Severance

Credit: Apple

For the first time since I’ve been writing about Severance, I have to say I have mixed feelings. Season 2, Episode 8 (which has the peculiar title ‘Sweet Vitriol’) is an odd bottle episode, hot on the heels of last week’s bottle episode. Two bottles in a row is a tough sell in even the best show, and taking this much time away from the main story is an odd creative choice. Spoilers ahead.

This was not a bad episode, by any means. But the big revelation at the very end leaves me feeling . . . unsettled, and not in a good way. Not in a “ooh, cool twist” way. In my spoiler-free review of the second season, I wrote:

If I had to sum it up in one phrase, this would be it: Season 2 is not as tightly crafted. This is most apparent in the second half, when a couple of the episodes felt a little bottle-ish, disrupting the rhythm of the season as a whole. I’m not sure if this will play better week-to-week instead of in a binge (I watched all ten screeners over the course of three or four days) but I admit I was a little thrown off by the decision to put two episodes in a row that felt very out-of-place with the rest of the season, grinding its momentum to a halt.

I may feel differently on a second watch. At least one of these episodes ends with a big revelation that I wasn’t particularly fond of—a choice that felt somewhat after-the-fact, used to expand one character’s story in a way that I don’t really find plausible, that felt perhaps lacked the narrative probity of the first season, or felt a little tacked-on. The other bottle episode gave us a lot of backstory, but never revealed the most important details the backstory was exploring. Both left me feeling unsatisfied.

First off, I do feel differently on the second watch. I liked last week’s Gemma (Dichen Lachman) episode a great deal the second time around, and I think that’s because I watched both these episodes back-to-back originally, and it was odd to have two episodes totally detached from the main story of Mark (Adam Scott) and the rest of the MDR crew in a row. I still think that’s a bit odd in terms of structuring the season, but my second viewing of last week’s episode hit me in the feels more than the first time around. My second viewing of tonight’s episode made me appreciate the dreamlike nature of Harmony Cobel’s (Patricia Arquette) visit to her home town of Salt’s Neck.

Side-note: I’m not sure where this is supposed to be in the fiction, but right away I thought “This looks like Newfoundland” and on my second viewing I thought, “This looks like the Bonavista area of Newfoundland” and apparently that is where it was filmed. I visited Newfoundland and spent some time in Bonavista in 2019 and it’s truly a fascinating, beautiful, otherworldly place. There were no glaciers floating by when I visited, but it was in October rather than the dead of winter.

Severance

Credit: Apple

In any case, I do find Harmony’s odyssey compelling. Returning to a Lumon company town that was once thriving thanks to the local Lumon ether mill, only to find it dying, its people “older” and “more frail” as Cobel puts it, reveals a great deal about Lumon’s past. The town is sick. Many of its inhabitants are ether addicts now. Almost all of them are deeply anti-Lumon. Only one remains loyal to Lumon: Harmony’s aunt, Sissy, who lives alone on a rocky peninsula outside of town. We learn that she “still lives by the nine” which makes her a pariah in the community.

We also learn that Ms. Huang (Sarah Bock) is not the only child employed by Lumon. When Harmony stops by a cafe to speak with an old friend, Hampton (James Le Gros) we learn that both of them once worked in the ether mill as children. Child labor is very much one of Lumon’s many insidious practices. There’s another connection to Ms. Huang here: When Cobel was young, she was also a Wintertide Fellow. Earlier in the season, Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman) says to Ms. Huang, “You cannot graduate from this fellowship until I have deemed you wintertide material.” It appears that Lumon youth deemed to have a great deal of potential are offered a special track with this Wintertide Fellowship, though the details of it and the rest of the child labor force remain fuzzy.

Cobel returns to her childhood home with the help of Hampton, a man who now peddles ether to the local addicts, who hides her in the back of his truck in case Lumon has people watching the house. This sounds paranoid, but we learn that Mr. Drummond (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) has phoned Sissy, and at the end of the episode a vehicle approaches as Cobel speeds away. Hampton stays back apparently to hold them off. “Tame these tempers,” he says grimly as the headlights approach.

Severance

Credit: Apple

We learn a few things at Cobel’s childhood home. First, that her mother died after a long illness once she was taken off her life-support machine. Cobel blames Sissy for this, telling her she would have taken care of her mother if she hadn’t been away from school. “I didn’t even get to say goodbye,” she tells Sissy, a mixture of grief and rage warring inside her. Or perhaps a more apt phrasing: Woe and Malice.

We also learn that Cobel was deemed worthy of the Wintertide Fellowship after proving how industrious she was as an “apprentice” at the factory. Her schooling was “more important” than being able to see her dying mother, at least according to Sissy, who is the most fanatical Lumon acolyte we’ve seen outside of the Eagans themselves at this point. It was Sissy who molded Harmony into what she eventually became; her mother was anti-Lumon through and through.

But the biggest and most profound and story-altering revelation comes at the end, when we learn that it was actually Harmony Cobel who invented the severance procedure. And the Overtime Continency. And the Glasgow Block. All of it was her invention, her idea, her work and Jame Eagan (Michael Siberry) took the credit. Not only did he take the credit, Lumon forced Cobel to keep quiet about it or face banishment. Sissy attempts to burn the papers with Cobel’s designs, but she grabs them back in time.

Here is where I become deeply divided – severed, if you will – on this twist. On the one hand, it’s kind of a cool twist. Jame Eagan is a fraud. Severance wasn’t cooked up by the all-mighty, all-knowing Eagans at all, but by one of their lackeys. On the other hand, a nagging doubt has entered my brain. This means that Cobel isn’t just a ruthless middle-manager and a (now straying) Lumon devotee. She’s also a brilliant scientist! This is . . . weird.

Severance

Credit: Apple

For one thing, I liked Cobel’s role just the way it was. I don’t know that I really like learning that she’s actually a brilliant scientist who came up with all of this. There’s a “chosen one” aspect to this shift that bugs me. Cobel as the fanatical Lumon soldier and frankly bizarre MDR floor manager (as well as her weird Mrs. Selvig persona) was pretty much perfect. It makes sense that, once rebuked and cast out by Lumon, she would have a crisis of faith and turn on the company she was once so devoted to, and we really didn’t need this backstory to flesh that out. Now Cobel is an entirely different character with a much more vital, fundamental part in the story of the severance procedure and its implications.

This alone is a lot to swallow, but there’s a part of me that keeps thinking this was a change made after Season 1 was already out. This was something not in the story from day-one, but tacked on as a twist for Season 2. It just doesn’t quite fit as organically in the story as everything else, and it worries me. It worries me because even though I know there’s always an element of “making it up as you go” when it comes to TV shows, I don’t want this one to go off the rails like so many others before it, and this moment feels a little off the rails to me.

I also preferred severance as something of a mystical technology. It didn’t need an inventor or an explanation. Sort of like The Force in the Star Wars prequel movies; it became less amazing the more George Lucas tried to explain how it worked.

In the end, Cobel takes the call from Devon (Jen Tullock) and learns that Mark is reintegrating. She asks her to put him on the phone and says, “Tell me everything” as the music picks up and she drives her pickup into the night, back toward Kier and back toward the main story that we’ve left lingering in the wings for the past two weeks. Just two episodes left, dearest readers. What fresh new hell awaits?

What did you think about this (very short) Cobel-centric episode? It appears that Mark’s reintegration is no longer going forward, so he’ll go into the final two episodes of the season only mostly reintegrated. What will that mean for his psyche? And will they go through with Devon’s plan to use the birthing cabin to talk with Mark’s innie? So many questions, so little time.

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Read my Episode 7 recap and review here.