“Sweet Vitriol,” Severance Season 2 Episode 8, breaks curious new ground for the show: it is, as my partner-in-crime Sam noted, the first time that Severance put plot development above character. Until now, every extraordinary or outrageous or simply crazy thing the show has done, whether Irving’s anger-dream-turned-eureka-moment in “Woe’s Hollow” or Mark’s reintegration turn in “Who Is Alive?” or Cobel’s violation of Petey’s corpse all the way back in “The You You Are” or anything else you’d care to name, has been in service of advancing character as well as plot. But the big reveal in “Sweet Vitriol” – that it was Cobel, and not Jame Eagan, who conceived of the severance chip – comes across more than anything else like a twist for its own sake. And that deviation from Severance‘s norm hints at the other elements working against the episode.
To be fair, the idea that Cobel sired severance helps answer two of the biggest questions about her character: One, why was she so driven by the need to understand whether Petey had reintegrated that she literally drilled into his skull and extracted his chip while he lay in his coffin at his funeral; and Two, why is she so interested in Mark? If the chip is her creation (along with, presumably, the very concept of severance itself), then the reason for Cobel’s interest becomes obvious.
Where “Sweet Vitriol” falters, then, is in giving us more of an explanation – or even an implication – of exactly how Cobel both designed this technological marvel and had reason to believe it would work. Throughout Severance Season 1, she was a prominent administrator if not necessarily a skilled one, but then one of Severance‘s most amusing running traits is how Lumon’s execs are all kind of shit at their jobs. And we certainly learned that she was handy with a drill. But nowhere did we get inklings of any mechanical, scientific, or biomedical wizardry on Cobel’s part.
And since Season 2 has only shown Cobel twice before this episode, both times in showdowns with Helena Eagan, that explanation has remained absent. I don’t need her to have a big framed severance chip schematic up on the wall behind her desk; I don’t want a big file marked “COBEL’S SECRET DESIGNS – KEEP OUT, SETH” on the desk in her office. But I need some sort of inkling of Cobel’s ability to pull this kind of thing off before Severance‘s big VOILÁ moment at the end of Episode 8. Without that, I’m left staring at a magic notebook filled with what the episode’s timeline suggests are a teenager’s noodlings and listening to that teenager-turned-vengeful-adult’s vitriolic claims – if you’ll please grant me one more use of all-caps in this paragraph – of “MINE!”
In part this is also a problem of cultism. Severance has made very clear that Harmony Cobel is a long-standing, long-suffering victim of the cult of Kier: our very first look into her private life is a study of her literal Eagan shrine; and it was only one episode ago when Reghabi told Devon that Harmony is a “soldier” for the family. But “Sweet Vitriol” asks us to put a torch to most of that structure. Instead, it seems that Harmony has been able to nurture her own personality and desire for years – ever since Jame took her chip designs on the grounds of Kier’s teachings (“Knowledge is for all”) with the threat of certain destruction should she ever try to claim them as her own.
In other words, it’s almost as hard to believe in the final upending of Cobel’s fidelity to the Eagan family as it is that she did, in fact, design the chip. I’d be willing to believe that Harmony doesn’t want revenge as much as she wants to bring her old designs back to Kier so she can smoosh Helena’s face with them (recall that one of the last things the kheir-apparent said to Harmony, five whole episodes ago, was “I think you’ve overestimated your importance…and underestimated your blessings.” Hell, it’s possible that Helena doesn’t even know about her father’s theft!). Because if there’s one other thing Severance has made quite clear, it’s that Lumon is all but omnipotent (at least, within its own sphere of influence). So it’s hard to see how Harmony expects to ride back into town with a tattered notebook and bring the company to its knees. Imagine a former Apple employee of long-standing calling a press conference and brandishing a sheaf of papers that they claim predate Steve Jobs’ place in the corporation’s lore.
Nor is this episode’s brevity doing it any favors. At 37 minutes including the credits, “Sweet Vitriol” is shorter than the average episode by approximately ten minutes and is the shortest Severance episode overall. We get a little bit of a look around Harmony’s hometown of Salt’s Neck (not that there’s much to see); we get a couple of terse exchanges with Hampton, Harmony’s child labor colleague at the former ether factory. (Given the timeline – it looks like Cobel was plucked from the town and made a Wintertide fellow at the age of twelve, since that’s when her bedroom growth chart stops – it seems possible that these two haven’t had more than an angry conversation or two in thirty-five or forty years?) And we get a couple of exchanges with Sissy Cobel, Harmony’s aunt, whose stern devotion to the Kier way and disappointment in her niece are her defining characteristics.
Which is to say that the potential for the kind of slow, deep exploration Severance does best is very much in evidence. But aside from a solitary scene in Harmony’s dead mother’s bedroom, we never truly linger anywhere. Which is a double-sided shame since, in terms of movement, “Sweet Vitriol” is almost shockingly brief: Harmony rolls into town, searches two rooms for her MacGuffin, finds it, and leaves. And since we don’t linger with these characters, only our questions are left hanging. If Cobel and Hampton haven’t been chums since their child labor years, what – other than loneliness – brings them together for a tender kiss on Harmony’s dead mother’s bed? What melts Hampton’s anger like so much freshly yellowed snow? Is it just the fact that he spends the whole episode “higher than a bearded vulture”?
And why exactly is Sissy so disappointed in Harmony, since it was Harmony’s industriousness that led the Eagans to pluck her from obscurity and put her in charge of Lumon’s greatest project? Is it just that Sissy has been talking to Mr. Drummond, and he’s poisoned her ear? Is it because Harmony blames Sissy for pulling her mother’s breathing tube and Sissy is disappointed that her niece can’t see the truth – that the late Mrs. Cobel pulled it herself? In this sense, the scenes between Harmony and Sissy are both the most electrifying and the most disappointing: they’re where “Sweet Vitriol” truly comes to life and where the episode leaves the most to be desired.
Maybe this one was always going to feel like an aside. This season’s storytelling focus has been on Lumon HQ and the people inside of it; Harmony no longer works there and has been working very hard to get very far away. “Woe’s Hollow” was an earthquake; “Attila” was another one; and “Chikhai Bardo” was a masterpiece literally and figuratively unlike anything we’ve ever seen from Severance. It feels absurd to ask “Sweet Vitriol” to do the same things those episodes did, but then that’s where the bar is now – raised so dizzyingly high you find yourself questioning your own sobriety.
Grade: C-
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