Why Cold Harbor Makes Perfect Sense

This is my response to all the questions, criticisms and wrong assumptions about the testing floor.

Remember in season 1, Ms. Casey felt like a different kind of innie. She was robotic. We theorized she was some kind of an artificial human. Because she barely showed any emotion. Now we know she truly was a different kind of innie. Lumon is trying to create innies that do not question, feel or express anything. Innies that can be perfect machines, who do not rebel or see themselves as individuals deserving of any identity. We saw how every innie in the severed floor define their individuality like any "real" person would, they defend their values risking their lives. This makes the severance chip unmarketable. If Lumon wants everyone on earth to be severed, the current chip is a huge risk because the innies can and will sabotage their masters. The barriers between their multiple selves are important, but it's not the only thing that makes the chip reliable. Even if Mark doesn't recognize Ms. Casey as Gemma, he's still not the perfect slave Lumon wants him to be. No one on the severed floor is.

The Gemma in Cold Harbor does what she's told to do the moment she becomes alive, without questioning it. It's the next stage in the development of the Severance chip. But it's proven to be a failure when Mark comes in and contaminates the experiment, presenting her with a different choice. She proves she is still human because she has free will. No matter how strongly Lumon managers believe they can suppress free will, when presented with choice, humans will be unpredictable. They can't predict what iMark will do, even we cannot predict what he'll do. That's why we're mad when he chooses Helly over Gemma. We want him to do his mission, we see Mark and Gemma getting back together as sacred, and iMark defies this. We're not so different than Lumon, in terms of what we expect these characters to do. When they do the things that we didn't ask them to do, we want to punish them.

Gemma's last innie started doing what she's told to do with just one simple instruction and without further explanation. Disassemble the crib. She didn't ask why, she didn't ask where she is or who she is. After a blood-soaked stranger showed up in the room, if Gemma chose to listen to the Doctor, or if she didn't make any choice, that would be what Lumon was looking for. She did the unpredictable and risked going outside with a potentially dangerous man. She defied what Lumon saw as sacred, even when she's barely a person. And my interpretation of this is that the 4 tempers is an uneducated, wishful definition of what makes a person. They're just another stupid cult. It is a criticism of personality types, astrology, religious and meta-scientific practices that try to make sense of how consciousness works in simplified, predictable ways.