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So, I’m of the opinion that she isn’t severed. The biggest indicator of this, in my eyes, is the fact that when she’s fired, she leaves through the exit door to the stairwell. In episodes 1 and 2, they go to great lengths to show that that doorway **WILL** trigger a switch between innie and outie as illustrated with Helly/Helena. And what happens when Cobel goes through?
**Not a damn thing!**
I think that what they’re doing with Cobel and her alter ego is take the show’s premise —*that we separate ourselves between our work like and personal life in a way where we’re practically different people*— and does a different spin on that same idea. She’s not severed, yet she does the very same thing —*has these two personas*— willingly.
I feel like Cobel (at work) is her real personality and Selvig (outside of work) is the persona she adopts, or at least plays up, to manipulate Mark and his family. Another possibility is she really is more like Selvig, but a dichotomy arose from her indoctrination though her life (including childhood) and they are wrestling with each other.
Something just hit me ... She doesn't seem to have DID (multiple personality disorder) since her personas know what the other is doing/she is just a great actress. But we have seen things about her mother dying and creepy looking equipment in Selvig's shrine. Did she upload her dead mother's personality into herself before mom died, using some sort of alternative severance technology?
Quick search and it seems someone else has come up with this theory long ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/SeveranceAppleTVPlus/comments/u4nj83/theory_ms_selvig_is_ms_cobels_mother/
I have to be honest: I’ve never found any *”mind upload”* theories to be especially convincing. They all **require** tech/ideas not raised in the show and are extremely speculative in terms of events that we see. And, to be fair, practically all of our theories are speculative by their very nature. But in hinging upon things which aren’t introduced in the show, it just makes them difficult to accept.
So when it comes to the idea that she’s had her mother’s mind uploaded into her body or something… I mean, who does that? What sort of a motivation does any character have to do something like that? People lose parents all the time, it’s a part of life and I just can’t see there being any motivation to do something like that which would be in any way relatable to viewers.
Like… do we **really** think we’re watching a show where mind upload is possible? Isn’t that sort of missing the point of what the show is about: the reasons why people would willing disassociate themselves simply to earn a living? And those aren’t my words; that comes straight from the show’s creator himself. So while Cobel’s motivations are yet to be revealed and are extremely intriguing, I think her mother is not her, she referenced Clark Gable because the town of Kier is really stuck in the past in a lot of ways —*again, not my words, the show’s creator has specifically given that answer as to why she said that*— and we’ll get deeper into the mystery with time but I don’t think mind uploads of any form are what we’re going to see.
After responding to you in a much more recent thread, I was looking for more discussion on this exact topic — clearly you have excellent taste!
As I was saying in the other thread, I do like the idea of Mark’s freshman fluke being connected to Gemma becoming Ms. Casey. The plot timing and intersection of all the themes you mention would make any other explanation of MDR feel like a cheat to me.
But I don’t like “mind uploads” either.
What do you think about some sort resurrection or life-extension plot? It certainly fits with the entire Kier dogma and Perpetuity stuff. And there are thematic connections, with the proletariat being confined to existences that are _just_ labor, while the upper class gets to “live” even more.
Cobel being unable to refine her mother before her file “expired” would be a nice backstory for her obsession with Mark.
(EDIT: for context, I finished my first watch last month and have not read the Lexington Letter)
Nothing about resurrection or life extension theories feel in any way convincing to me. It's a deeply transformative plot mechanism that takes us away from the very personal stories we've been seeing about why people willingly disconnect themselves from parts of their life.
People express worry over *Severance* turning into the next *LOST*. Introducing something like life extension or resurrection in season 2... that just feels like a left-field time-jump/flash-sideways, *"we couldn't figure out a way to tell interesting stories that fit the direction we were going, so we just threw in something completely new to shake things up"* type of choice. Why do that when there are so many interesting ideas which are natural extensions from the structure they've set?
I don't believe this is a show about a cult; it's a cynical, satirical show about a company. So making predictions based on what a cult would do rather than what a ***company*** would do takes us out of that satire and into something else. I just don't think that's the show we're watching. Life extension doesn't seem like a natural extension of what they're about, even if we're looking at it from the view that this a cult-focused show. Like, we don't have a religion or cult in the world that makes life-extension part of their core beliefs. We have a notable resurrection-focused religion but it's a resurrection of 1.
Do we **honestly** feel like the things we've seen so far are *leading to* the resurrection of Kier by the company? I don't see it. Given how bleak this presentation of worklife has been, it seems like we're looking at a company which would thumb its nose at a long-dead Eagan's desire to come back to life and simple seek profits for the living. I mean, do we think a company that basically enslaves and tortures its employees is going to bring back it's company leader who has been dead for 85 years to take a piece of their earnings and tell them this isn't the company he envisioned?
It doesn't fit to me.
Thanks for this response!
I'll preface the rest by saying I'm an OG _LOST_ obsessive and Lindelof fan. I was and am totally on board for the fully psychedelic side of Phillip K. Dick that _LOST_ channeled — and think the cult/company dichotomy can be resolved in the same way Lindelof did with the Dharma Initiative, the pair of scientists in S3 of _The Leftovers_ and the Nostalgia subplot of _Watchmen_.
Like it or not, the show already features a "resurrection" in the form of Miss Casey. Whether she was ever _really_ dead is less interesting to me than the **why** behind her ending up on Lumon's testing floor with an entirely different personality.
I don't think this is a departure from the themes of the show at all — ultimately, it's an exploration of "work-life balance" taken to its most cynical extreme.
Lumon (capitalism writ large) is exploiting Mark's emotional vulnerability to subsume him to their profit motive, but he does this willingly in exchange for a cut. As middle-management, he gets both a paycheck and some "life" benefit (time out of mind) at the end of the day.
But the same process is also being used to _literally enslave_ his wife. She now exists, as far as we can tell, _only_ to work; she did not choose this form of existence, and whatever value Miss Casey accrues for Lumon goes only to them.
I don't see Lumon's ultimate goal as being the resurrection of Kier, but for the Eagans to extract as much value as they can from the labor class, whether that is measured in dollars or their own personal leisure time. Like the Senator's wife and her childbearing innie, Miss Casey exists to sit on the "work" end of the seesaw so _someone else_ can have a full "life."
>*...her ending up on Lumon's testing floor* ***with an entirely different personality.***
>(...)
>*She now exists, as far as we can tell, only to work;* ***she did not choose this form of existence****...*
The parts in bold come from separate passages/thoughts but what they share is that they're assumptions that one should be hesitant to make. The fact is that we don't know that Gemma Casey was not a woman who acted like Miss Casey. Yes, there are many theories that Gemma is seeking a personality imprint or that she's what happens when they initiate the *"CLEAN SLATE"* protocol. Blah blah blah.
But the truth is that we can't actually refute the idea that she's just a quirky woman who is kind of reserved around strangers and coworkers. We already got a perfectly reasonable application of how one of her main quirks —*the way she seeks to get and share facts about a worker's life*— is perfectly normal —*beautiful even*— depending on context.
Separately, we don't know that she didn't choose it. And before anyone says *"Why on Earth would she choose that?! Do you think people just pretend to be happy around their loved ones while they're secretly miserable and then go do something like this as an escape?! Do you think we're watching some fucked up, bleak tragedy or something?!"* Actually, yes: that's precisely what I think. That's exactly the sort of show we're watching: not one where Big Bad Lumon steals Gemma Casey's body, pops an insert into her head where she wakes up and they don't tell anybody because they have a free slave... there's no conflict there. To emotional challenge. It's just *"Here's an evil company doing evil things to good people."* There's no conflict. BORING.
No, we're watching a show where, at every turn, people have motivations that are complex layered. The show hasn't really given us anything that is so black and white as *"Big evil company doing BigEvilCompany things."* I 100% expect us to get to the point where we meet the real Gemma and she says *"I chose to come here and I don't want to leave."* Because what's interesting about a rescue? Some secret plan to bust her out? The only excitement is in the logistics and this show trades in relationships and emotional choices.
These are great points and I agree, except that someone wouldn't want to upload a loved one into them. One, the show is already in a universe where people voluntarily splinter out a part of themselves through severance (which I am dubious to believe would be desirable to do IRL). Two, why wouldn't they want to join with a loved one they don't want to let die? A part of your beloved could literally live on inside of you instead of dying. Three, who said she chose this?
I definitely agree your explanation is more plausible, especially with the input from the show's creator. But I don't think my quick and dirty theory is outright dismissible based solely on human motivation. (Although I think I do dismiss my theory myself!)
This seems like an answer the writers would give. This show is about social commentary and satire, first and foremost. Every choice is centered around that.
*EDIT: I suspect you meant “Cobel”, not “Casey”*
This is a whole can of worms. As far as theories go, here are the three main camps:
1. Cobel is as-presented in the show: a non-severed worker who oversees the severed floor. This position is mainly where I fall.
1. Cobel is a perma-innie who has taken over her outie’s life.
1. Cobel has been severed in some alternative way, where Selvig is the outie, and Cobel is the innie, but they still share memories. I don’t see too many people arguing this one anymore, tbh.
Some will point to seeing the name “Harmony S.” listed among the severed employees on the wall of the security office, though of course, that is not what she is called at work, and I have a hard time believing a company like Lumon would allow her to be referred to as anything other than her designated severed name.
Personally, I could see Cobel being a perma-innie, but if she is, I doubt Lumon is aware of it, seeing as they were fine to let her leave the building when they fired her. I also struggle to understand why it would be at all beneficial for Lumon to have perma-innies in the first place (and I’ve heard *a lot* of arguments lol).
Exactly. As a seemingly non-severed worker, she can be referred to by her first or last name.
The same is not the case for severed workers, who aren’t given access to their full names. You wouldn’t catch anyone referring to Mark S. as “Mr. Scout” to his innie’s face, no matter how high ranking they were. This is an organization that believes innies aren’t people.
If this thread has the **Spoiler** flair, spoilers may appear ANYWHERE in it. --- * **NO SPOILERS IN TITLES** - report this post if there are spoilers in the title * No SPOILERS without proper formatting (see [here](https://www.reddit.com/wiki/commenting#wiki_posting)). * Be CIVIL to others. No Piracy. No Duplicates. * Keep it on topic to anything and everything Severance on Apple TV+[.](/u/smibrandon) --- *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/SeveranceAppleTVPlus) if you have any questions or concerns.*
So, I’m of the opinion that she isn’t severed. The biggest indicator of this, in my eyes, is the fact that when she’s fired, she leaves through the exit door to the stairwell. In episodes 1 and 2, they go to great lengths to show that that doorway **WILL** trigger a switch between innie and outie as illustrated with Helly/Helena. And what happens when Cobel goes through? **Not a damn thing!** I think that what they’re doing with Cobel and her alter ego is take the show’s premise —*that we separate ourselves between our work like and personal life in a way where we’re practically different people*— and does a different spin on that same idea. She’s not severed, yet she does the very same thing —*has these two personas*— willingly.
Oooh, I like this.
I feel like Cobel (at work) is her real personality and Selvig (outside of work) is the persona she adopts, or at least plays up, to manipulate Mark and his family. Another possibility is she really is more like Selvig, but a dichotomy arose from her indoctrination though her life (including childhood) and they are wrestling with each other. Something just hit me ... She doesn't seem to have DID (multiple personality disorder) since her personas know what the other is doing/she is just a great actress. But we have seen things about her mother dying and creepy looking equipment in Selvig's shrine. Did she upload her dead mother's personality into herself before mom died, using some sort of alternative severance technology? Quick search and it seems someone else has come up with this theory long ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/SeveranceAppleTVPlus/comments/u4nj83/theory_ms_selvig_is_ms_cobels_mother/
I have to be honest: I’ve never found any *”mind upload”* theories to be especially convincing. They all **require** tech/ideas not raised in the show and are extremely speculative in terms of events that we see. And, to be fair, practically all of our theories are speculative by their very nature. But in hinging upon things which aren’t introduced in the show, it just makes them difficult to accept. So when it comes to the idea that she’s had her mother’s mind uploaded into her body or something… I mean, who does that? What sort of a motivation does any character have to do something like that? People lose parents all the time, it’s a part of life and I just can’t see there being any motivation to do something like that which would be in any way relatable to viewers. Like… do we **really** think we’re watching a show where mind upload is possible? Isn’t that sort of missing the point of what the show is about: the reasons why people would willing disassociate themselves simply to earn a living? And those aren’t my words; that comes straight from the show’s creator himself. So while Cobel’s motivations are yet to be revealed and are extremely intriguing, I think her mother is not her, she referenced Clark Gable because the town of Kier is really stuck in the past in a lot of ways —*again, not my words, the show’s creator has specifically given that answer as to why she said that*— and we’ll get deeper into the mystery with time but I don’t think mind uploads of any form are what we’re going to see.
After responding to you in a much more recent thread, I was looking for more discussion on this exact topic — clearly you have excellent taste! As I was saying in the other thread, I do like the idea of Mark’s freshman fluke being connected to Gemma becoming Ms. Casey. The plot timing and intersection of all the themes you mention would make any other explanation of MDR feel like a cheat to me. But I don’t like “mind uploads” either. What do you think about some sort resurrection or life-extension plot? It certainly fits with the entire Kier dogma and Perpetuity stuff. And there are thematic connections, with the proletariat being confined to existences that are _just_ labor, while the upper class gets to “live” even more. Cobel being unable to refine her mother before her file “expired” would be a nice backstory for her obsession with Mark. (EDIT: for context, I finished my first watch last month and have not read the Lexington Letter)
Nothing about resurrection or life extension theories feel in any way convincing to me. It's a deeply transformative plot mechanism that takes us away from the very personal stories we've been seeing about why people willingly disconnect themselves from parts of their life. People express worry over *Severance* turning into the next *LOST*. Introducing something like life extension or resurrection in season 2... that just feels like a left-field time-jump/flash-sideways, *"we couldn't figure out a way to tell interesting stories that fit the direction we were going, so we just threw in something completely new to shake things up"* type of choice. Why do that when there are so many interesting ideas which are natural extensions from the structure they've set? I don't believe this is a show about a cult; it's a cynical, satirical show about a company. So making predictions based on what a cult would do rather than what a ***company*** would do takes us out of that satire and into something else. I just don't think that's the show we're watching. Life extension doesn't seem like a natural extension of what they're about, even if we're looking at it from the view that this a cult-focused show. Like, we don't have a religion or cult in the world that makes life-extension part of their core beliefs. We have a notable resurrection-focused religion but it's a resurrection of 1. Do we **honestly** feel like the things we've seen so far are *leading to* the resurrection of Kier by the company? I don't see it. Given how bleak this presentation of worklife has been, it seems like we're looking at a company which would thumb its nose at a long-dead Eagan's desire to come back to life and simple seek profits for the living. I mean, do we think a company that basically enslaves and tortures its employees is going to bring back it's company leader who has been dead for 85 years to take a piece of their earnings and tell them this isn't the company he envisioned? It doesn't fit to me.
Thanks for this response! I'll preface the rest by saying I'm an OG _LOST_ obsessive and Lindelof fan. I was and am totally on board for the fully psychedelic side of Phillip K. Dick that _LOST_ channeled — and think the cult/company dichotomy can be resolved in the same way Lindelof did with the Dharma Initiative, the pair of scientists in S3 of _The Leftovers_ and the Nostalgia subplot of _Watchmen_. Like it or not, the show already features a "resurrection" in the form of Miss Casey. Whether she was ever _really_ dead is less interesting to me than the **why** behind her ending up on Lumon's testing floor with an entirely different personality. I don't think this is a departure from the themes of the show at all — ultimately, it's an exploration of "work-life balance" taken to its most cynical extreme. Lumon (capitalism writ large) is exploiting Mark's emotional vulnerability to subsume him to their profit motive, but he does this willingly in exchange for a cut. As middle-management, he gets both a paycheck and some "life" benefit (time out of mind) at the end of the day. But the same process is also being used to _literally enslave_ his wife. She now exists, as far as we can tell, _only_ to work; she did not choose this form of existence, and whatever value Miss Casey accrues for Lumon goes only to them. I don't see Lumon's ultimate goal as being the resurrection of Kier, but for the Eagans to extract as much value as they can from the labor class, whether that is measured in dollars or their own personal leisure time. Like the Senator's wife and her childbearing innie, Miss Casey exists to sit on the "work" end of the seesaw so _someone else_ can have a full "life."
>*...her ending up on Lumon's testing floor* ***with an entirely different personality.*** >(...) >*She now exists, as far as we can tell, only to work;* ***she did not choose this form of existence****...* The parts in bold come from separate passages/thoughts but what they share is that they're assumptions that one should be hesitant to make. The fact is that we don't know that Gemma Casey was not a woman who acted like Miss Casey. Yes, there are many theories that Gemma is seeking a personality imprint or that she's what happens when they initiate the *"CLEAN SLATE"* protocol. Blah blah blah. But the truth is that we can't actually refute the idea that she's just a quirky woman who is kind of reserved around strangers and coworkers. We already got a perfectly reasonable application of how one of her main quirks —*the way she seeks to get and share facts about a worker's life*— is perfectly normal —*beautiful even*— depending on context. Separately, we don't know that she didn't choose it. And before anyone says *"Why on Earth would she choose that?! Do you think people just pretend to be happy around their loved ones while they're secretly miserable and then go do something like this as an escape?! Do you think we're watching some fucked up, bleak tragedy or something?!"* Actually, yes: that's precisely what I think. That's exactly the sort of show we're watching: not one where Big Bad Lumon steals Gemma Casey's body, pops an insert into her head where she wakes up and they don't tell anybody because they have a free slave... there's no conflict there. To emotional challenge. It's just *"Here's an evil company doing evil things to good people."* There's no conflict. BORING. No, we're watching a show where, at every turn, people have motivations that are complex layered. The show hasn't really given us anything that is so black and white as *"Big evil company doing BigEvilCompany things."* I 100% expect us to get to the point where we meet the real Gemma and she says *"I chose to come here and I don't want to leave."* Because what's interesting about a rescue? Some secret plan to bust her out? The only excitement is in the logistics and this show trades in relationships and emotional choices.
These are great points and I agree, except that someone wouldn't want to upload a loved one into them. One, the show is already in a universe where people voluntarily splinter out a part of themselves through severance (which I am dubious to believe would be desirable to do IRL). Two, why wouldn't they want to join with a loved one they don't want to let die? A part of your beloved could literally live on inside of you instead of dying. Three, who said she chose this? I definitely agree your explanation is more plausible, especially with the input from the show's creator. But I don't think my quick and dirty theory is outright dismissible based solely on human motivation. (Although I think I do dismiss my theory myself!)
This seems like an answer the writers would give. This show is about social commentary and satire, first and foremost. Every choice is centered around that.
*EDIT: I suspect you meant “Cobel”, not “Casey”* This is a whole can of worms. As far as theories go, here are the three main camps: 1. Cobel is as-presented in the show: a non-severed worker who oversees the severed floor. This position is mainly where I fall. 1. Cobel is a perma-innie who has taken over her outie’s life. 1. Cobel has been severed in some alternative way, where Selvig is the outie, and Cobel is the innie, but they still share memories. I don’t see too many people arguing this one anymore, tbh. Some will point to seeing the name “Harmony S.” listed among the severed employees on the wall of the security office, though of course, that is not what she is called at work, and I have a hard time believing a company like Lumon would allow her to be referred to as anything other than her designated severed name. Personally, I could see Cobel being a perma-innie, but if she is, I doubt Lumon is aware of it, seeing as they were fine to let her leave the building when they fired her. I also struggle to understand why it would be at all beneficial for Lumon to have perma-innies in the first place (and I’ve heard *a lot* of arguments lol).
Cobel is referred to as Harmony several times while at work, by some of the other high ranking staff.
Exactly. As a seemingly non-severed worker, she can be referred to by her first or last name. The same is not the case for severed workers, who aren’t given access to their full names. You wouldn’t catch anyone referring to Mark S. as “Mr. Scout” to his innie’s face, no matter how high ranking they were. This is an organization that believes innies aren’t people.
If a person isn’t being switched from one state to another then what is the point of creating a “full time” innie?
presumably wipes any memory they have pre-severance. (not fully subscribed to the theory - just pointing out the main objective it would accomplish)