‘Severance’ Recap Season 2 Episode 8: Ms. Cobel’s Backstory Explained

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 8 of “Severance,” now streaming on Apple TV+.

Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette), the former manager of the Severed Floor, has been acting like she’s more important to Lumon than she gets credit for since the beginning of “Severance” — and in Episode 8 of Season 2, she justifies it.

In this installment, titled “Sweet Vitriol,” Harmony appears for the first time on screen since she drove off at the end of Episode 2, leaving Mark (Adam Scott) to wonder what she knows about him, Gemma/Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman) and Lumon’s overall mission. When she shows up again, she’s returned to the impoverished, tiny hometown where she grew up to ask for help from her childhood friend Hampton (James Le Gros) in getting back into the home where her mother died, since she’s on bad terms with her aunt Sissy Cobel (played by Jane Alexander).

Among the many discoveries “Severance” viewers make in this episode about Harmony Cobel and her past — including that she worked in a Lumon-run ether factory as a child, and left the dangerous job when she was accepted into a special Lumon fellowship program — is that Harmony created the first plans and schematics for the severance chip.

By the end of the episode, Harmony has left home once more, and is presumably driving back toward Mark after learning from Devon (Jen Tullock) that he has been successfully reintegrated.

Here, Variety speaks with Arquette about diving into Harmony’s past with episode director Ben Stiller — plus, why she says “Mark” like that.

We find out in this episode that Harmony Cobel played an enormous part in the history of Lumon’s severance procedure by coming up with the idea for the chip as a young student in the company’s fellowship program. How much did you know of Harmony’s backstory from the beginning of Season 1, and what surprised you when you learned it in this one?

I knew that Harmony had gone to a school and that she had worked at this ether factory, and that her mom had become an ether addict, and that Lumon had environmentally poisoned the town through their industrialization of everything. We had always talked about this as being an origin story aspect of it. There were different points in time where we talked about the possibility of Cobel having something to do with some aspect of the chip, definitely, because even though she didn’t get any acknowledgement of it, it carried within her the entitlement of somebody who had more to do with things structurally than maybe this organization will acknowledge. The way that this belief system works — like a lot of things, like the military or whatever — it’s all for the glory of the organization. It’s all for the glory of Kier. It’s not about you, not about the individual. It’s about the organization, what the organization needs. Here’s this person who will never get the acknowledgement from the people that she wants it most from: her aunt and Lumon itself.

How would you describe Harmony’s current feelings about Lumon? And what she plans to do from here after responding to Devon’s calls, and learning Mark has been reintegrated from his severance procedure?

I think Harmony has a deep conflict about this company. Her mom was a rebel, and her mom was angry at Lumon. And some of that that I think is also within Harmony. Harmony never got to have that kind of mother love. The organization separated kids from their parents, so she didn’t get that kind of maternal bonding. And then when you have a drug addict parent, you’re never going to get it, because they’re disconnected in that kind of a way. The place itself, it’s very enlightening about Harmony’s inner landscape. This was the norm — this kind of coldness, this kind of strangeness. These were the proletarian of that time. These were the early incubators. This place was the incubating space for Lumon. And ether is the drug of forgetting. It in itself feeds into the chip.

I think a lot of people see Harmony as a bad guy — now she’s going to confront her own bad guy, her aunt, and this cold place where her mother died. And she didn’t get any closure, she didn’t get to say goodbye. This cold room when her mom died alone. And then you have to say goodbye to people, and you will never get closure with them. They’re not capable, and it just wasn’t meant to be that way. So I think she’s mourning that when she’s in that room. But it was really nice to be able to see the set designer and the props department, and everybody who made these spaces that we’ve been talking about since the first season.

How did you construct the scene where Harmony lies on her mother’s bed and holds her mother’s ether mask up to her face and finds comfort in that while simultaneously wailing in pain?

She had done some ether a few times when she was a kid with James’ character, Hampton. But her mom was such an addict, and it had taken her away into this dream state so much, stolen her mother from her, basically. So we had talked about just the awkwardness of the apparatus and how we were going to shoot that and so on. And then also incorporating historical things like, throughout time and throughout cultures, women have talked about keening — the sound of mourning, which has like animal kind of elements of loss. Going back to our essential animal self, the sadness and the pain that comes with loss. Ben and I talked about whale sounds, almost, and how he wanted to use that. So we talked about it and there was some freedom in it, and we did it a few different ways and different times.

It’s really just going back to that place that I myself had cared for a lot of people who died, and then also had to let people go in my life that needed to be let go of. That can always be painful, and I think she’s crying a lot for herself, too. She really doesn’t have anyone to go to to really talk about how she feels about anything. And that’s part of why she really liked Ms. Selvig, because she got this pretend feeling of what it’s like to make friends and have people you chat with.

“Severance” creator Dan Erickson told Variety that the Grand Central surprise pop-up event is canon to the show’s storyline — but at the same time, he says he doesn’t know what you and the other actors were saying inside of the glass cube where the scenes took place. Were you all just making it up as you went, and can you tell me what you were actually saying to Adam Scott in character?

We were making it up as we went along, but there were moments where I felt like really interesting things were happening from inside my character and inside his character. I was having him write this thing on a post, and then he ended up writing “human,” which was a really cool moment. I’ve got to ask Adam exactly what the prompt was I gave him. It definitely felt like we were in it a lot of the time. It was really fun to do that. It felt very free. It felt immediate, and it felt fun to play with these fellow actors like that.

Fans have an obsession with the way Harmony pronounces Mark’s name throughout the series. Was that scripted, or did you develop how she would deliver the line yourself and why did you land on that?

I came up with that when they were telling me how Harmony grew up in this place, and even just the lore of tempers and all the different things — there was an old world-ishness about it. So I knew I wanted to have this sound, since I knew that Harmony hadn’t really been raised so much by her mom as these figures of higher authority. And, I thought, authority has this certain tone. If you think about a drill sergeant, there’s a certain kind of meter and a certain kind of tone and a certain kind of authority. And then you think of all these different people in upper management, the way that upper management sounds. I think she had formed a sound based on her idea of what that is.

And I don’t know, I was kind of playing around with watching a little bit of “Maude” before we started, and there was a certain way that Bea Arthur speaks, that there’s a tiny, tiny pinch of the tip of the hat to “Maude” also. And there’s some joy that I think Cobel has to luxuriate on his name. It means a lot to her.

This interview has been edited and condensed.