‘Severance’ Season 2 Episode 7: Did We Just Confirm Reddit’s Biggest Gemma Theory?

But it’s also important that we see so much of what she does on this basement level, which helps us parse why she’s down there. To summarize: Gemma (with all her pre-severance memories) lives in a sad little cell where she makes her bed barrack-style, does daily calisthenics, eats rehydrated food and undergoes intense psychological examinations with the icy man who is simply credited as “doctor”.

She also spends hours putting on costumes and going into different rooms with the doctor, where she is subjected to various physical indignities paired with highly emotional moments. In one room, she undergoes endless dental work. In another, she braces herself through terrifying turbulence on an airplane. In yet another, she endures what I assume is some sort of sexual assault. (We see her exiting the room dressed as a gymnast, while the doctor looks on, cosplaying as a creepy gymnastics coach and talking about how “she’s easy to like.”) In the final room, Allentown, she suffers through an eternally sadistic marriage, forced to hand-write thank you cards on Christmas day.

When she’s out of the rooms, the doctor tries to get her to remember these experiences, to see if she can associate her physical symptoms with any emotional connection. (I wondered if these rooms might be tied to the tempers—dread for the dentist, malice for the coach, etc.) She can’t remember anything, but as she astutely notes, there’s one room she’s never been in: Cold Harbor.

Based on what we know of Cold Harbor (the file Mark’s been working on, seemingly forever) and based on what we know of Gemma’s Lumon life, I’m coming on board with a theory I’ve seen floating around Reddit: Cold Harbor is the project of bringing Gemma back to life by sorting all of her severed emotions and experiences into a soul.

Hear me out: The doctor tells Gemma that when she enters Cold Harbor, she’ll be going back into the world. But we also know that MDR has been refining the other rooms she’s been in. (We’ve seen them working on files called “Allentown,” “Dranesville,” and “Tumwater,” for instance.) When they refine, they sort numbers into buckets, which are seemingly aligned with the four tempers. They also look for and remove any “scary numbers.” Could it be that they are taking all the good parts of Gemma’s various severed personalities, extracting the bad parts and sorting them all into a new, full person, essentially a Gemma 2.0?

In other words, when Gemma enters Cold Harbor, rather than being severed, she’ll be put back together, a reintegrated person built by machine. Of course, it would be naïve to think that she’ll simply go back to her old life. Rather, I think, Gemma’s body will be disposed of (“You’ll have to say goodbye to her,” warns the TV monitor guy), and this new artificial soul inserted into a new host, maybe even a robot.

How does this serve Kier, you ask? Well, it’s certainly in tune with his vision for eternal life. If Gemma can be recreated, so too can he.

Other considerations:

• We know Gemma was doing fertility treatments. Was she pregnant when she was abducted by Lumon? And if so, where is that baby now?

• Speaking of babies—and since we know pregnancy is important to the show—what if Helly got pregnant during either her innie or outie’s romp in the hay? That would be a trip.

• When the unnamed nurse—played, to my delight, by a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Sandra Bernhard—asks Gemma if she’s more afraid of drowning or suffocation, Gemma says “drowning.” Does this mean she remembers the car crash in the lake—either because she was saved from it, or because she did die and was brought back to life?

• Speaking of death, let’s talk Russian literature and Buddhist philosophy. The Death of Ivan Ilyich is about a man who, as he’s dying, learns to stop fearing death in order to glean the meaning of life. (Or so Wikipedia tells me; the only Tolstoy I’ve read is the first 40 pages of Anna Karenina.) Chikhai Bardo, meanwhile, is the final stage between life and death, according to Tibetan Buddhist tradition. To me, this seems further proof that Gemma is being refined in order to become a higher version of herself—somebody not quite alive and not quite dead, and not too worried about either outcome.

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