This ‘Severance’ Season 2, Episode 8 Revelation Changes Everything
Spoilers below.
To all the naysayers: Devon Scout is no fool. In a truly shocking turn of events, her prediction last episode that Harmony Cobel might not be a twisted Lumon supervillain with great hair is, in fact, correct. Never doubt an overprotective sister!
Episode 8, 'Sweet Vitriol,' gives us Harmony’s first appearance since episode three, and it’s a chapter focused entirely on her disturbing background as a Lumon prodigy. As Reghabi put it to Devon in episode seven, Harmony was indeed 'raised by' the company in the seaside town of Salt’s Neck. But Reghabi’s accompanying claim, that the former severance-floor overseer is 'Lumon through and through'? Suffice to say, Reghabi doesn’t know everything about her one-time colleague. Harmony — not Reghabi — might end up being the best possible resource for Mark’s pending reintegration.
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'Sweet Vitriol' opens on water breaking against the shore of a coastal town that’s as icy and overcast as Mark’s home of Kier, PE...but looks much different than anywhere else to which we’ve been privy. As Cobel’s little white hatchback zips along a stretch of crumbling road, we learn she finally made the decision — foreshadowed in episode three — to return to Salt’s Neck. She doesn’t seem thrilled to have returned to her childhood home, which is practically barren, its ramshackle buildings and fading paint battered by the sea-swept wind. Cobel stops to brush her teeth along a roadside only to encounter a man huffing diethyl ether, the very substance that built Kier Eagan his fortune in the 1800s, and the chemical compound whose slang name inspired this episode’s title.
Harmony ignores a call from Devon as she struts into the Drippy Pot Café, which seems almost exclusively occupied by senior citizens and a man named Hampton (James Le Gros), who knows Harmony well enough to wonder what she’s doing back in town. Harmony takes note of the septa- and octogenarians at the surrounding tables, and Hampton replies, 'Yeah, well, with the market readjustment from a few years ago and the fluctuating interest rates, there was a retrenchment from some of the core infrastructure investments.' This corporate babble seems like a pointed remark at Harmony herself, a sort of Lumon mimicry meant to insult her and the company to which she, up until recently, devoted her life. The same company that, apparently, has devastated Salt’s Neck after abandoning it for flashier, more lucrative biotech.
Harmony ignores this goading and instead asks for a favor. When they later meet at a defunct factory bearing the Lumon logo, she tells him she needs him to drive her to 'Sissy’s.' If Lumon is watching — as they almost certainly are — her car can’t be spotted outside her old home. Hampton’s none too keen to help Harmony out, though he realises she must be in deep trouble with Lumon if she’s willing to deal with Sissy.
'You know she still lives by the Nine?' he asks, alluding to the Nine Core Principles of Lumon: Vision, Verve, Wit, Cheer, Humility, Benevolence, Nimbleness, Probity, and Wiles.
'I assumed,' Harmony replies.
'Then you know she’s a fucking pariah here,' he says.
I find this insight particularly telling. Much of the outside world we’ve witnessed in Severance has treated Lumon with either cult-like devotion (i.e. everyone in the Eagans’ inner circle); righteous protest (i.e. the Whole Mind Collective); or eventual, if uneasy, acquiescence (as seems the case with much of Kier, PE, and with Devon’s husband, Ricken). But you don’t become a 'pariah' unless your beliefs are stigmatized. Which implies that the people of Salt’s Neck don’t merely distrust Lumon but hate Lumon. To draw such — pardon the reference — vitriol, the company must have done something horrific.
And, uh, I’d say child labor fits the bill. In an attempt to convince Hampton to help her, Harmony appeals to their shared history. 'We were once chums,' she says. 'Old colleagues lift each other up.'
'Colleagues?' he scoffs. 'Child fucking labour.'
These bits of information are dropped throughout the episode until they create a blurry but legible portrait: Harmony and Hampton worked together as kids at the Salt’s Neck ether mill, at least until Harmony began school at the Myrtle Eagan School for Girls. When Lumon CEO Jame Eagan saw Harmony’s potential, he enlisted her as a young Wintertide fellow — the same fellowship that has since been granted to Miss Huang, as we learned in episode 6. Perhaps Lumon has not done away with its predilection for child labor. (That would certainly explain Miss Huang’s presence on the severed floor.) Perhaps the young theremin player isn’t being held at the office against her will. Perhaps, like Harmony, she’s simply a student who believes what she’s been taught.
Ultimately, Hampton agrees to shuttle Harmony to Sissy’s under a blanket in the bed of his pick-up truck, where she again denies a call from Devon. Sissy (Jane Alexander) — otherwise known as Celestine Cobel, either Harmony’s aunt or her older sister — is even more unhappy to see Harmony than Hampton, especially since she brought a 'huff peddler' along for the ride. 'You gave him his thirst for it,' Harmony accuses, further indicating that Sissy herself oversaw the Salt’s Neck child-labour force at the factory.
In the squat blue house she grew up in, Harmony searches the dusty, decaying rooms for something essential but unnamed. Sissy doesn’t aid her hunt, but she doesn’t exactly stop it either, instead evoking a preening moral superiority — even when she slaps Harmony across the face in anger. When the latter learns Mr. Drummond has telephoned Sissy seeking information, she rips the phone out of its socket and demands the key to her mother’s old room. Harmony wants that space opened to her, a space to process the significance of her mother’s death — a death she missed because of her obligations at the Myrtle Eagan School for Girls.
As Sissy is all too happy to suggest, Charlotte Cobel died by her own hand, having pulled out her own breathing tube to ease her pain. Charlotte was apparently not a 'believer,' as Sissy puts it, otherwise she might have 'found solace in the Nine' before she died. (Hampton backs up this claim later in the episode, adding that Charlotte 'hated Lumon more than I did.') This serves as an early indicator in 'Sweet Vitriol' that Harmony might have much more complicated motives than we’ve been led to believe. We know Harmony was devoted to Charlotte. If her own mother denied the Eagans’ holiness, Harmony has ample reason to do the same.
Eventually, Harmony scrounges around in Sissy’s things long enough to uncover the key to Charlotte’s room, hidden inside a box next to four creepy Tempers figurines. (The level of detail in this episode is remarkable, even judging by the props alone.) Inside that lifeless space, there’s only a bed; a photograph of young Harmony; and an ancient breathing device. Harmony attaches the breathing tube from season one (and season two, episode three) to the device and inhales as if it’s her own — as if she might breathe life back into her mother’s ghost. Her whimpers and moaning are equally ghostlike, adding to the eerie shadow that looms over the entirety of 'Sweet Vitriol.'
After she naps for a while in her mother’s old sheets, Harmony wakes to find Hampton rushing into the room. He’s come to bring her back outside, but also to inform her that, whatever she’s 'looking for,' he doesn’t think it’s in Salt’s Neck. Leaning against the bed in the dim light of the setting sun, they huff ether together and share an unexpectedly tender kiss.
'I haven’t done that since I was eight,' Harmony says of the ether.
'You ready to man the vat for ten hours?' Hampton asks, and they laugh as if this weren’t preposterous and ghastly.
Something about the ether (or the kiss, maybe) seems to grant Harmony an epiphany. She rushes out to Sissy’s shed, and inside she discovers what is perhaps one of the biggest revelations in a season already stuffed with them: Hidden within a bust of Kier Eagan are the schematics to the severance chip, which Harmony Cobel herself invented. And she invented it as a Wintertide fellow! She is not some corporate bigwig; she is a genius, and that weirdo Jame Eagan stole credit for her work!!!
All of the severed-floor shenanigans we’ve witnessed stem from her designs. 'Base code! Overtime Contingency! Glasgow Block! All of it!' Harmony screeches at Sissy, whose response is to try to burn the schematics in her hearth. Mercifully, Harmony snatches them back in time, and she rushes back out into the cold, taking Hampton’s car as he steels himself to deal with the Lumon lackeys hot on Harmony’s tail. ('Come tame these tempers, assholes,' he mutters as he readies himself for a fight.)
As she speeds out of Salt’s Neck, Harmony finally takes that call from Devon. She’s headed back to Kier — the town, not the man! — with schematics in tow, and she has as much reason to hate Lumon as Mark does. That doesn’t mean they’ll become easy allies, especially after all the spying and lactation-expert fraud that went down in season one. But Harmony knows everything about severance, and she has a keen interest in reintegration. She has her designs. She has Petey’s old severance chip, which she removed from his corpse during his funeral. And she has a gigantic chip on her shoulder. That, friends, might be just enough to spark a revolution.
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