The completion of Cold Harbor is hyped up so much throughout this series. Jame Eagan tells Helly AND Helena about it excitedly, Drummond describes it as “Lumon’s greatest day”, and Lumon fired three good workers in favor of three known dissidents because they knew Mark wouldn’t complete Cold Harbor without it.
So when Gemma walks into a room and disassembles a crib, many viewers were either perplexed or in disagreement. How could this be the crowning moment? How could it be so banal?
Theories on the purpose of cold harbor fall into two camps:
It’s testing compliance
ColdHarbour Gemma is different from every innie we’ve seen on the show. In mark’s first moments, he threatened to find and kill Petey. Helly assaulted mark and tried to run away. Even Gemma’s other innies show reservations, like when she’s distressed on the plane or reluctant at the dentist or hateful in the Christmas card room.
CH Gemma is different. She’s given the same onboarding question and standard memory wipe as Mark & Helly, but instead of acting out, she complies instantly with the task she’s given.
Kier sought to tame the four tempers to create maximum efficiency, and in CH Gemma, that’s worked perfectly: she has no objections to any prompting whatsoever. Cold Harbor could be about trying to create the perfect employee.
It’s testing severance bounds
We know Cobel was obsessed with reintegration and putting iMark & Mrs. Casey together. She loots Mark’s house for his wife’s things to prod iMark during the wellness sessions, and watches closely as iMark sculpts a tree in front of Mrs. Casey.
We know at least some of the rooms were personalized to Gemma’s anxieties and dislikes; Allentown forces her to write thank-you cards repeatedly because she hates doing that. In the same way, Cold Harbour is personalized to her greatest pain: losing the baby with Mark.
Cold Harbor could be about pushing the bounds of severance; Dr. Mauer says so himself. There is no emotion bleeding through here; CH Gemma tackles one of the lowest moments of her life completely docile and oblivious.
(As an aside, if this was the intention, mark “passed” this test when Gemma did not. iMark abandons his outie’s wife after his outie experienced the most resplendent joy in years, proving love can’t transcend severance.)
What do you think of Cold Harbor? What was it trying to achieve? Was it the best way to achieve either purpose?
TL;DR: I think the design of the room, combined with the activity in it based on previous experience is exactly what you'd expect Cold Harbor to be. It is the ultimate test to see if the barriers are holding after taming the tempers.
I think you're right on the money - I just have a slight point to add. Remember how Mark bought this crib at some point. He had something to prove when he said that he was pretty handy. Back then, it was sort of funny to Gemma as she dismissed his statement by calling him 'handsy'.
When Gemma had her miscarriage and Mark started actually building the thing, failing miserably, it was very painful for Gemma.
So when Jame keeps asking if the barriers are holding, he wants to know if the tempers are tamed enough to not even have the most painful moments awaken something in this Cold Harbor Gemma. Considering the bad situations we've seen, where the barriers did hold (dentist, thank-you note writing), this one is much more emotional, much deeper rooted than the others.
They take the single most excruciating moment of her life, find some reference to it that is not too overt, and see if it generates any kind of reaction. When it doesn't, and she complies, even without questioning a why, Jame knows he's created a severance barrier so strong, it's pretty much perfect.
What I'm getting from the final episode is that they have a rudimentary severance process in place. Let's call it the Mark One (ha). Now Gemma is sort of like a test subject for a better severance, which will not only make the innie more compliant, but it will also make it possible to create new innies for any situation an outie does not want to experience.
The most important pro of this: Your innie will not have a complete life, i.e. their social interactions will be limited, therefore they will not develop any kind of social intelligence. This creates a situation wherein the innie will feel like they have no choice to accept their hellish life. Remember: for an innie, there is no time between activation and deactivation. They are continuously going to the dentist. But as there is no possibility to discuss this with others who have a shared experience, there is no option of questioning, no road to rebel.
The first iteration of Cold Harbor illustrates this perfectly. Gemma's tempers have been tamed enough for her to accept her situation and be compliant. The emptiness of that innie Gemma's life (the pristine white room with just a crib in it) is designed for nothing to alter her situation, and thus, her tempers, to make her less compliant over time.
It leads one to wonder if what the Eagans are doing is not, in basis, a good thing. They will create the perfect life for their constituents: no pain, no sadness, for any situation you don't want to experience, you will just create an innie and you'll have no memory of the ordeal. Like the senator's wife in childbirth. Of course the question is whether this is ethical, it negates any right the innies might have as pilots of the outies vessel. And of course, the balance between good things and bad things are what makes us human, that's a fact of life.
Outie Mark wasn't building the crib, he was dismantling it after the miscarriage. I'd argue that this action is more traumatizing.
Oh I figured he was trying to assemble it but couldn't get it there. Yours makes more sense.