This post contains spoilers for this week’s episode of Severance, “Sweet Vitriol,” which is now streaming on Apple TV+.
For the second week in a row, Severance largely puts its various ongoing plots on hold in favor of providing more worldbuilding and backstory. But where last week’s “Chikhai Bardo” felt necessary, as well as often moving and/or horrifying, “Sweet Vitriol” plays a bit more as a stall for Season Two’s endgame than a story that needed to take up an entire episode.
This is Harmony Cobel’s first appearance since the season’s third episode, “Who Is Alive?” With all due respect to the great Patricia Arquette, the character wasn’t especially missed in her absence, as her villainy and zealotry have tended to be written in a more one-dimensional way than how Severance portrays those same broad ideas with Milchick. Until Devon improbably suggested last week that Harmony might be able to save Mark, I had honestly not realized she’d been absent for so much of the season. Milchick fulfills most of her old narrative functions in a more interesting way, and Ms. Huang provides the air of menacing weirdness that was Milchick’s original assignment within the story.
So if the plan is to bring Ms. Cobel back into the center of the action, then she needed to become a more well-rounded character than the snarling true believer presented throughout the first season and the start of the second. And she definitely emerges from “Sweet Vitriol” with some necessary context to her behavior — along with a key piece of the series’ mythology: the revelation that she invented the severance process, and Jaime Eagan just took credit for her work.
But was that context enough to justify devoting an entire episode — even a relatively compact 38-minute one — to it, this late in a season where the characters the audience is most invested in have now been in limbo for multiple chapters in a row? Not really.
Without a job with Lumon or Kier’s sweet embrace, and with the Eagans potentially gunning for her as a traitor to the cause, Harmony returns to the hometown she left in the dust long, long ago. It’s a desolate place, somehow the most depressing representative yet of the eternal winter in which our story occurs. We gradually learn that this was once a thriving company town, built up by Lumon, then abandoned when it was no longer essential to the Eagans’ master plan. Without its central industry, it’s become a ghost town, and one where the era of Harmony and her old friend (played by character actor James LeGros) working as child laborers(*) for Lumon comparatively feel like the good old days.
(*) We also discover that Harmony eventually got a prestigious Lumon fellowship, which sounds a lot like the one that has led to Ms. Huang currently working on the severed floor.
Harmony isn’t here for the sake of nostalgia, though. She wants some degree of emotional closure regarding the death of her estranged mother, but also she wants to find proof of her role in creating severance — perhaps to gain revenge on the Eagans, perhaps as a wedge to get back into their good graces. And she has to go through her Aunt Sissy (the great Jane Alexander) to accomplish both goals.
There are some nice moments sprinkled throughout, like Harmony lying in her mother’s deathbed, sucking on the old oxygen tube, crying as she attempts to feel connected to the parent she was taken from. Seeing this sad place, and getting some idea of the environment in which Harmony was raised, definitely explains much of her behavior, even if it doesn’t excuse it.
But it feels like the wrong moment in the season for a bleak, contemplative interlude devoted to a character the show has been doing just fine without for a while. “Chikhai Bardo” also put Helly, Dylan, Irving, and Innie Mark on hold, but it was so stylistically audacious, so loaded with memorable sights and sounds, and ultimately so powerful in what it had to say about the level of control this company intends to exert over people’s lives, that it worked as a break from our usual action. Whereas I spent much of these 38 minutes wishing we could see what Dylan or Helly were up to.
Both episodes owe a big spiritual debt to Lost, which also liked to toggle back and forth between the main island story, its characters’ former lives, and all its weird mythology. Last week’s episode was just a much more interesting example of that approach.
