[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for Severance Season 2 Episode 7, “Chikhai Bardo.”]

It’s perhaps the biggest mystery hanging over Severance’s second season: What the heck is Cold Harbor, and what does it have to do with Gemma Scout (Dichen Lachman)?

In “Chikhai Bardo,” we got a few crumbs. We now know that Gemma is alive, rather than in a catatonic or unresponsive state. We know she remembers Mark (Adam Scott) and appears to be herself, rather than a duplicate or a clone. We don’t, however, know what Cold Harbor is supposed to do. We know only that the room for it remains locked and that Mark is responsible for refining the data that will ultimately, we assume, create the experience. Here’s what we — and the Internet — think Cold Harbor might be.

What Is Cold Harbor?

According to several predominant and logical-sounding Reddit theories, “Cold Harbor” might be devastating — and it’s entirely possible Gemma won’t survive its completion. The consensus among groups of fans is that Gemma’s experiences in the rooms on the testing floor are meant to evoke inconveniences and fears from which people might want to escape. Thus, as an innie, she writes tedious thank-you cards, endures a turbulent flight, and goes to the dentist, all of which are experiences non-severed people might want to opt out of. When Gemma reverts to herself, she has no memory of what she went through; she simply leaves the room with aching gums or a sore hand.

Following that line of thought, the current theories propose that Cold Harbor might be a way of escaping the ultimate opt-out human experience: death. The assistant on the testing floor asks Gemma whether she fears suffocation or drowning more, which seems to imply Gemma’s being evaluated for her response to certain scenarios. Once Cold Harbor is completed, it could end up being a way to test whether Gemma is able to experience death entirely as an innie, therefore sparing her outie from going through the pain. We’ve also seen plenty of nods to drowning in Season 2, with a whistled “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” and Helena-Helly’s (Britt Lower) near-drowning experience.

What Does Mark Have to Do with It?

Throughout Season 2, Severance has made it clear that Mark has to be the one to complete Cold Harbor. To hear the workers at Lumon tell it, he’s the only one who’s capable — but why? And why, for that matter, is there so much interest in Mark as an employee when all of the MDR workers have been trained for the same job?

If, as the theories propose, Cold Harbor relates specifically to Gemma’s fears, it’s possible that Mark is needed to refine that data because he knew Gemma on the outside. He was married to her, after all; he knows she hates writing thank-you cards, that she always sneezes twice, that she’s allergic to nutmeg. If Cold Harbor is meant to be her ultimate fear, who would be better to refine the data to recreate it than her husband? This also places Mark in a unique position to the Lumon higher-ups, because he has a personal connection with Gemma. We already know Mark’s refining work is involved with Gemma’s torture, because he completed a file called “Allentown” — the name of one of the rooms Gemma entered.

Of course, should that prove true, it’d be beyond horrible for both Mark and Gemma. Mark’s been working for the whole season to get his wife back: If he ends up being the architect of her demise, it’d be hard to imagine his character ever recovering. And it isn’t as if Lumon’s answers to Gemma when she asks about Mark are offering much hope — while they’ve told her Mark will benefit from the world her testing creates (“The completion of Cold Harbor will be remembered as one of the greatest moments in the history of this planet,” Mr. Drummond [Olafur Darri Olafsson] says), their responses when she asks about seeing her husband again are incredibly ominous. We wouldn’t be surprised if Mark ends up being too late to save Gemma and they end up either separated again heading into the show’s third season, or separated permanently.

Whether or not Cold Harbor goes into effect, we think Gemma deserves to hit the scientists on the testing floor with even more chairs. She’s earned it.

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