Summary
Severance Season 2 gets bogged down in Episode 8, an intriguing Harmony-focused instalment that arrives at precisely the wrong time.
Severance is a great show, of that there can be no doubt, and Season 2 is on track to exceed the freshman outing in almost every way. But Episode 8, “Sweet Vitriol”, doesn’t help its case. Despite revolving around a thoroughly underused Harmony Cobel, who hasn’t been seen since she sped off at the end of the third episode, it’s nonetheless a somewhat saggy and – this in a bit of whisper – dull installment in a show previously firing on all cylinders.
Weirdly, “Sweet Vitriol” has a short runtime of just 37 minutes, only increasing the suspicion that everything in it could have been slipped into the margins of other episodes with nothing being lost. A bottle episode is a standard part of serialized storytelling, but a bottle episode so close to the finale coming after another bottle episode is a little odd. The brakes have been thoroughly pumped.
Patricia Arquette is great though. And it helps that she’s great in a big, arch way that isn’t typical of a show largely about strained, performative send-ups of human emotion. So far removed from Lumon’s premises, the episode instead takes in the breadth of Lumon’s parasitic corporate reach, and there’s something valuable about that. Here is the flip side of Lumon’s squeaky-clean front-facing image; the real-world cost that underpins its impenetrable labyrinthine offices.
Harmony is returning to her hometown in Severance Season 2, Episode 8, and her backstory is intimately connected to Lumon. Their factory turbo-charged the economy of Salt’s Neck, a small fishing village in the middle of nowhere (“Sweet Vitriol” was filmed in Newfoundland, Canada, which frequently resembles another planet), but did it on the back of child labor and sucked the population dry before it shut up shop. It seems like everyone left is a trauma-addled drug addict, though several are largely still in the cult-like snare of Kier Eagan.
With this in mind, you can see how Harmony turned out the way she did, and why Lumon’s betrayal of her is so stinging. She was raised in the bosom of a nutcase aunt, Sissy, to worship Lumon. She bought into the fallacy of what Lumon provides without reckoning with the reality of what it takes; Harmony wasn’t there when her nonconformist mother passed and has never gotten over it, and now she has been awakened to how Lumon deals with those who cease being useful to them, the cruelty of her life, her family, her home, are all coming into sudden, stark focus.
James Le Gros in Severance Season 2 | Image via Apple TV+
But I’m cautious of making this episode sound better than it is. There are emotional highs for certain, including a scene where Harmony weeps in anguish that is quite powerful, but it’s mostly a steady reiteration of things we already know about Lumon. Their being terrible is baked into the show’s firmament. As alarming as it might be that Harmony’s aunt Sissy ran what seems very much like a Magdalene Laundry for prospective Lumon employees and that Harmony graduated through the same fellowship program that Ms. Huang is now a part of, implying that Lumon has a pipeline of child labor keeping the lights on even today, it’s much more interesting to learn things we genuinely didn’t know, like Harmony’s personal involvement in the conceptualization and creation of the severance process itself.
The official line is, of course, that severance was the brainchild of Jame Eagan, and fittingly Harmony keeps her original designs for the chip hidden in a statue of him. I’m not sure whether Helena is aware of this truth or not, but I can see why Lumon would want to keep it hidden. And I can see why Harmony would be so determined to expose it, either out of spite for someone else being credited for her work or guilt for the pain she has wrought by her subservience. But I’m not sure we needed a whole episode for that.
If nothing else Severance Season 2, Episode 8 provides a helpful humanizing perspective on someone who seemed like a one-note corporate stooge villain, and it’s reassuringly timed to arrive just when it seemed like the show had forgotten about her completely. But it also arrives at a time when Season 2 was licking up a real head of steam heading towards the finale, and shifting back onto the tracks from here will require a bit of a lurch. It’s fine in and of itself, but holistically “Sweet Vitriol” feels like a rare misstep for a show that rarely ever puts a foot wrong.
