Severance Season 2 Draws A Parallel Between Cobel And Huang

This article contains spoilers for “Severance” season 2 episode 9, “The After Hours.”

Life isn’t easy for anyone associated with Lumon Industries, and this applies triple if they happen to be working on the company’s infamous and controversial Severed Floor. The poor innies and their truckloads of existential crises are just one part of the whole story, too — even if you’re an unsevered worker with a cozy managerial position, things are liable to get tricky.

Interestingly, a pattern seems to emerge among the Kier faithful who have been tasked with supervising the Severed Floor during the show’s two seasons. The seething, hostile Ms. Cobel (Patricia Arquette) and the calm, collected Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman) couldn’t be more different from each other. With the introduction of the latter’s Deputy Manager replacement Miss Huang (Sarah Bock), however, “Severance” season 2 shows a certain, deeply worrying trend in Lumon’s recruitment policies. In fact, episode 9, “The After Hours,” reveals that Miss Huang and Ms. Cobel seem to be on the same path, though they walk it several decades apart. Unfortunately, it very much seems that said path is the exact opposite of nice and easy.

“Severance” season 2 episode 8, “Sweet Vitriol,” reveals that Harmony Cobel grew up in a small Lumon factory town called Salt’s Neck, and was hand-picked to study in a Lumon-affiliated school called Myrtle Eagan School for Girls. Presumably because she excelled academically and embraced the cult of Kier, Lumon CEO Jame Eagan (Michael Siberry) accepted her in his Jame Eagan Wintertide Fellowship sponsor program. This eventually landed her the highly prestigious position of the Severed Floor manager.

As it happens, Miss Huang — whose full name is Eustice Huang, as “The After Hours” reveals — is on the exact same trajectory. Her previous interaction with Milchick has already revealed that he’s acting as her overseer while she interns on the Severed Floor in an effort to become a Wintertide Fellow herself. This means that she, like Cobel, studied at the Myrtle Eagan School for Girls or a similar facility, and Milchick ends up greenlighting her Wintertide Fellowship in “The After Hours.” In effect, Huang is effectively what Cobel once was … and the strong implication seems to be that they are just two of the many, many ladies in Jame Eagan’s program over the years.

Unfortunately, Cobel’s arc confirms that this supposedly glorious educational and career path comes with plenty of pitfalls. In her case, she was stuck in school while her mother was struggling for her life and ultimately died. Later, she used her talents to invent the severance procedure, only for Jame to take the credit and claim that he’s the inventor. Despite this, she’s been indoctrinated into loyalty, which goes a long way toward explaining her peculiar combination of barely concealed bitterness and near-religious devotion to Lumon in general and Kier Eagan’s cult of personality in particular. She only snaps out of it after realizing that her loyalty is worth absolutely nothing when Lumon fires her near the end of season 1.

Likewise, Huang doesn’t seem to be treading the path of glory. Milchick makes it immensely clear that he doesn’t appreciate her initiative, and takes some pleasure in forcing her to smash her beloved ring toss game in “The After Hours.” She also seems genuinely displeased to have her time on the Severance Floor cut short, and the last we see of her, she’s shipped off to the Gunnell Eagan Empathy Center in Svalbard — a cold and remote archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. Whatever brand new inventions she’s set to bring to the table in this faraway facility, she can wholly expect the Eagans to steal.

If spending your academic life in a boarding school and becoming indoctrinated to a cult that will employ you while happily stealing all your work isn’t enough, this particular storyline may have an even darker undercurrent. “The After Hours” reveals that Jame Eagan doesn’t play very nice — especially when it comes to women. As Cobel reveals at the gates of Damona Birthing Retreat, Jame has a history of sending pregnant women to the facility, and the strong implication is that the Damona staff have standing orders to deal with such situations in secrecy.

While it’s too early to tell whether this has something to do with Lumon’s bizarre endgame or if it’s a matter of Jame’s personal proclivities, the fact that a rich CEO who sponsors an all-female fellowship program keeps having to deal with secret pregnancies has some truly unnerving implications. What’s more, since Cobel — a former Lumon superstar who went through Jame’s program — has knowledge of this, it seems likely that the situation is either connected to her work at the Severed Floor or, chillingly, she has personal experiences of it from her time as a Wintertide Fellow.

The “Severance” season 2 opening credits feature several babies, and so far, their meaning has been shrouded in mystery. From the looks of it, the show is finally beginning to address this particular corner of its mysteries. Let’s just hope that the answers it provides aren’t too depressing.

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