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Seven Severance Questions is a weekly attempt to digest the events of one of television’s twistiest shows by highlighting the weirdest, most confusing, and most important unresolved issues after this week’s episode, “Sweet Vitriol.” There will be theories. Many will be unhinged.
Hello and welcome to beautiful Salt’s Neck!
Well, maybe beautiful is a bit strong. What’s a good word for an old company town that has been gutted and bled dry and whose residents inhale ether through dirty rags and where every day appears to be 50 degrees and overcast and windy? Bleak. That’s the word I was looking for. Welcome to bleak Salt’s Neck, childhood home and workplace of Harmony Cobel.
It’s been many episodes since we last saw Cobel, so we were due for a check-in. This episode gave us about 30 minutes of Cobel saying things like “meet me at the factory” and “we used to be chums,” and then another ending filled with shocking reveals. The severance procedure was Cobel’s idea! It was stolen by an Eagan who took all the credit! She has the evidence stuffed inside a bronze head her dead mother stored in the shed! We are at the point now where I will be legitimately disappointed if an episode does not end with a universe-altering revelation. It’s a problem the show has created for itself.
We also end on a cliffhanger, with Cobel speeding off and learning that Mark has reintegrated and shouting “TELL ME EVERYTHING” into her phone. It’s setting the season up for a wild conclusion. There are so many plates spinning, I would believe almost any theory you throw at me. For now, though, I have some questions …
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Can Mark and Devon trust Cobel given what we now know?
First, let’s take a minute and review what we now know. The most important thing is that just about the entire severance project — the OTC, the Glasgow Block, all of it — seems to have been conjured up and designed by Cobel and then stolen from her by Jame Eagan. Cobel was a Lumon prodigy, the valedictorian of her Eagan-named high school and a Wintertide fellow (more on this below), as we learn from the yearbook stuffed away in the underground shed next to the house where her Kier-skeptic mother died. She was a lifer, someone indoctrinated into the Lumon/Eagan philosophies from a young age, starting with a childhood spent working in an ether factory and extending all the way up until she was let go at the end of the first season. And now she feels betrayed. And angry.
Which brings us back to the issue of trust. Can Mark and Devon trust her with this highly sensitive information about his reintegration and their various plots against Lumon? Reghabi doesn’t think so. Reghabi hauled ass outta there as soon as they tried to call her. It’s good to remember that Mark and Devon don’t know all the stuff about Cobel being the scorned wunderkind who concocted all of this. Devon is only reaching out because the list of people she can reach out to is short enough that “the lady who lived next door to her brother under a false identity and pretended to be a baby expert and was recently fired by the company that has been secretly keeping her thought-dead sister-in-law alive in the basement for testing” feels like a reasonable option. Any port in a storm, you know?
But they do have a common enemy now. Sometimes, that’s good enough. Strange times lead to strange coalitions. And if this plays out the way it looks like it will (no guarantee on this show, to the degree I felt a little silly typing it just now), it certainly looks like an interesting alliance. You’ve got the reintegrated lynchpin of the program being helped by the woman who masterminded the whole thing, both of whom have an axe to grind against Lumon for different but deeply personal reasons. There are a lot of ways this can go. At the very least, the odds of someone burning down the Lumon headquarters just went up a whole bunch. That’s important to me.
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Does this explain everything Cobel was up to in the first season?
It definitely explains at least some of what she was up to. It explains why Lumon had her in charge of the severed floor. (Most of what is going on there is based on stuff she scribbled out in notebooks as a younger and more idealistic person.) It explains why she kept pushing Mark and Ms. Casey together for those wellness sessions. (If severance is her baby, she’d have a greater interest in seeing how it held up over time.) It explains why she stared at Natalie like that every time the board had input. (“YOU FOOLS ARE TINKERING WITH MY GRAND DESIGNS AND HAVING THIS STRUMPET DELIVER THE NEWS.”) Things like that make more sense now. It always seemed to mean something more to her. Maybe that’s because it did.
It could also explain, to some degree, why she was so intent on monitoring Mark on the outside too. Again, there’s pride here, probably. None of that makes it, like, okay to live a double life as a lactation expert and weave yourself into someone’s family under false pretenses. She should not have done that. Very few plans involving infant-related subterfuge are justifiable. I suspect it was the kind of thing that started with a series of small decisions and quickly spiraled out of control, kind of like how the sink in your kitchen will start dripping one day and the small repair you looked up on YouTube leads to another problem, and then that leads to a different problem, and a few months later you’ll have company over and find yourself saying things like, “That toilet only flushes when the dishwasher is running, so knock on the wall when you’re done so I can start it running for you.”
My point here is that mistakes were made. But I can see how they happened.
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What happened to Salt’s Neck?
Oh, you know, just your classic situation where a company builds an ether factory staffed by children and then packs up and leaves town once a new plan comes along involving experimental brain surgery and possible necromancy, and the town becomes a dilapidated husk where the guy who owns the coffee shop sells ether that people huff with rags to get high enough — high as bearded vultures, if you will — to forget it all for 30 seconds at a time.
There’s also a parallel here to what happened with Cobel. Lumon used her for her ideas and then disposed of her as soon as she was no longer useful to them. Hmm. Well, at least this is all dystopian science fiction and not something that happens in our world. That would sure be a bummer.
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Does all of this make the Miss Huang situation more or less clear?
Neither, really. That’s still weird. And it’s made even weirder by the fact that it’s starting to feel less weird within the universe of the show. I had myself all spun up after last week with theories about clones and goats and potential immortality. I still stand by some of those. Kind of. Maybe.
Put it this way: It says a lot about this show that I heard Cobel talk about working in the factory and saw the yearbook and the thing about her and the Wintertide fellowship — the same one Milchick mentioned Miss Huang was shooting for earlier this season — and my immediate reaction was, “Oh, maybe this is just regular old child labor.”
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Should Cobel be putting this many miles on her rickety old hatchback?
She really does seem to be driving a lot this season. I’m not sure that old clunker can handle much more. I guess we don’t know exactly how far Salt’s Neck is from the main office. It seems pretty far, though. And she’s driven there and back and there again, and now she looks like she’s heading back again, too. She also appears to be living out of the car, based on that shot of her standing next to it while brushing her teeth. Brushing your teeth outside is usually a tip-off that things have gone sideways for you somewhere.
Anyway, please imagine how mad everyone would be if the next episode opens with the transmission blowing out on those winding roads and Cobel spends an entire hour waiting for AAA while doing puzzles on her iPhone.
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In the universe of this show, is it considered normal behavior to travel back to your hometown and huff ether with your childhood co-worker before the two of you make out in the rusty old hospital bed where your mother died?
I sure hope it is not!
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Where is my damn Milchick episode?
We have been on some journeys this season. We’ve been on an ORTBO. We traced through the past and present of Gemma’s story. We took a trip to Cobel’s hometown. We met Dylan’s wife and Burt’s partner. The world of the show is expanding rapidly.
And while I do have some qualms about all of that, at least as far as these grand individual stories come at the cost of the charm of the Innies sitting around at their desks and plotting to destroy their company, I must once again insist that, if we’re going to commit to this, I am going to need to see what Seth Milchick is up to when he’s not at work. I know there are only a few episodes left this season. That is not my problem. They have opened this box, and now they better show me what is inside or else I am going to explode.
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