You Missed The Point Of Severance’s ‘Bad’ Cobel Episode

Severance aired one of its most controversial episodes last night, episode 7, ‘Sweet Vitriol.’ It was the second bottle episode in a row, with last week’s Gemma-focused episode being one of the best of the series. This, by most accounts, was not.

Its appearance right after the Gemma episode hurts the pacing of the show, not to mention it just really doesn’t feel like Severance at all when you’re 100% out of the office with 0% of the main characters even seen.

However, there was a specific point being made here, something which has been endorsed by Ben Stiller, giving his liking of a tweet trying to explain the episode and what everyone might be missing here. I was in the “yeah that was not good” camp, but this sort of changed my mind in terms of it at least being a useful and important episode, even if it wasn’t exactly thrilling to watch.

The big reveal of the episode was that it was actually Cobel who invented severance, not any of the Eagans. When she was younger, she came up with the technical concept, but because Kier says “all knowledge” belongs to everyone, as a true believer she gave up credit, or rather it was stolen from her, as an Eagan was given credit for Severance eventually. Now, she wants it back, disillusioned with Lumon in full now.

It seemed a bit far-fetched that essentially the equivalent of an intern came up with severance, but the rationale from a character perspective at least makes sense. We know that Lumon had an incredibly dangerous factory in this now-ruined northeastern town that employed child labor as young as eight year-olds to man its dangerous equipment and chemicals, and that’s how Cobel was brought up.

This was no doubt traumatizing, so she came up with the idea of literally creating disassociating through technology, specifically, separating a “main” personality from another one designed to focus only on work. In her cause, traumatic work.

As we know, this is horrifying in her case especially, as this creates an entirely different person, more or less, and if it was used in that case it would be a child trapped in literal factory hell knowing nothing else. A bit more severe than a boring office job. Though we’re not trying to make the case Cobel is some sort of hero here.

This now extends into what seems to be happening currently with Gemma. It’s not disassociating from work, it’s disassociating from all trauma or even monotony or general negative feelings, possibly all the way up to death. That reaches all the way back to Cobel’s intent in the first place even if that means torturing a number of tech-created alternate personalities.

No, I didn’t especially like this episode, but I do think it’s an important one that gets to the core of the entire series based on what it showed us. Maybe watch it again with that in mind.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.