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We all owe Harmony Cobel an apology. In all my Reddit searches, in all my comment surfing, in all my theorizing with friends and family, I never once heard anyone consider that Cobel could have been the literal mastermind behind the severance chip. (Hit me up if I’m wrong, but it’s certainly not a popular theory if it was ever one at all.) We deeply underestimated this woman, but I’m not yet sure what this colossal reveal means for the big picture. [Cobel voice: “Oh, Maaaark. What are we in for?”]
After being absent for the vast majority of the season, our favorite unhinged lactation fraudster is back. Since the OTC, she has mostly been severed from the main narrative. The last time we saw her was back in the episode “Who Is Alive?” when she turned around at a sign for Salt’s Neck in order to confront Helena Eagan outside the Lumon building. That meeting didn’t go so well for Harmony and she fled. Apparently, she’s been driving ever since then.
Clocking in at a lean 37 minutes, “Sweet Vitriol” is a quiet episode that utilizes lots of desolate imagery to evoke a certain vibe. The sparse ocean landscapes on Cobel’s drive are gorgeous but striking in their severity, and the town of Salt’s Neck itself feels almost like a waystation to hell, the camera lingering on all the disrepair among the perpetually frozen streets as an overt metaphor for the despair that permeates the town. The imagery succeeds at being evocative of the iconic liminal spaces that have come to define the mood and tone of the series, but it also serves to remind viewers that we’re very far away from home.
As Severance is a show about work-life balance, and as this episode doesn’t really showcase either of those things, it’s sure to be divisive. It’s certainly a risk to give Cobel her own standalone installment — especially following another installment featuring a limited cast — but as the narrative reveals much about how Lumon operates, and it also delivers a huge bombshell twist at the end, I think it mostly works. However, I adore Patricia Arquette and everything she’s doing on this show, so your mileage may vary.
As Cobel arrives in her old hometown, we see that it’s mostly abandoned. While we saw some of her “personal” life in season one, she was mostly undercover as the daffy “Mrs. Selvig” and not herself. Now, we finally get her origin story. She’s truly a product of Lumon, having been a golden child of the Wintertide program (a.k.a. child labor) and a model student at the Myrtle Eagan School for Girls. She got out, but the town — and its complicated relationship with Lumon and the cult of Kier — remained. It’s implied that after Lumon closed the Salt’s Neck plant, the community was devastated. It looks like most of the people who remain there are either high on ether, selling ether, or both.
Given that the episode title, “Sweet Vitriol,” is slang for diethyl ether, it feels like the pointed focus on the substance is meant to be a stand-in for today’s opioid epidemic, with the Lumon and the Eagans taking the place of Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family. The idea that Lumon would have marketed an addictive substance to a wide audience as non-addictive and then profited off of death and destruction tracks not only with their nefarious vibe but also with the general public’s hatred of the company in the broader world of the show. Also, with ether production on one end of the Lumon timeline and severance on the other, it sure feels like helping people numb or disconnect from the pain of being a human seems to be the biotech corporation’s guiding mantra. We know that Kier was working in an ether mill when he had his purported epiphanies. So … he was totally high all the time, right? Did he invent the tempers and virtues in the midst of an ether hallucination or an episode of withdrawal? We can’t rule it out. To paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson: One thing that really worries me is the ether.
Cobel has traveled to Salt’s Neck to hunt down a mystery item. It’s at her old childhood home — a member of her family, a social pariah named Sissy, still lives there — but she can’t drive there in her car because she believes that Lumon thugs might be keeping an eye on the place. (She turns out to be right.) So, she stops by a café and gets the attention of the bedraggled man who owns the place. Even though he seems like he’s been beaten down by life, the man (James Le Gros) is rakishly handsome and generally kind. He and Cobel have a brief conversation in which she convinces him to follow her to the abandoned Lumon ether factory, which apparently served as the cornerstone of industry for the town decades ago. They chat more openly here, and we learn that the factory was also a place that trafficked in child labor.
During this conversation, Cobel vacillates between playfully direct and vaguely threatening (“I’ll not be the punching dummy for your resentments,” is an excellent retort), and the man decides to help her. Obviously, given their old power dynamic, we’re meant to understand that he never really had a choice. By insisting on showing and not telling, Severance has historically been great at introducing established relationships in a way that feels organic and true. (See: Devon and Mark’s relationship in the very first episode.) Instead of using these reunion scenes to load up on exposition, the two childhood chums fall right back into old patterns of banter and behavior, and it doesn’t feel like any dialogue has been added explicitly for the audience’s benefit. The result is a fully-formed bond, created in minutes of screen time without flashbacks or frills.
Actor James Le Gros’s comforting, teddy-bear-like presence and natural chemistry with Patricia Arquette both also go a long way toward establishing this relationship. As the two interact during Cobel’s visit, I was genuinely happy that the generally taciturn Cobel would have a friend (lover?) like that in her life when she was younger. Le Gros is awesome, too, so if Severance wanted to use him as an ongoing love interest for Cobel, I wouldn’t be mad about it, though, at this point, it seems highly unlikely.
Once Cobel gets to the house, she interacts with a woman who appears to be her sister (the great character actress Jane Alexander) but might also just be a relative who shares the same last name. Celestine “Sissy” Cobel has a Lumon plaque hanging on her wall, announcing that she was the Quarterly Striver in the 4th Quarter of the Year of Vision. (There are dystopian shades of Infinite Jest here with that unconventional Year designation.) Sissy was once a Youth Appreciation Matron, which we can assume is basically code for the Miss Hannigan assigned to the kids toiling at the Lumon ether mill. Sissy is not kind, and she’s Lumon brainwashed all the way. She does, however, let Cobel go upstairs into her old room and root around, and she doesn’t exactly try to stop her from breaking into her mother’s old room, either. (Try to be gentle on your remotes during these sequences, friends. There’s a lot of fun stuff to see.)
Sissy does try to appeal to Cobel by telling her that Drummond called looking for her. In a loaded conversation, she remembers how promising Harmony once was, telling her that she was an industrious apprentice in the Wintertide fellowship, which is curiously the exact same fellowship that Milchick mentioned to Miss Huang back in episode six. There’s also some back-and-forth about whether or not Sissy pulled Cobel’s mother’s breathing tube, with Sissy eventually telling Cobel that their mother pulled it herself to stop her own suffering. Either way, Cobel was away at school, trapped in the gears of the Lumon machine, and therefore never got to say good-bye. This haunts her. Apparently Charlotte Cobel was not a fan of Lumon, which makes sense given that both of her daughters were basically absorbed by the cult of Kier.
During the search for her mystery item, Cobel enters her mother’s old room, and she grieves. She goes on a nostalgia tour, willing the memories of her mother back by engaging her senses. She lovingly gazes at her mother’s personal effects, caresses her dust-covered bedspread, and breathes into the breathing machine, eventually breaking down in sobs. Moaning into the breathing tube, Cobel makes her inner anguish manifest, her moans eventually turning into something that sounds almost like whale song. Arquette is wonderfully unmoored in this scene, showcasing her uncanny ability to access Cobel’s inner rage and sorrow as made manifest by a woman who was never given the space or grace to emotionally mature beyond her childhood years.
Cobel’s woe makes her sleepy, so she passes out on top of her mother’s bed. Her man friend, tired of waiting in the car, comes to find her, kindly offering her a hit of ether for her pain. Cobel giddily accepts a toot, and says that she hasn’t gotten high since she was eight. Oh man, what was Lumon doing to these kids? Between the ether and an electric smooch from her man, Cobel gets a spark of an idea. She runs outside to a shed, and there she finds what she’s been looking for: A notebook full of detailed drawings. When she goes back inside to confront Sissy — the firelight devilishly dancing on their faces — she screams that she created all of it. “My designs!” she shrieks. “Base code! Overtime Contingency! Glasgow Block! All of it!” Because Kier does not allow anyone to claim ownership over their own knowledge, Sissy waves off these claims and tries to burn the book, but Cobel snatches it back and hustles out the door as she and Sissy hurl harsh words at one another.
Jaw. Dropped. An apology is available upon request, Ms. Cobel. I truly underestimated you. We’ve repeatedly heard the claim that Jame Eagan invented severance, but there was literally no reason for us to take that at face value. He’s basically a piece of stale bread on legs, not a genius! This twist was certainly not on my Severance bingo card, and the revelation that Cobel knows literally everything about severance and the severance chip makes for an interesting turn of events.
As the Lumon police descend on Sissy’s house, Cobel’s old flame lets her abscond with his truck. He’s got a lot of Lumon baggage, too. He stands at attention in the road, ready for a showdown, and says, “Come tame these tempers, assholes.” It’s funny and telling all at once, and it’s devastating to think that Lumon has stolen (and continues to steal) the lives of children all over the world.
Cobel doesn’t even bother to go get her car. (RIP, white Rabbit.) She heads straight back to Lumon, phone in hand. And now she has a minute to answer the repeated calls she’s been receiving from Devon. She picks up, hears that Mark has been reintegrating, and breathes, “Tell me everything.” This turn of events is curiouser and curiouser. We know that Cobel already has an interest in reintegration — she confirmed that Petey had fully reintegrated before he died, and for what it’s worth, she still has his chip — but the reason for her personal interest in reintegration (and Mark) is unclear. However, as the former Lumon big wig teams up with Mark and Devon, it feels like the final two episodes are full of possibility.
Severed Sentiments
• This episode really drove home the fact that Lumon is a predatory and pernicious corporation. Cobel and her man Hampton (we finally get his name at the end) are ostensibly in their 50s, so the company has been exploiting child labor for at least four decades, likely longer. How have they been allowed to get away with this? And what awaits poor Miss Huang at the ominous Wintertide fellowship program that Cobel once attended years ago? Commenter queenpineapple made a very interesting observation about this back in the comments of the episode six recap: “Ms. Huang isn’t a clone or a full-time severed employee like Ms. Casey. She’s just a model student in a cult-run school. Most weird shit going on here probably isn’t super sci-fi; it’s probably more about the fact that this is a corporate cult in a company town.” After the events of this episode, I heartily agree. And somehow, that simple idea is more chilling to me than making Miss Huang into a clone because it’s all too real.
• The way Cobel tosses her empty water bottle into the snow recalls the way she casually threw the lactation baby doll onto the couch last season, and I appreciate her hilarious consistency.
• When Cobel says “I haven’t done that since I was 8” after taking a huff of ether, it reminded me of one of the very best lines in Fight Club.
• Say it with me: This is a departure episode, not a bottle episode. A departure, not a bottle. You’ve got it.
More From 'Severance'
- James Le Gros Spent Two Years Figuring Out His Severance Character
- Can Cobel Be Trusted? And Other Severance Questions.
- Severance Gets Lost in Time