child? Or does he choose Helly and the baby, letting Gemma go? By this point, will his reintegration be complete? Will two parts of himself be fighting within the same mind?

Mark, pls. Things are about to become terrible for you.

The After Hours and The Twilight Zone

Episode 9 was titled ‘The After Hours,’ and several fans have drawn a straight line to The Twilight Zone episode of the same name. They’ve then gone and watched that episode, and come up with a theory as to what it could mean for Severance.

Thank you for your service.

In The Twilight Zone’s ‘The After Hours,’ Marsha is in a department store trying to buy a gold thimble. She goes to the ninth floor and things are weird as fuck, with an empty corridor, and one saleswoman selling one thimble.

Upon realising the thimble is damaged, Marsha tries to return it. But when she goes back to the ninth floor, she finds that the saleswoman is not a woman at all, but a mannequin. The twist is that Marsha, too, is a mannequin - one of many who take turns at briefly being ‘alive’.

There are quite a few theories about exactly what this means, and one of them is that Gemma isn’t real. Or, she was an innie (Miss Casey) first. Is she a Lumon experiment? A ‘mannequin’ for them?

Gemma did die

Lumon has a lot of religious/Christian vibes, what with the art, the bible-esque stories, the worship of Kier. So there’s a popular theory that Lumon is working to resurrect Kier.

Perhaps Gemma really did die in a car accident, it was her body that Mark saw, but Lumon were able to resurrect her. Maybe it’ll be Sixth Sense vibes where she discovers a scar and is like OMG WAS I DEAD. Or maybe she already knows idk.

Also, a few episodes ago, Gemma was asked a series of questions by Cecily and Dr. Mauer while they drew her blood. One of those questions was: "If you were caught in a mudslide, would you be more afraid of suffocating or drowning?" Gemma answered drowning.

We don’t know the details of the car accident, presuming it happened at all and wasn’t staged by Lumon, BUT in the opening sequence of the show (which I skip every time), there’s a car in the background sinking into a lake.

So. Did she drown? Does she remember, on some level? Is Cold Harbor literally a cold harbor where she died?

The Iceberg Theory

There’s an artwork in Milchick’s office that some fans think is a reference to Sigmund Freud’s Iceberg Theory.

Freud’s Iceberg Model of Consciousness suggested there were three levels to the mind: the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious. He argued that only a very small percentage of our behaviour is conscious, and, in fact, most of what we do and how we act is determined by everything beneath the surface - our instincts and our urges and our traumas and our fears and our painful emotions. So, perhaps Lumon is testing whether trauma ‘bleeds over’ from an innie to an outie, and vice versa.

Even though innie Mark is consciously unaware of his grief, does it still live in his unconscious mind? When the MDR team refer to the numbers giving them a “bad feeling,” are they tapping into these deeper parts of their psyche?

We know Lumon are attempting to ‘sever’ painful, traumatic experiences (for example, childbirth), so are they examining whether a person can truly be severed?

One theory suggests that Cold Harbor (which, remember, is both the project Mark is working on and the room Gemma has not yet entered), might be the ability to automatically ‘sever’ painful events to the reality of the innie. But I’m not sure. I’m inclined to think Cold Harbor is more literal than that.

So, what’s going to happen in the finale?

It’s really dumb for me to be writing this the day before the finale comes out, because in ~24 hours I’ll look like an idiot. But oh well.

One of the most compelling predictions about what’s actually going to happen in season two’s final episode centres around the Glasgow Block. Like the Overtime Contingency, we know the Glasgow Block is a Lumon feature - one that allows an outie to enter the world of the innie (or for an outie to be activated at work). We know this because it’s what Helena used to pretend to be Helly R, when Milchick was all like “DISABLE THE GLASGOW BLOCK.” Cobel has also referenced it explicitly, shouting that she’s the inventor of severance and all its features, including the Glasgow Block.

Surely what Cobel is going to tell Mark is that Cold Harbor is 96 per cent complete, and he’s only hours away from finishing it. Whatever Cold Harbor is, it can be assumed that completing it will be catastrophic for Mark and for Gemma, so they somehow need to get the message to Mark’s innie not to do it.

Or.

Cobel can help Mark use the Glasgow Block so it’s actually his outie who returns to Lumon, with the full knowledge of what completing Cold Harbor would mean. The process of Mark’s reintegration has not been straightforward, so it’s unlikely he’ll be entirely reintegrated by the finale, but we can probably expect some crossover between his outie’s consciousness, and his innie’s consciousness.

Basically, my money is on: Glasgow Block, Helly’s pregnant, Cold Harbor is to do with drowning/death/the car accident/trauma.

We’ll reconvene here when it turns out I’m entirely, humiliatingly wrong xxx