Severance Season 2 has gone on a departure in recent weeks. Episode 7 focused on Gemma, aka Ms. Casey, as she explored multiple severed versions of herself in different unpleasant situations. In Episode 8, “Sweet Vitriol,” the focus shifted from Gemma to Ms. Cobel, who we last saw driving off into the sunset. Her journey took her back to her hometown, where we learned all about her backstory and her personal tragedies.
But hidden amongst her lore was a secret that has big implications across all of Lumon, including one of Season 2’s newest — and most mysterious — characters.
We see Harmony Cobel’s Wintertide Fellowship award in her yearbook.
In Season 2 Episode 8, Ms. Cobel travels back to her childhood home in search of the key to severance herself: the notes she took when she, not Jame Eagan, developed the technology. As she searched her house, we slowly learned her life story: She started in the ether factory as an eight-year-old but was plucked from obscurity and sent to the Myrtle Eagan School for Girls on the “Wintertide Fellowship,” allowing her to greatly advance and gain prominence within Lumon’s management structure.
Believe it or not, we’ve actually heard of the Wintertide Fellowship before. In Season 2 Episode 6, “Attila,” Mr. Milchick confronted Miss Huang, the child prodigy Lumon employee, as her manager. “I feel I should remind you,” Milchick says, “You cannot graduate from this fellowship until I have deemed you Wintertide material.”
Whatever scholarship Miss Huang is working under is the same one Miss Cobel received as a small child. All the way back in the first episode of Season 2, Mark asked her why she was a child. “Because of when I was born,” she replied. Now we know the real truth: because of the Wintertide Fellowship.
Miss Huang is following in Ms. Cobel’s footsteps. Will she be the next to turn against Lumon?
But what does this mean for the future of Severance? The Wintertide Fellowship wasn’t the miracle Harmony Cobel wanted it to be — instead, it was the path to getting her research and hard work stolen by an Eagan. Could Miss Huang be going down a similar path? She clearly loves what she does and has thoroughly downed the Lumon Kool-Aid, but if her work is stolen by the next generation of Eagans (namely, Helena), then we could see her make the same loyalty shift as her predecessor.
Lumon’s crimes could fill a book at this point, but now we know to add a long history of child labor and intellectual property theft. But at least Miss Huang is proving that you can girlboss at any age, even if it’s highly immoral and probably illegal.
