The importance of Severance’s “filler” episode and what it reveals about Harmony Cobel and the show’s story as a whole
Since Severance is at times a mystery sci-fi show, the plot garners disproportionate intrigue and speculation sometimes. The twists/revelations are thrilling, but I think it’s easy to get sidetracked by the adrenaline of the plot and miss out on some of the subtler aspects.
There is a common piece of writing advice that goes something like: if you want to write about the tragedy of war, you don’t focus on the number of people killed, or the series of dramatic battles that unfolded, you focus on a child’s shoe lying abandoned in a burned down house. That is precisely what this episode did.
It revealed so much about Cobel, Lumon’s past, and the themes of exploitation, indoctrination, and trauma, and does so in a way that isn’t meant to be flashy or exciting. It is meant to be heavy, almost oppressive, a reflection of Cobel’s inner isolation, grief, and repression.
The haunting landscape of Newfoundland and Labrador is a perfect setting for this, mirroring not only the inner landscape of Cobel’s character, but also the real life towns built around a company or industry, then abandoned and left to decay. It is a landscape submersed in the aftermath of capitalist exploitation and industrialization, so perfectly contrasted with the usual polished, fluorescent hallways of Lumon’s modern buildings.
The corrosion of Lumon’s corporate and cult-like powers reaches far beyond glamour and glitz, but stretches all the way into the bedrock of places like Salt’s Neck, haunted by the everyday people whose lives were destroyed to realize a company’s vision.
Here in Salt’s Neck we see Lumon’s past, but we also get a sense that this is perhaps its inevitable future.
There is so much depth to this episode that necessitated the time we spent in this town, not only in how much information it gave us as an audience (almost, I would argue, as significant as the information revealed in Chikhai Bardo), but the moving and nuanced way it was delivered to us.
Through the ether bottle slipped to one of the customers at the coffee shop we understand the grip that addiction has on everyone in this town. We were with Cobel in the back of the truck as they drove the long journey to her aunt’s old house, and understood how fully her aunt is severed from this community, isolated and distant; here the status quo is flipped, and it is Lumon and Kier that is seen as the pariah.
Every moment of her interactions with her aunt revealed so much too:
- The vitriol in which her aunt spoke to her, and how she slapped her, painting a vivid portrait of childhood abuse and conflict
- Her aunt’s language being a mirror of Lumon and Kier’s corporate-cult speak, showing the total grip that Lumon can have even on this old woman far removed in place and time from the Lumon that exists today
- The hints at a deep conflict between her aunt and her mother, one a true Kier believer, the other one who hated Kier and Lumon for any number of reasons, including making her sick and dooming her to a painful, prolonged death
- This deep conflict being perfectly symbolic of Cobel’s likely lifelong internal conflict, the two selves in her that held diametrically opposing beliefs
- We can see that Cobel was not always a true Kier loyalist, simply based on her aunt’s immediate distrust and animosity towards her
The house too, in its isolation and slow decay, a reflection of character and many of the underlying themes of the show. Sometimes the setting itself is one of the most important characters. We see the pencil marks on the door frame marking Cobel’s heights as a girl, and the physical sense of how small and how young she was when she went away to boarding school and was severed from her mother, and from this place she called home.
Particularly important in this setting is Charlotte Cobel’s room.
The locked door, a depiction of how her aunt has severed both the memory of her sister and what her sister stood for, refusing to face the pain that she has compartmentalized away there. In turn, the locked door being symbolic of how Harmony Cobel, too, made the choice long ago to sever herself from her mother and be swept up into Lumon’s clutches, only for those severed parts to start inevitably bleeding through.
It is significant that it was Cobel who found the key to Charlotte’s room, and walked through the threshold – a reintegration of sorts – while her aunt refused to do so, and remained separated from it.
We see her drowning (the transition between her time in the room and the shots of the ocean) in her grief and the past she locked away for so long. By connecting the breathing tube to what her mother used to breathe in her dying days, she is literally breathing in and reuniting that part of herself into her body.
Also of note, the light that is shining onto her is warm, and warm/cool colours are used symbolically throughout the show.
To me, Cobel’s story has always felt in ways parallel to Mark’s.
Lumon took everything from her, and by following in step with Lumon and Kier, she took everything from Mark, leaving him in the same state of desolation that she found herself in. Now, they’re both caught unmoored in a conflicted transitional state.
In this way, I feel like Cobel’s arc this season may end up mirroring Mark’s reintegration arc. While he is reintegrating via Reghabi’s procedures on his chip, Cobel is reintegrating by returning to her past (one could say, the life of her “outie”) and processing the grief and trauma that she had severed away willingly in her head.
It is so important that it is in her mother’s room, after she spent hours undergoing this symbolic reintegration, that Cobel reconnected with the man who she knew as a child. And instead of leaving her there, he waited for her outside for hours.
She even took some of the ether he offered, and we learn the horrifying fact that she was likely addicted to it too as a young child. Ultimately she has a lot more in common with him than she does with someone like Helena Eagan.
When they first meet in this episode, they are cold and distant with each other, representing how her metaphorical severance isolated herself from any external relationships and the people she had the most solidarity with.
It is through walking into Charlotte’s room and facing this part of herself and her past that Cobel is able to reconnect with this community that she had cut herself away from so many years ago.
Of course we have to talk about the revelation that, as far as we know now, it was Harmony who was the progenitor of the severance chip. To me, this is thematically perfect. Of course the chip was not invented by highly-paid Lumon scientists, but by an exploited child/teenager who dreamed it up in an effort to find reprieve from the conditions that Lumon itself created. And of course it was this very company that convinced her to share her idea with them, who stole it and repurposed it for their own goals.
There is something so broken, twisted, and ultimately, devastating, to see that an invention born out of a desire to be free from exploitation is now in turn being developed in the most exploitative ways for the most exploitative ends.
(Credit to this Reddit post for the above image)
The many awards and memorabilia from Cobel’s time in school points to a very smart person with so much potential, and we feel the loss of all that potential wasted by being twisted into means to an end for Lumon.
But of course, Cobel must’ve felt beholden to Lumon, to the Eagans. She never did put up a fight when they took credit for her idea and manipulated it for their own goals. She must’ve believed the line that we heard her aunt say to her – that she owed everything to the Eagans as fealty.
She was a child working in horrendous conditions, with a sick and suffering mother and constant household conflict. Suddenly, Lumon swooped in with a scholarship and promise of a better life at their boarding school. The Eagans created her suffering, and offered her salvation, ensuring that she would feel indebted to them forever.
Lumon’s offer to her of a bright future at the Myrtle Eagan School for Girls was just manipulation and an extension of exploitation, but she had no way of recognizing that at her age. It forced her to reconcile the immense internal conflict she must’ve felt, by severing herself from her hometown, from her mother, and from the solidarity of all the peers she had at the factory.
Not only does this reflect the isolation tactics of cults, but also how oppressive and exploitative systems will select token minorities and individuals from the oppressed to hold up as an example to strive towards, which only serves to further the oppression of the group, and isolate those selected individuals from their community and collective struggles.
These individuals lose the fellowship of the people, and the people grow to resent them for what they represent, and their betrayal in accepting a seat at the table at the cost of furthering an exploitative system.
The seat at the table is always precarious though, as the power offered is almost always on the terms of the privileged. Cobel must’ve known, even unconsciously, that her position with them was never a guarantee, that they would only continue to champion her and groom her for a glorious future with them as long as she played by their rules.
It is hard to say the extent to which she believes in the goals of the severance chip in its current iteration. I don’t think Cobel ever intended for her invention to be used this way, but I also think that somewhere along the way, through Lumon’s indoctrination and her own desire to maintain her position with them, she ended up believing in it. She is absolutely complicit in the horrors that go on at Lumon, and I’m not sure what redemption could even look like after her deliberate and prolonged involvement in the torture happening on the severed and testing floor.
We do see her faith and loyalty to Kier waver and then break entirely though. (It’s also important that in her grief and rage at being fired, she tore down her shrine to Kier and reached out for her mother’s breathing tube, and everything that tube represents).
While her being fired was absolutely the final straw that broke a lifetime of internal conflict and repression, I think the process of deprogramming (her reintegration) was already happening. There were the small, corporate things like being constantly disrespected by Lumon and the board, their dismissal of her ideas and input, which must’ve been happening for a long time already.
Then there is the deeper emotional conflict she might’ve felt about what she was doing. There are moments I would argue that she felt genuine empathy for Mark, as outie Mark’s open grief must’ve been something she related to deeply but couldn’t allow herself to feel fully about her mother. Then, there is the realization that must’ve been brewing in her that she was responsible for his grief and Gemma’s suffering, much like Lumon was responsible for hers and her mother’s.
She was clearly invested in reintegration, and it seemed to me like she wasn’t testing the severance barrier so much as she was hoping it would break. It’s hard to read her motivations, especially because she so coldly ordered Gemma to be sent back to the testing floor, but Milchick’s “you know it's good right, that they don't remember each other?” suggests that there is a real possibility she was hoping reintegration could work.
Either so that it would kill Lumon’s plan for the chip, or that it would more align with her own, different ideas for how severance would work. Or perhaps she was just hoping for this experiment to fail, so that she no longer had to feel the guilt of what she did to Mark and Gemma.
After this latest episode, it’s hard to say what Cobel’s goals are at this point in time. She has clearly spent so much of her life drinking the Lumon kool-aid that it would take much more than a few hours in her mother’s old bedroom to undo the damage that it did.
It would be disappointing to me but honestly fairly similar to how these things go in real life if her goal was simply to use her notebook as a bargaining chip with Lumon to gain a position of higher power and privilege within the company, but continuing to perpetuate the cycles of exploitation.
However, following the thematic parallels between Mark’s reintegration and Cobel’s, and the underlying messages of the show, I feel that the most satisfying way for her arc to go is to be one of the key figures in taking down Lumon entirely, and ensuring that nobody can ever use this severance technology again. One can argue for a long time about whether or not this would redeem her. I don’t think there’s an easy answer. But it would be a moving way to end.
The severance story that started with an exploited girl born into a town created to serve a company. The girl whose invention she hoped could free her from her conditions, having to live with it being stolen and repurposed by her oppressors to further the exploitation of people like her mother.
The arrogance and callousness of this company, then, to continue disrespecting her, the culmination of which was attempting to throw her away completely, similar to how they left Salt’s Neck to rot. The irony of this more or less sealing their eventual downfall.
For the girl’s grief and love for her mother to be the final motivator that ultimately leads to her finally using her invention – though not in the way she intended – as a key piece in helping liberate everyone, and ultimately herself, from the company that caused so much collective suffering.