An exploration of the character of Harmony Cobel on Apple TV’s Severance
(Originally published on my Substack)
Recently, I caught up with the Apple TV Show Severance. You may have heard of it, since it’s become wildly popular and generating a ton of (well deserved) praise and discussion across the internet.
The following is an in depth dive on the character of Harmony Cobel, with the intended audience being readers who are caught up with the show as of the day of writing this (February 4, 2025, or after the airing of 2x03).
MAJOR spoilers ahead for the entire show up to 2x03. Don’t continue reading if you haven’t watched the show yet and intend to do so.
There are some very popular fan theories about Harmony Cobel, many of them centering around the fact that she might be severed herself, and/or that the her we see on the show is an innie who has completely subsumed the life of her outie. The idea of a severed or chipped Cobel is fascinating, and something I’ve entertained extensively in my own rumination about the show.
However, I was recently listening to an interview with show creator Dan Erickson, when he said this:
“Our intention was is that she [Cobel] is not severed. And I was surprised that some people think that she is. With her, we wanted to look at the ways that people can sever without severance. There is a sense, as Mrs Selvig, she is living a life that she can’t as Cobel, whatever her motives are for doing that. I always felt that she likes Mark as Mrs Selvig, she actually enjoys the warmth of that friendship, and that’s something that she can’t necessarily feel in her life as Cobel. So it’s like, what are the ways even people who are not severed segment their life and live out different versions of themselves in different scenarios?”
(Note: I’m going to assume that Dan is telling the truth here. If she really is severed, and he didn’t want to reveal it, I do not think he would’ve brought this theory up like this)
Initially, I was surprised to hear him say this, because there are certainly many signs in the show that could point towards her being severed.
However, I spent some time thinking about what Dan said there, and the more I stepped back and looked at her character from the baseline assumption that she isn’t severed (or have a chip in any way), the more it made sense to me. Not only did it make sense, but in many ways, it feels like a more meaningful direction for her character.
Here is a painfully detailed deep dive into why. (This started off as a normal post, but accidentally turned into a 5000 word exploration that took me 5 hours to write…oops.)
Part 1: Cults and Indoctrination
With her, we wanted to look at the ways that people can sever without severance.
A lot of the innie indoctrination process starts with the idea of a blank slate — creating a version of someone isolated from their other memories and outside identity, someone who is child-like and highly suggestible. In other words, fertile soil for implanting your own set of values and beliefs.
However, as we know from the real world, people don’t need a severance chip to do so something like that.
We know that Cobel has been intricately involved with Lumon since she was a child, having gone to the Myrtle Eagan School for Girls. While the innies are adults who have been artificially reverted to a child-like state, Cobel, when she was first brought into Lumon’s fold, was literally a child. She didn’t need to be severed to have been manipulated and used in the way the innies are, and I think that’s the point.
When I was watching the first season with my partner, before we both got down our fun little fan theory rabbit holes, a comment he made stood out to me: “She definitely gives me “daughter of Scientology” vibes.”
In other words, her character reminded him (and myself) of many real world cases of people who were raised from childhood in a cult, and how that trauma manifests in real life.
We know that in the real world, people are most susceptible to being preyed on and manipulated by cults when they’re emotionally vulnerable and isolated. Many people find themselves indoctrinated into cults after experiencing a deeply traumatic event. In the show, this is overtly explored through Mark’s story, how losing Gemma was the ultimate motivating force for him to undergo the severance procedure. This is hinted at with Irving, who may be suffering from PTSD from his time in the navy, along with the fact that he seems to be a deeply lonely and isolated individual.
For many individuals in the show, their entry point into Lumon seems to be born from a place of great trauma and vulnerability, reflecting how cults recruit people in the real world.
While it may be possible that Cobel was born and raised into the Lumon/Kier ideology (in that perhaps her parents were both Lumon employees), it may also be possible that the death of her mother, Charlotte Cobel (who we see hints of through the medical bracelet and breathing tube), was the trauma and catalyst that ultimately led a young Harmony Cobel to Lumon.
It’s suggested that Cobel was brought to the Myrtle School for Girls as an orphan. Irrespective of the details, it seems quite possible that it was her mother’s death that led to her ending up in the school and in Lumon’s hands.
The loss of Cobel’s mother is clearly a source of great grief and pain her life she hasn’t healed from, and Lumon could’ve fully taken advantage of a young, lonely girl who just went through the shock and trauma of losing her parent(s). This is when she was severed — severed without severance — when her life and concept of self was hijacked by Lumon from this deeply painful point in her childhood.
Although we’re not shown explicitly, I do think there are hints that she experienced abuse at the school, and if not outright abuse, then certainly a lack of real human connection and love.
In the scene where she throws her mug at innie Mark (to his utter bafflement), she recites a line that I can easily hear having been said to her after some kind of painful punishment at the Myrtle School for Girls. Simultaneously, I do think it was her way of expressing her care for Mark in the only way she knows how in that context.
In another scene, she sits alone in her office and recites Lumon’s Nine Principles, a nod to what Myrtle Eagan herself and Helena Eagan were forced to do as children.
Myrtle Eagan’s statue in 1x03: When I was a girl, my father would make me whisper…Vision. Verve. Wit. Cheer…
Helena Eagan in 1x09: My dad used to make me recite the nine Core Principles before bed every night, which I can’t say I always did happily.
It’s likely she was forced to recite this continuously at the Myrtle Eagan School for Girls, and might’ve been punished if she didn’t get them right.
Whatever she experienced at the school and at Lumon afterwards, she’s sort of stuck in this arrested development, where the self (the little girl) she was outside of Lumon (her metaphorical outie) never got the chance to mature. This arrested development might be hinted at throughout the show too. For example, her bedroom is laid out in a way that some theorize might be a deliberate reconstruction of the room she had at the Myrtle School for Girls.
Meanwhile, everything about her as an adult is tied to the company and to Kier, effectively trapping her completely, arguably even moreso than the severed workers who at least have some possiblity be reintegration and getting their lives back, or walking away from it all.
Cobel’s shrine at her house clearly evokes the idea of cults, religion, and worship. We get the sense that what’s on the shrine is her entire identity.
(Interestingly, the free ebook excerpt we are given of Ricken’s The You You Are might be a nod to this. In it, he talks about finding out who you are by choosing certain tokens that represent you and placing them on your vanity, which really evoked for me the image of Cobel’s shrine.)
Moving on, on Cobel’s shrine to Kier, we see:
- Papier-mâche tempers (which she might of made as a child at Myrtle’s School for Girls as an arts and crafts project)
- A miniature Kier home
- A newspaper article from the past describing the new Lumon severance implant
- Handmade dolls of her and Kier (which might have also been made when she was young, her version of comforting stuffed animals)
- Stuffed toy goat (see above)
- Cat o’Nine Tails (nod to Kier taming the tempers)
- Jar of marbles
- Ribbons and awards from the time she was in the Myrtle School for Girls
- Charlotte Cobel’s hospital bracelet and breathing tube
Almost everything on the shrine is related to Kier and Lumon, a surefire nod to how completely the corporation has a cult-like hold on her. Some of it is also child-like (the papier-mâche, toy goat), another indication of the arrested development of her sense of self.
Part 2: Grief and Trauma
Edit: thank you for those who pointed out it’s a breathing tube, not a feeding tube. Corrections made accordingly!
The only item that is more personal on Cobel’s shrine is her mother’s medical bracelet and breathing tube. It being there at all could indicate just how important her mother was to her and maybe how she feels that Lumon/Kier can heal her from her grief (more on that later).
Interestingly, we know through The Lexington Letter, a free companion e-book to the show, that Lumon was once sued for faulty/malfunctioning feeding tubes. I’ll leave this here even though it’s not a feeding tube that Cobel holds onto, as I still wonder if Lumon’s hinted past at medical negligence/malpractice is related to her mother’s death.
On a small tangent, another item we briefly see on Cobel’s shrine is this: (after massively turning up the exposure and brightness on the screenshot to read it properly):
The interesting part is the: “High Quality Pharmaceutical Interventions” part. I wonder if Lumon’s corporate negligence contributed to Charlotte’s death. This one might be a reach though, so moving on.
I’ve heard people bring up that Cobel might be severed because of her erratic mood swings — how she seemed to be near tears in the car when Mark confronted her, then suddenly started screaming and raging, almost like she’s constantly oscillating between being different people.
I don’t think we necessarily need a more complex explanation for this though. It could very well be a natural result of her indoctrination and trauma.
I think back to what Petey said to Mark in 1x03:
You carry the hurt with you. You feel it down there too. You just don’t know what it is.
Mark initially underwent the severance procedure in a literal attempt to compartmentalize his trauma, to give a version of himself the chance to not have to feel that pain.
Cobel is a woman who’s spent almost her entire life in a cult, taught to suppress certain emotions and elevate other ones, never getting the chance to fully realize her own self or identity.
I think Cobel, too, has tried her whole life to compartmentalize her grief and trauma (more on this and Mrs Selvig next), to put her mother in a box separate from her Lumon self, to make sense of it through Kier but never truly face it or process it. This unhealthy coping mechanism results in wild mood swings and breakdowns, as the compartmentalization and repression fails. Everything inevitably bleeds through, no matter how hard we try otherwise.
When Cobel is fired from Lumon, she is absolutely distraught, grief-stricken. It’s the state of a woman who suddenly finds herself cut off from the only thing that has given her identity and meaning.
In a symbolic ritual (which, in the episode, is cut interspersed with the Waffle Party dance ritual), she begins tearing down this shrine to Kier. This soon transitions into a sequence where she clutches at her mother’s old breathing tube, as the grief of losing Lumon transitions in the core grief underlying everything, the loss of her mother. She curls up and hugs her mother’s breathing tube, evoking the image of a young girl reaching out for comfort. This, I believe, is the point where her mental compartmentalization begins to fall apart completely.
This is also, I think, the start of her symbolic reintegration. After being fired from Lumon, she is suddenly forced to remember, and confront, the life she had with her mother and the grief of losing her. Her “innie” (the self that was indoctrinated by Lumon after her loss) has to face the memories of her “outie” (the young girl that presumably led a normal life with her mother before Charlotte’s death). She will try to run away from this, and return to who she was at Lumon, but it will never be the same for her after this.
Through the severed workers, we already have an avenue to explore the concept of indoctrination and loss of identity from the point of view of someone who has undergone the procedure. Personally it feels more meaningful if Cobel’s character explored a different way one’s self can be lost and subsumed by a cult/corporation, a way that doesn’t involve the same severance process but leads to the same result.
To me, the backstory of her character hits harder if there isn’t a “gotcha” plot explanation for it. It’s the realization that her life and where she has ended up is very much possible without any science fiction or fantastical explanation.
Part 3: Mrs Selvig
There is a sense, as Mrs Selvig, she is living a life that she can’t as Cobel…what are the ways even people who are not severed segment their life and live out different versions of themselves in different scenarios?
Putting aside Cobel’s ultimate reasons for going out of her way to spy on Mark (and we now know that the extent she did so wasn’t even under Lumon’s orders), I think Cobel found a sort of freedom in pretending to be Mrs Selvig that she might not have experienced since childhood.
Through the identity of Mrs Selvig, Cobel was able to escape from one type of role and identity she was moulded into all her life (the “innie” self that Lumon created). Even if Mrs Selvig is fake, she was real in a way for Cobel. Mrs Selvig allowed her to become someone else and experience another kind of life.
Mrs Selvig seems much like what an innie would be like if they got the chance to explore and make a life for themselves outside of Lumon. In Cobel’s case, she was never an innie in the technical, severed sense, but her upbringing had effectively rendered her as disconnected and isolated from the outside world as any innie on the severed floor.
I mentioned earlier that Lumon swooping into her life at a time of great trauma might have arrested her development at a young age. The last time she knew what it was like to be a human being with a self outside of Lumon, was before she lost her mother as a young girl.
Interestingly, she often keeps her hair in pigtails when she’s alone (she also has her hair in pigtails the photo of her at the Myrtle School, and it might be a hairstyle she had before she was brought to the school as well).
Edit: thanks to those who pointed out these are probably scrubs, not pajamas! I’ll still leave this here but the scrubs makes more sense.
She is also seen wearing colourful scrubs (with bright, child-like cartoons).
It’s almost like she picked up on the outside where she left off when her mother died.
People often point out that the way Mrs Selvig speaks seems to be outdated or slightly off. This might not be because she’s secretly an innie, but because Lumon had isolated her so much from the outside world growing up that she simply doesn’t know how to act “normal.” The only way she knows how to speak (outside of the type of language/speech Lumon instills), is drawing from how she or her mother talked when she was a little girl.
The almost-endearing-but-unsettling nature of Mrs Selvig — her inability to figure out how recycling/trash removal works, her experimentation with chamomile cookies, her trying to be a lactation nurse for Devon — hits a lot harder when looked at through the lens of an indoctrinated young girl experiencing the world for the first time since the loss of her mother.
I think Cobel genuinely found it fun and liberating to be Mrs Selvig. In one sense, it was a lie. But in another sense, it allowed her to be that little girl again who never got to continue maturing after her mother’s death. It allowed her to invent a new self to be. There might be parallels between what Cobel felt as Mrs Selvig and what Helena might be feeling pretending to be Helly down on the severed floor in season 2 (I personally think it is Helena, not Helly, but that’s another discussion).
I’m briefly reminded of Cobel’s conversation with Devon when she was pretending to be the lactation expert, when they were chatting and laughing together at Devon’s house. To me, there was an earnestness to it. It felt like Cobel really was enjoying herself in that moment, connecting with another human being like that, even if she could never really be a part of that world, even if she had ulterior motives for being there.
(An interesting observation about this shot: Cobel is framed in a way that suggests she’s trapped and separated from Devon and the rest of the world)
Part 4: Cobel and Mark
“I always felt that she likes Mark as Mrs Selvig, she actually enjoys the warmth of that friendship, and that’s something that she can’t necessarily feel in her life as Cobel.”
I think as an audience, we focus a lot on Cobel’s obsession with Mark, Gemma, and reintegration, and how there must be a deeper plot-based reason for her motivations — whether it’s to bring her mother back, or whether its because she herself is severed and wants to reintegrate. However, maybe the reason is less plot driven, and more character driven.
I do wonder if initially, Lumon asked her to keep an eye on him because they wanted to ensure that Mark’s memories of Gemma didn’t bleed through to his innie as they were experimenting on Ms Casey. Maybe Cobel was supposed to stay out of his way at first, but decided to create this alternate persona of Mrs Selvig, to move in next to him, and start interacting with him.
Like I mentioned in the last section, maybe it simply felt liberating to do so. Perhaps the more she did this, the more she began to see her own life experiences reflected in the experiences of the innies who never get the chance to have this outside life. It slowly morphed from being a task she was doing for Lumon, to her own personal adventure.
I think sometime during this whole Mrs Selvig pretense, she suddenly found herself befriending outie Mark, growing fond of the outside world and fond of her friendship with him. I wonder if Mark’s loss of Gemma reminds Cobel of the loss of her mother, and that she sees the similarities between the two traumatic experiences that led them both to Lumon, leading her to empathize deeply with him.
To this point, I wonder if Charlotte Cobel might’ve gotten in a car accident like Gemma did, one that resulted in her in a coma, dependent on life support, hence the feeding tube, before passing away. It could be the reason for Charlotte’s premature death, leaving a young daughter behind.
My other feeling is that maybe there’s a chance that Cobel had some personal involvement in faking Gemma’s death and taking her body, something which she did unquestioningly for Lumon at first. But after getting to know outie Mark and see the grief he’s feeling, she grows to regret what she did, a regret that also plants a seed of doubt about Lumon’s values as a whole. And a lot of her efforts with Mark and Gemma is trying to rectify her guilt in different ways.
We get the sense that Cobel doesn’t really have anyone she cares about or who cares about her. Growing up the way she did never gave her the chance to make friends or have a family. I think her short interactions with outie Mark over time (we have no idea how long she has lived next to him as Mrs Selvig, but maybe as early as when he started working at Lumon) meant a lot more to her than we assume.
For the first time, she sort of had a real friendship that she could enjoy, compartmentalized away from her duties as Harmony Cobel, Lumon floor manager.
Remember the strange conversation Cobelvig had with Mark when she was sharing her chamomile cookies with him? She asked him if he had been on a date, he said yes, but that it didn’t feel like anything. After Mark starts eating her cookies she, seemingly completely randomly, says this:
My late husband was a carpenter, and before he passed, he said he would start building us a house in the hereafter. And there would be a small guest apartment in the back, in case I found a new man before I got there.
For a while, I read way too much into these few lines. (What husband? Carpenter? Did he help build some Eagan facility? Was she married to an Eagan? Is the afterlife some sort of foreshadowing?)
Now, I don’t think she ever had a husband at all. Growing up at the school and then at Lumon makes it highly doubtful that she ever would’ve had the freedom to date, to marry, to have a family (unless it was for Lumon’s benefit somehow).
I think there might be two reasons she said what she did.
First, she finds a certain freedom and joy in the creation/invention of Mrs Selvig, including making up this fanciful, happy story where she had the chance to fall in love and a partner who loved her back.
Second, this might be a reach, but given the assumption that she does care about him, I would say that her little anecdote was an attempt to communicate to Mark (in an almost comically absurd way), that it’s okay to give himself permission to date, to feel things for someone else, that Gemma would be waiting for him and would want him to be happy, too. If she feels guilt over knowing that Gemma is still alive, maybe she’s hoping she can encourage him to move on from her and alleviate some of her guilt.
Cobel knows about Gemma, but Mrs Selvig isn’t supposed to, so this was her way of saying that without giving away the fact that she knows a lot more about him.
Regardless, I think Cobel grew to care for Mark, and that she sees a lot of similarities between him and herself.
Maybe Cobel wanted to help him somehow, or make amends for her involvement with Gemma’s “death,” whilst still fulfilling her duties at Lumon. Maybe she believed that if she could find a way to make reintegration work, she could unite Mark and Gemma, so that outie Mark could see her again (or the Ms Casey version of her), and save him from his grief in a way she wishes could be possible for herself.
She increases Mark’s wellness sessions to increase the amount of time innie Mark spends with Gemma/Ms Casey. She seemed genuinely moved when innie Mark seemed to subconsciously react to Gemma’s candle that she stole from outie Mark’s basement, sculpting the tree out of clay. She was asking Devon whether (outie) Mark sometimes sees his wife around. Almost as if she was trying to help him reintegrate, without being able to actually perform the reintegration procedure.
However, when outie Mark tells her that he wants to quit in 1x09, after her failed attempts to reintegrate him, she earnestly encourages him to quit, to escape. She might see his desire to quit as a sign that he’s healing from his grief and is ready to move on.
It’s cruel in a way to encourage him to quit, knowing Gemma is still alive down there, but from her point of view, she might’ve genuinely believe that this was for the best at that point.
I don’t think Cobel was certain that whatever Lumon is experimenting with on Ms Casey will work, or if Gemma is even still in there somewhere anymore.
Maybe by this point in the show, Cobel simply felt that with no promise that Cold Harbour will be successful and no real evidence (as far as she knew) that reintegration without death is possible, the best thing to do was to encourage Mark to quit and move on with his outie life.
Watching all of Mrs Selvig and Mark’s interactions through the lens that actually, she might genuinely care about him outside of her duty to Lumon, or feel some responsibility for his grief, completely changes the way those scenes feel to me. In the beginning, her behaviours and words seemed malicious based on what we knew about her at the time.
Knowing what we do at this point though, a lot of Cobel’s moments could also be read like the earnest attempts of a woman who was never allowed to socialize or interact with others in a healthy way, trying awkward to connect and be friends with outie Mark. The ulterior Lumon motives, of course, she can sever and compartmentalize away. Until, as with everything, reality bleeds through.
The scene in 2x02, when outie Mark confronts Cobel and asks about Gemma, is the first time outie Mark and Cobel meet again after the OTC activation. It’s the first time outie Mark sees Cobel as Cobel, not Mrs Selvig. In this moment, her Mrs Selvig self, the little life she made outside of Lumon, her friendship with outie Mark, all falls away.
When Mark asks about Gemma, Cobel looks distraught, genuinely close to tears. It’s hard to say what she’s feeling. Guilt at hiding Gemma’s existence from him? Regret that she was responsible for faking her death? Empathy for his grief and confusion and desperation?
Perhaps she’s feeling genuinely, earnestly sad that in this moment, she just lost all pretense of her free life as Mrs Selvig, and she just lost the only friend (outie Mark) that she ever had. Then, this boils into a rage, as she struggles to process any of these emotions bleeding over each other, and drives off away from him.
Goodbye, Mrs Selvig.
Part 5: Concluding Thoughts
In season 2, Cobel seems to be caught at a crossroads in her life, deeply internally conflicted now that she has been cast out from Lumon and seems to be debating the terms of her return — or if she wants to return at all. At this point in the show, anything can happen. Maybe we do find out she’s severed, maybe we find out there’s something else going on entirely.
Her arc this season might very well mirror Mark’s reintegration arc, where Mark struggles to reconcile his outie and innie selves and Cobel struggles to reconcile the self she was/could be outside of Lumon, and the self that she has known most of her life as a part of it. We just have to wait and find out.
All in all, while it’s easy and fun to fall down complicated rabbit holes full of plot twists and mysteries, I think it’s meaningful too to look at Severance through the lens of what makes this show feel so earnest and sincere: its exploration of the human experience, our relationships with each other and ourselves, our understanding of identity and self, and how we come to understand (and continuously create) the selves that we are in the world.
Hearing what Dan said in that interview helped me step back and re-evaluate the character of Cobel from this perspective, and it was quite enlightening to do so. Even if my theories here are completely wrong, exploring her character through this lens was still a meaningful exercise for me.
Hope some of you all enjoyed it too.
