“Your company! Who the hell do you think you are? No. your friends are gonna suffer. Mark will suffer. You’ll be long gone, but we will keep them alive in pain.”
– Harmony Cobel To Helly In The Season 1 Finale
Was that a threat or a warning?
In season one, Harmony Cobel was a seemingly sinister puppeteer and loyal follower of the Lumon cult. Personally, I detested her because she made my stomach turn and reminded me of every passive-aggressive co-worker that I have ever had. In the season one finale, she left viewers seeing how rotten to the core she actually is, but last week’s episode gave a new and confusing meaning to her final words to Helly. Is Harmony Cobel….on their side?
Season 2 episode 8, titled “Sweet Vitriol”, she takes centre stage as we finally get some back story on her character. In 30-minutes, every single question and odd detail that we had from season one has been answered. Cobel created the Severance technology as a child and Lumon stole it from her, specifically James Egan, and passed it off as their own invention. Cobel was basically a child slave in the cult but was esteemed for her intelligence and potential and so she was vetted to be the next “Keir” in their religion. Through quick visual storytelling and charged subtext, it is heavily implied that Cobel might have invented the technology to help her sick mother who she was actively being kept from so she could focus on her “studies”. What made this reveal more sinister is that Harmony and her mother did not sign up to be a part of this weird, religious Lumon cult. It is suggested that the town was sucked into Lumon Industries because it was the only source of employment, and their departure destroyed the towns economy. Lumon took advantage of this small coastal town, promising them wealth, prosperity and higher religious ascention only to abandon them for corporate greed.
This bottleneck episode left some fans frustrated because of its slow pace and disjointed dialogue but I argue we needed episode 8 to provide revelations, explain motivations for the last two episodes to have the powerful finale impact this show deserves. Severance has become my favourite show to watch weekly and is one of the best shows ever made in my opinion. I love it for many reasons but the main ones are its demand for audiences to practice media literacy and its restoration of active consumption as viewers.
The battle for the ‘attention economy’ is a fight that has caused us as viewers to disengage with the media that we consume and has shortened our appetite and momentous storytelling. I remember the days of network television when I was obsessed with NBC’s Heroes, a story about a group of people who discover they have superpowers and are faced with the task of saving the world through the murder of a high school cheerleader. I would spend each week speculating what the clues meant and ruminating over each character’s fate. Network TV gave us the luxury of getting to know the universe and invited us to be a part of the journey in 24 episodes.
But those days are gone and streaming platforms are challenged with what feels like an impossible task of supporting their artists while keeping audiences engaged and making a profit. A problem that has often been solved with a large budget that focusses on CGI theatrics for engagement and less of a focus on world and character building. Thankfully, Apple TV+ has rejected this issue with Severance and has allowed series creator Dan Erickson to go back to basics, a streaming risk that has paid off.
Severance treats each episode like a motion picture. I was recently invited by Apple TV+ to a special screening of episodes 6 and 7 at TIFF Lightbox and it made me want to buy a 72” TV for my apartment. These episodes ascend what a TV show has historically been. The cinematography has been the foundation for the visual storytelling. It has been the key driver in establishing this haunting atmosphere of Lumon and the Outties reality. The Innie’s work environment is meant to mimic a typical work environment that feels suffocating. Muted colour palettes, fluorescent lighting, maze-like white hallways that feel like you are trapped. The bright blue that is Lumon’s signature colour matched with Mikchicks performative joyful boss is the thing of nightmares. And then we are returned to the Outtie’s world which is always dark grey and drab. As we have come to find out, Mark is generally depressed and hopeless since the death of his wife, Gemma. Dylan is impulsive and unfocussed revealing how much a disappointment he is as a father and husband.
Hellen is Lumon incarnate on the outside, her energy is dark. Every atmosphere she seen in is dark and Irving is literally haunted with what we know now as the testing floor at Lumon. The darkness on the outside also hints at the future for the Outies. They do not realize they are just as much void of free will as their Innie counterparts, they are Lumon’s test subjects and they want their bodies without their consensual conciseness. The double entendre of these visual tones is that it has made the mundane aspects of our lives feel dystopian because it brings to question our relationship with our jobs. How much should a company have control of our identities?
In episode 7, a bottleneck episode that fans unanimously loved, diverted from the formula and told us the heartbreaking story of Gemma and how Lumon got their hands on her. Through ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ clues, it is revealed that Lumon has always had their eyes on Gemma and Mark. From the moment that she went to the fertility clinic, they chose her as their test subject. The brilliance of this episode is that it is very much a show-don’t-tell episode combined with non-linear storytelling. In three timelines, we are taken through a meet-cute, a love story, a marriage, a breakdown in that marriage and, ultimately, death. Jessica Lee Gagné, Cinematographer of both episodes 6 and 7, demonstrated beautifully what television can do when given the right support, during the Q&A portion of the screening, Gagné had this to say about achieving the visual style of that episode:
“With time, it was really episode 7 where I got to explore what time is, I think time is a very personal thing. What you see as time is not what I see as time because we move through it in very different ways. The episode, what was interesting about it was that there were three timelines and I was trying to find a way to see how it worked within the show, because as it was being written by Mark Friedman, we weren’t necessarily paying attention to where the timeline fit in the show. From my own brain, I was trying to put it in a box and see where the rest of the show was happening and there was no way of figuring it out. So, the timelines were independent and what brought them together was how we as humans connect emotionally on another place.”
Gemma’s backstory will go down as one of the best episodes shot in a series and I wouldn’t be surprised if it is nominated for an Emmy award next year. The creativity and diversion from Lumon’s general feeling continued in episode 8, writers Adam Countee and K. C. Perry and director, Ben Stiller continued the masterclass in storytelling that this show is.
This is what entertainment consumption is meant to feel like. Severance is encouraging deep engagement through meticulous world-building, slow-burning plots and layered characters. This series proves that good storytelling is the answer to a distracted, disconnected generation. It creates an excitement for speculation, demonstrated perfectly by the plethora of fan theories. Is Gemma really Hannah? Is Cobel good deep down or is she only concerned about getting ownership back and recognition of her invention? Is Devon in on the scheme? Her choice of blue clothing on the outside would suggest so. Severance is disrupting passive viewership with embedded layers of subtext, answers to questions at the right time, and different storytelling techniques like lighting, sound and framing to shape perception. One thing that I find brilliant are the key changes in the elevator sound when Helly, Mark, Irving and Dylan are entering and leaving Lumon. Fans who looked closer were able to figure out Helly was actually Helen before Irving did.
Finally, the show is restoring communal television discourse. My favourite places to go to after each episode are TikTok and Reddit to discuss and dissect. The unintended consequence of binge culture is that some shows are being formatted for that type of viewership. I am not saying that is necessarily a bad thing, but it is when platforms abandon the art of story for profit and consumption. It also promotes disengagement; the act of shared analysis and theories has reignited TV discourse á la days of Lost, Sex And the City, Heroes, and so many more beloved programming.
Severance is a palate cleanser we, as viewers, desperately need. As fans and audiences continue to seek out intellectually engaging programming, this show will serve as the blueprint for future projects. Just as HBO changed the formula for network television, so has Apple TV+ changed the future of streaming, and I can’t wait to see what’s next.
Episodes 1 to 8 of Severance Season 2 are now streaming on Apple TV+
