Wild theory about how Cobel's background and motivations COMPLETELY re-contextualize a key Helly moment from season 1

Something that has never been quite satisfactorily explained up until now is, if Helena got severed for PR, to show the world how safe Severance is and how happy it makes both the innie and outie, then why did they torture the innie of the CEO's daughter like everybody else? Why didn't they go more of the anti-Gemma route, giving Helly the cushiest possible innie job where her responsibilities include taste-testing gourmet food, play-testing video games, and just generally doing whatever she wants the rest of the day, and setting up a purpose-built facility for her, with enough trappings of an office that you can use Milchick's photos to do PR? Yes, the Eagans don't see the innies as people and push a cult that says that serving the Eagans is the point of the innies, but just purely from a practical perspective, it is to their benefit for Helly to be as happy in her job as possible, to maximize the PR value she can produce. When Helly was clearly not happy, that should have been recognized as a huge risk to their plan immediately. What if she had cut off Helena's fingers? And wasn't it ultimately Cobel's responsibility to ensure that she was happy, and that the project went well?

Now we have context. Cobel pissed at Jame for stealing credit for her idea and using it to add to the Eagan mythology. And for ruining her home town/killing her mother. There also seems to be an implication that Jame/Lumon bastardized her vision to some degree, and the version of severance we've seen and Lumon's ultimate goals of selling it as a product to sever away all unpleasant parts of life wasn't necessarily Cobel's vision. I don't know that Cobel is fully onboard with what's happening to Gemma. If anything, her attempts to prove bleedover and finding a bunch of uses for Ms. Casey suggest that she might have been acting to protect Gemma by keeping her away from Dr. Mauer for as long as possible.

Despite this, Cobel was also raised in the cult, and fully believed in Kierism. She seems to have taken a "just one more thing" mentality to her time at Lumon, where she felt, if she worked hard enough did just one more undeniably impressive/loyal thing, it would all pay off, and she would be recognized and rise all the way to the top. Her stuff about trying to "prove" that reintegration exists to the board seems to be a way of proving that she's the rightful inventor of the chip, that she understands something about it that Jame and the board do not. And she's also not at all above a little sabotage to get ahead. Once again, see the Gemma stuff.

Remember, before being fired, she was supposed to be given access to The Board to plead her own case the same night of Helena's big debut at the gala. Her actions make way more sense if you view them with the framing that she does not want Jame's PR stunt to go well, to weaken him as she stakes her claim as the true creator of severance. We can see her sabotaging the Helly project from her first scene. Helly is having a rough time, refusing to take the entry survey. Milchick asks if Cobel is seeing this, and if he should help. Cobel responds "you should not." The implication at the time was, she had it out for Mark and wanted him to flail and flounder in his new position. But now, it seems like she just wanted things to go badly for Helly. After seeing Mark deviating from the script to show empathy to Helly and talking to her like a normal person being the one thing to calm her down, Cobel encourages further animosity between Mark and Helly, belittling Mark in front of Helly, abusing Mark for rule-breaking to the point where he cycle-of-abuses that back to Helly and is a stickler towards her for much of the first half of the season. Cobel did not want Helly to have a good time.

Which...leads to a really dark conclusion about what was already one of season 1's darkest moments. I'm talking about Helly's suicide attempt.

Grainer was shown to be a Cobel loyalist, through and through. Grainer was in charge of monitoring the security cameras, and presumably had other security-related responsibilities in his role as, you know, "head of security." Like, Judd is probably a direct report, for example.

Speaking of Judd, another thing we've never had a satisfying answer for is, why was Judd absent when the elevator opened?

Oh shit.

Grainer and Cobel set the whole thing up. They intended for Helly to be so miserable that she would be driven to suicide. And they intended that she would succeed. They planned to knock off the presumed successor to the CEO position, and create a PR disaster for Jame's version of a severed workplace that he couldn't possibly cover up. "The CEO's daughter got severed, and her innie was so miserable that the innie literally killed the outie" is about as badly as things can possibly go for a stunt about proving that the innies are happy. Grainer told Judd to look the other way for a few minutes, and was watching the cameras not to ensure that nothing like Helly hanging herself happened, but in this case, to ensure that it did.

There's also the detail about how, when Grainer runs to the elevator, he's way more concerned with Mark than he is with the company's next CEO. He shouts "god damnit" not when he sees Helly's unconscious body, but when he sees that Mark got there first and is saving her life. His immediate focus is on removing the evidence from the elevator, and shoving Mark in there ASAP. In the final scene as the elevator doors close, we don't even see Grainer tending to Helly in any way, doing CPR, or anything. What if he only even started running from the security office when he saw that Mark was going to see it? What if he was more concerned with stopping Dylan from also seeing it? They had planned to have Helly simply disappear/quit to the innies. Mark being a witness forced their hand to abandon the plan and act to save Helly, otherwise it's not Helly that killed Helena, but Grainer through negligence/inaction, and iMark would know it, a provable loose end.

When Mark comes back the next day, Cobel is super resentful towards him, blaming him for this happening "on his watch," and that he should thank Kier that it "went the way it did." They're forced to make some minor changes to prevent future attempts (because Helly's actions are gonna put ideas in the others' heads), and Mark is more overtly supportive to Helly as he recognizes just how dire her mental health down here is. Their opportunity to manufacture circumstances in which Helly creates a PR disaster by killing Helena has passed.

Cobel is not pissed that Helly almost died. She's pissed that Helena was saved.