What Severance’s Patricia Arquette Learned From Cobel’s Trip to Salt’s Neck

“Early Lumon is clearly part of a broken-down industrial age.…They killed this whole town, and now there’s the new, rebranded Lumon with its bright carpeting and cute cartoons.” Photo: Apple TV+

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Spoilers ahead for Severance season two, through episode eight, “Sweet Vitriol.”

At the end of “Chikhai Bardo,” Devon Scout takes the reins of Mark’s increasingly messy reintegration process, basically firing Dr. Reghabi and summoning the big guns by calling Mrs. Selvig — sorry, Ms. Cobel! — for help. Viewers who thought, Oh yeah, where is Ms. Cobel, anyway?” could easily be excused for not having Patricia Arquette’s character at the forefront of their mind; we had scarcely seen her since she drove off toward someplace called Salt’s Neck five episodes ago. But she reemerges in full force in “Sweet Vitriol,” which takes place the same day Devon frantically reaches out to Cobel, and it does for Lumon’s disgraced severed-floor manager what “Chikhai Bardo” did for Gemma Scout, answering some questions while raising others.

Unlike the Ms. Cobel of Severance’s first season, the Harmony Cobel who takes center stage in “Sweet Vitriol” has reached the galvanizing state of grim determination and seething fury she needs to stomach a return to her rusted-out husk of a small coastal hometown after decades away. The resulting backstory-laden stand-alone episode is essentially a three-hander for Arquette, James LeGros (playing Hampton, whom Harmony refers to as her former colleague but is strongly coded as a childhood sweetheart), and Jane Alexander (as Harmony’s Aunt Sissy). For all the revelations in “Sweet Vitriol,” though, it is just as brimming with what’s not there — alluding to histories between characters and moments from Cobel’s past that the episode only glances at — so we asked Arquette to help fill in the blanks.

A bunch of revelations and questions are packed into “Sweet Vitriol,” but we have to start with a timeline question: When did you learn Harmony Cobel was the true inventor of severance?
There was some allusion to it in earlier episodes, her connection to severance being very personal and pivotal, but I didn’t really understand the full extent until I got that script.

As Harmony flips through the notebook, sort of shaking it at her aunt to show her all the work she’s done, we see it’s not just conceptual; she created the Overtime Contingency, the Glasgow Block, all of it. How has that knowledge of Harmony’s contributions to the company informed your understanding of her relationship with severance? 
I had layered into my performance already that she felt a certain ownership and was involved on a very deep level with severance. Her perception of the procedure and what it meant for her and the company, then seeing how really pivotal she was to all of it, gave me a different level of leverage for her in her relationship with Lumon. It’s like, Oh, you guys are going to try to screw me over. I have this proof now, so how am I going to utilize this to make you give me what I want or to make this turn out in a better way for myself than it’s going right now?

This reframes so much of Harmony’s behavior in the previous season. Her life is littered with instances and different types of severance: She’s severed from her family and friends once she goes to school, she’s severed from her mother and what remains of her family, and then she’s severed from her own creation. 
Yeah, and then her Aunt Sissy reminds her that no matter how brilliant her work is, she should be ashamed of taking any credit! All the glory goes to the company, the religion, the organization. That assumption isn’t far off from our reality, either, that attitude of “You sign a contract, whatever you think of or build or do on our clock is ours. We own it.”

This revelation of Harmony as a genius-level woman in STEM also changed my perception of her conversations with both Helly R. and Helena Eagan. Helena’s entire life flows from the ingenuity and skills of this person she’s treating like garbage!
I think Harmony has a bunch of understandings all at once. First, there’s Oh my God, you spoiled person, why are you treating me like this? At the same time, she wants Helena to see that genius. And then there’s the annoyance and horror of Why am I being forced to deal with this unruly Eagan, who could die on my watch? Helena’s presence and playacting at being Helly R., and the real Helly R., too — they all challenge Harmony’s subconscious need for severance and the value it has in her mind.

Could you break down the breathing-tube scene? We’ve known for a long time that the tube has real significance to Harmony, but now it’s performing a number of functions.
First off, Harmony’s mom became an ether addict. Whenever you deal with a drug addict as a child, you don’t get the parenting you need. And then she is trying to please this corporation and her school and her aunt, even though she hates her aunt. On top of that, her aunt put a wedge between Harmony and her mom, and her aunt is very judgmental of her mom, whom Harmony wants to protect even now. So the breathing tube is holding the love she didn’t get. Breathing through it is almost like getting a kiss from her mom, lying in bed and cuddling with her. It’s also tied to her not getting to have any kind of closure, not getting to say good-bye to her mother, and all this trauma is resurfacing because she has been unceremoniously kicked out of Lumon.

I imagine the landscape and the town of Salt’s Neck don’t help either. It’s so bleak and cold, and it reveals the damage left behind by the earlier iteration of Lumon. 
Yes! Early Lumon is clearly part of a broken-down industrial age. The ether factory was an attempt at something big, but you can see it didn’t work and it created this whole environmental nightmare, too. They killed this whole town, and now there’s the new, rebranded Lumon with its bright carpeting, new aesthetic, and cute cartoons. There’s also a kind of lingering Bergmanesque coldness and loneliness to the whole area, not just in Harmony’s mother’s old room. That room is so quiet and dusty and strange and cold, and all of that’s reflected in real things like the icebergs floating by.

The only warmth in the episode comes from Hampton, James Le Gros’s character. He’s literally pouring hot cups of coffee for people at his tiny shack restaurant, and he helps Harmony out when she needs him, even though driving her out to Aunt Sissy’s place is the last thing he wants to do that day.
I always love to work with James. We get to see Harmony as the girl she used to be, glimpses of the feelings and the relationship between them before something bad went down. He’s mad at her, but you also see he’s the only person who really cares about or does anything to help her. I really think they were each other’s first love and a lot of things got in the way of that — his not being a company man, his drug addiction, his lack of ambition. James and I have known each other a little since we were teenagers. He was good friends with a boyfriend of mine and helped me move all my boxes out of my mom’s house, and I made him cookies as a thank-you. So we go way back.

Once Hampton takes Harmony up to Aunt Sissy’s house, we’re plunked right into the thick of some awful stuff. Can you talk a bit more about the family history between Harmony and Sissy?
I mean, Jane Alexander is just a powerhouse. And there’s so much history between these two characters, so much pain and judgment, and so much wanting. Harmony wants her aunt to acknowledge her, to make her pain go away. Like, “Why didn’t you let me know? Why didn’t you do this for my mother?” There’s just a lot of unshielded rawness in Harmony’s younger self, and that wanting shows us how dangerous her family is. Playing those scenes with Jane in this old, uninsulated saltbox house with the wind blowing through it was so interesting. We’re literally rattling around in a house from the turn of the past century; it felt like we were in a time warp.

You also feel that sense of history a bit with the ether, which underpins so much of Harmony’s experiences, especially her mother’s and Hampton’s addictions, and the desolation of the town where she grew up. But that moment where she huffs it in her mother’s bedroom also leads to her brainwave about the notebook’s location. Having played that scene, what do you think Harmony thinks about the role of ether in her life? 
I don’t know that Harmony consciously thinks about it that way, but I do. I grew up in a time when there were so many heroin addicts, and I remember a therapist once said to me that when you’re high, heroin is like a mother holding you. There’s an aspect of that to ether. That’s very interesting for me, how it connects with the breathing tube. But there’s also an aspect of forgetting with ether that makes it a very primitive form of severance. If I were going to choose a drug that would work like severance, it would be ether.