Severance Just Proved Something We Kind Of Knew: We Know Nothing

It’s easy for Severance fans to parse through previous episodes, freeze-frame computer monitors, and comb auxiliary texts. It’s even simpler for hardcore viewers to add up these scattered findings to equal ironclad theories on Severance‘s endgame. What’s harder, but maybe most fulfilling, is realizing the series has revealed certain truths from the beginning, while leading viewers astray all along.

Season 2, Episode 8’s ‘Sweet Vitriol’ was a long and winding road of a contained story, choosing to take the scenic route to its bombshell destination. The bottle episode’s subject was Ms. Cobel, who speaks like Milchick minus the charm. The entire episode lacked the usual charms of a standard Severance episode, if those even exist anymore. Yet, it still succeeded on nearly every other series mandate. In trademark Severance fashion, ‘Sweet Vitriol’ was foreboding, shocking, and bitingly satirical.

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“You’re Higher Than A Bearded Vulture”

Season 2’s shortest episode felt like a long haul. With a relative lack of humor and action, there was little past the mystery of Ms. Cobel’s Macguffin to keep viewers invested. There were some cool overhead shots of waves crashing the shore, signaling a coming storm and some pretty nature shots from scene-to-scene, but it otherwise lacked excitement. Patricia Arquette’s Harmony Cobel handily carried the entire episode despite lying down for long stretches in multiple scenes — once in the bed of a truck, and, in another instance, on her mother’s deathbed. The latter was heartbreaking, finding Cobel weeping, gasping for air through her late mother’s breathing tube — the same tube found on her Kier shrine in Season 1, Episode 8.

At the start of ‘Sweet Vitriol,’ Ms. Cobel rolls into the ether-addled Lumon industrial town of Salt’s Neck, where she stops to observe a poor man huffing ether fumes from a bottle, passing out. Ether is known to have anesthetic and euphoric effects when ingested. She visits the shanty town’s coffee shop to find an ether-peddling shopkeeper by the name of Hampton, who trades cryptic dialogue with Ms. Cobel. The exchange involves some intentionally rigid financial jargon which, when unpacked, sheds some light on the town’s struggling condition.

Ms Cobel notes the residents are “older” and “frailer” than she remembers. Hampton explains that:

If that sounds like a bowl of word salad, Ms. Cobel ate it right up and looked knowingly toward the thin man across the room, who’d accepted the ether drug, called ‘huff’, from Hampton at the top of the scene. Put simply, living costs spiked and Lumon subsidies bottomed out, leaving the Lumon town in shambles.

Cobel notes that the two were ‘once chums,’ to which Hampton retorts their friendship was the result of ‘child labor.’ This statement immediately reminds viewers of Ms. Huang, the too-young-to-work supervisor on Lumon’s severed floor, meaning she’s not the only child laborer at Lumon. Hampton eventually agrees to hide Cobel in his truck bed along a picturesque drive that leads them to a secluded home ‘by The Nine.’

“Why Do You Bring Nothing But Woe Into My Life?”

Ms. Cobel storms the house upon arrival, shouldering past an old woman in white who screams Cobel isn’t welcome and neither is “that huff-peddler” — to which Cobel asserts the woman in white “gave him his thirst for it.” Cobel wants to know where her things are, and the woman, revealed to be Harmony’s Aunt Sissy Cobel, insists she’d sold them to the poor. Ms. Cobel defies Sissy, breaking into her deceased mother’s room, where she unveils the breathing tube she’s kept since season one. She hooks it up to the old bedside ventilator and puffs through it, receiving no air, futilely recreating her long-suffering mother’s desperate state before passing.

Hampton visits her after some time, where they huff ether, reminiscing about their early drug use, huffing as young as eight years old. Ms. Cobel, high, kisses Hampton while telling him it’s “so shameful” that he sells the drug. This is conflicting for Hampton, as he’s trying to cheer her up in the only way he knows how. Because Lumon has relegated him to operating a coffee shop that no one can afford, spending what little they have on ether. Lumon has left the townsfolk to die in Salt’s Neck, not unlike Ms. Cobel had left her dear mother. It’s revealed here, when Hampton and Ms. Cobel find her old blueprints, that Ms. Cobel is responsible for what Lumon is today. Ms. Cobel is Lumon, so even though she’s sympathetic in this episode, can she be trusted in the long run?

Meanwhile, Sissy Cobel has aligned herself with the Eagans despite their treachery and ruin of Salt’s Neck. Sissy was tasked with warding Harmony’s mother, Charlotte, when Harmony went away to attend the Eagan school. It was initially thought that Sissy had pulled Charlotte’s tube, killing her, but Sissy informs Ms. Cobel that Charlotte ended her own suffering, preventing Ms. Cobel from ever seeing her mother alive again.

Sissy is no saint, though. She insists that Ms. Cobel owes everything she has to the Eagans, despite being made aware of Ms. Cobel’s childhood designs that led to Lumon’s advancements. Sissy attempts to burn the blueprints and report Ms. Cobel to the authorities that once enslaved her. Ms. Cobel, alerted by Hampton in the nick of time, gets away and returns Devon’s calls to finally learn about Mark’s reintegration.

Harmony Cobel: Friend Or Foe?

Severance cinematographer Jessica Lee Gagné did a beautiful job layering chilly scenic shots amidst small-town palace intrigue in ‘Sweet Vitriol,’ but the episode still felt like it could use a shot of Dylan or an injection of Irving. Still, there was a lot to love about the installment. With all the stark whiteness of Newfoundland, Canada’s backdrop, and a series of blind twists and turns, ‘Sweet Vitriol’ was a lot like watching Mark S. run the labyrinth halls of Lumon for 37 minutes before the hammer finally dropped. When it dropped, though, it broke the ice on Ms. Cobel’s coldness, with audiences now rooting for her to shatter the glass ceiling at Lumon.

The reveal that Ms. Cobel is a pivotal architect of Lumon’s tech is a gigantic twist, informing her vitriol after being fired from the company. It tracks, especially given her extreme Lumon knowledge, including that one time she deftly and gruesomely extracted a Severance chip from Petey’s head in Season 1. Still, the question remains: after all the harm Ms. Cobel has done, can she really be an ally?

Severance

Release Date

February 18, 2022

Showrunner

Dan Erickson, Mark Friedman

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  Tramell Tillman

  Seth Milchick