Affective Hierarchies: Viewer Bias and Female Suffering in Severance

We’re all still reeling from the second season’s finale of Severance, but there’s more to unpack than that mic-drop final scene. Viewers’ reactions to an earlier episode, one that centers on Harmony Cobel—an older woman whose intellectual acumen and personal devotion have been wholly given over to Lumon Industries—was lukewarm to hostile: viewers described it as “filler,” its character study as “unnecessary,” and Cobel herself as a character whose depth was either uninteresting or unwarranted. The collective disavowal of this episode and of Cobel as a subject worthy of narrative attention suggests a larger cultural unease with aging female protagonists, especially those whose moral valences are not clearly demarcated.

Spoiler alert: This essay contains plot spoilers for seasons 1 and 2 of Severance.

After watching the eighth episode of the second season of Severance entitled “Sweet Vitriol,” I found myself disquieted not only by the content of the episode but by the collective response to it, as expressed on social media. This episode centers on the character Harmony Cobel—an older woman whose intellectual acumen and personal devotion have been wholly given over to Lumon Industries—and sparked not empathy or analytical engagement but flippancy and derision in much of the online discourse about the show. Platforms such as Reddit and X (formerly Twitter) were teeming with comments labeling the episode as “pointless,” “boring,” or unworthy of its place within the narrative architecture. Some viewers went so far as to suggest that the episode’s contents could have been condensed into an email—a phrase drawn from corporate meme culture. 

These dismissals stand in sharp contrast to the adulation for the preceding episode, which focuses on Gemma, a younger woman revealed to be Mark Scout’s supposedly deceased wife. This bifurcation in audience reception of the two episodes is not only a matter of taste; it reflects underlying cultural valuations and devaluations—particularly with regard to age, gender, and narrative legitimacy as it pertains to women’s suffering.

Severance, created by Dan Erickson and distributed by Apple TV+, unfolds (so far) over two seasons that delve into the implications of a fictional severance procedure developed by the omnipotent and enigmatic Lumon Industries. This procedure cleaves an employee’s consciousness in two, thereby creating an “innie” self who exists solely within the confines of corporate life and an “outie” self who remains oblivious to the inner workings of their employment. What unfolds is a parable of late-stage capitalism, one that interrogates the commodification of identity, the totalizing scope of corporate power, and the fantasy of a perfect work-life balance.

Against this dystopian scaffolding, the series constructs a multistranded exploration of how women in particular experience and internalize exploitation, erasure, and the machinations of power. While the show is ostensibly anchored in Mark Scout’s journey through grief and corporate awakening, it is in the narratives of the “secondary” characters Gemma and Harmony Cobel that I see one of the series’ most incisive critiques. Each of these women embodies a distinct modality of suffering, one shaped by the interplay of personal desire and institutional control. Their experiences, while varied in tone and texture, form a thematic duo through which the show interrogates the violence inflicted upon female agency.

The series constructs a multistranded exploration of how women in particular experience and internalize exploitation, erasure, and the machinations of power.

Gemma’s story is perhaps the most viscerally wrenching. Initially introduced under the tragic specter of death—Mark’s beloved wife, lost to a car accident—she is later discovered to be very much alive and subject to experimentation within Lumon’s secretive Cold Harbor program. The narrative structure by which this disclosure is executed is itself a kind of brutal poetry. Viewers are slowly made aware that Ms. Casey, the placid wellness counselor on the severed floor—the specific floor in the office building designated for employees who have undergone the severance procedure—is in fact a severed version of Gemma. As this awareness dawns, what ensues is not merely the horror of bodily entrapment but the invocation of deeper, more intimate wounds. Gemma’s earlier life with Mark, shown in the seventh episode (“Chikhai Bardo”), was shaped by the quiet, cumulative devastation of infertility—a failed pregnancy, the physically and psychologically corrosive cycles of IVF, and the emotional collapse that follows.

The series brings this anguish to the fore in a sequence at the end of the season that is as formally arresting as it is narratively revelatory. In the Cold Harbor test, Gemma is placed within a simulation that compels her to disassemble a crib—the very object that once symbolized her hope for motherhood. This act is not simply a disturbing performance of mourning but a corporately orchestrated ritual of dehumanization. By forcing her to unmake the symbolic center of her lost maternity, Lumon seeks to eradicate the final vestiges of her affective memory, thereby producing a perfectly docile subject. The crib, emblem of both love and failure, is rendered an instrument of psychological sterilization. Such scenes exemplify the series’ acute awareness of how reproductive trauma can be weaponized by institutional systems.

The audience reactions I encountered to “Chikhai Bardo”—the episode that unveils Gemma’s past with Mark—were vociferous and deeply emotive. Praise abounded for its visual and directorial sophistication, achieved by cinematographer-director Jessica Lee Gagné, as well as for its emotional complexity and character development. Gemma was widely described as a tragic heroine, and her ordeal inspired sympathy and reverence. The aesthetic and narrative apparatuses of the episode combined to produce what many hailed as the dramatic apex of the series. What is noteworthy, however, is that this praise was not merely for the technical execution but for the type of suffering depicted, one that aligns with culturally sanctioned scripts of femininity: youth, beauty, romantic love, and maternal longing.

In jarring contrast, the reception to the episode immediately following, which centers on Harmony Cobel, was lukewarm to hostile. That the episode was shorter in run time and more restrained in tone did not help its case. Yet this difference in scale does not adequately explain the disproportionate disparagement: viewers described it as “filler,” its character study as “unnecessary,” and Cobel herself as a character whose depth was either uninteresting or unwarranted. The collective disavowal of this episode and of Cobel as a subject worthy of narrative attention suggests a larger cultural unease with aging female protagonists, especially those whose moral valences are not clearly demarcated.

Cobel’s backstory reveals a childhood spent in Salt’s Neck, a desolate company town whose economic and cultural infrastructure has been consumed by Lumon. Raised by an aunt steeped in the corporate cult of founder Kier Eagan and marked by the mysterious death of her skeptical mother, Cobel’s formative years are shaped by ideological conflict and emotional deprivation. Her brilliance is cultivated under duress and ultimately co-opted by the very institution that destroyed her family. She is the very creator of the severance procedure but also its victim—a tragic figure whose life arc exemplifies the paradoxes of complicity and dispossession.

Cobel is the very creator of the severance procedure but also its victim—a tragic figure whose life arc exemplifies the paradoxes of complicity and dispossession.

Her story is not one of romantic longing or maternal grief but of intellectual erasure and ideological entrapment. As such, it resists easy sentimentalization. It is no less devastating than Gemma’s, yet it lacks the visual and emotional cues that typically elicit audience empathy. Cobel is not youthful and not portrayed through the aesthetic lens of romance or nostalgia. Her suffering is systemic, not sentimental; cerebral, not corporeal. And therein lies the difficulty of its reception. The lack of enthusiasm for Cobel’s episode discloses a hierarchy of affective interpretation, one that privileges certain configurations of female suffering while marginalizing others.

Gemma represents the exploitation of reproductive identity; Cobel, the co-optation and dismissal of intellectual labor.

Together, the stories of Gemma and Cobel delineate a spectrum of dystopian womanhood, each characterized by different modalities of subjection and resistance. Gemma represents the exploitation of reproductive identity; Cobel, the co-optation and dismissal of intellectual labor. These are not ancillary storylines; they are constitutive of the show’s thematic core. That the audience should respond to them with such disparity underscores the necessity of critical attention to how narrative structures and audience expectations converge.

The contrasting reactions to the characters of Gemma and Cobel reveal not only audience preferences but entrenched societal biases regarding which female experiences are deemed narratively valuable.

In this context, the reception of these episodes becomes a site of analysis in its own right. The contrasting reactions to the characters of Gemma and Cobel reveal not only audience preferences but entrenched societal biases regarding which female experiences are deemed narratively valuable. Gemma’s pain is legible; Cobel’s, less so. This difference in legibility is instructive, providing insight into the affective economies that govern viewer engagement. It invites us to ask, What forms of suffering do we find moving, and why? Whose pain is aestheticized, and whose despised?

Severance does not offer easy answers. It presents, instead, a capacious and unsettling meditation on the cost of complicity, the allure of erasure, and the violence of systems that consume and discard. It insists that we look closely—not only at the shiny surfaces of its narrative but at the uncomfortable truths embedded within. As viewers, our task is not merely to consume but to interrogate our consumption, to recognize the asymmetries in how we distribute our empathy.

Richard Charles Lee Canada–Hong Kong Library
University of Toronto