Severance – Sweet Vitriol Review

Let’s be honest: No matter what Severance cooked up this week, it was never going to stand up to the exceptional episode it offered us last week. But you know what? This deep-dive into the past of Harmony Cobel – who has been absent since episode three – was enough of a change of pace that I didn’t find myself comparing things to last week. And this strange, Lynchian look at a town destroyed by Lumon – homes, businesses, and people alike – was all the more sinister in light of what we learned about Gemma’s situation last week. Lumon certainly doesn’t care about the human cost of its actions, and it never has.

From the start of the series, Cobel has been an enigma. A tried and true believer in the wonders of Kier and the mission of Lumon as a company, she was willing to stalk Mark (presumably as a means of keeping tabs on him and his grief to aid in whatever experiments Gemma was undergoing as well as Innie Mark’s Cold Harbor advances) and force her way into his family. And while Lumon claims they had no hand in it – and that may be true – knowing what we now know about Cobel’s own status within Lumon (and all she created for the company), well, I am pretty convinced they at least knew what she was up to even if they weren’t specifically calling those shots.

So, who is Harmony Cobel? Well, she was born into the world of Lumon, through her now-deceased mother, and from childhood worked within the local Lumon factory. She, like others in the town, also apparently huffed chemicals from a young age – which was incredibly disturbing to hear. The town of Salt Neck may have once been the site of a booming, child labor employing Lumon factory, but now it’s like a scene out of a David Lynch film. She was raised by her mother and Sissy (the great Jane Alexander) – who appears to have been Harmony’s aunt, although she could have been a partner of sorts. Demanding and true believers, Harmony’s mother and Sissy were tough on the young girl. But she turned out to be a genius. Caught the attention of the Eagans. Got herself out of the dead-end town and the factory and off to Kier. She was so brilliant she managed to essentially create the severance procedure on her own – although James Eagan took the credit, because “Kier’s knowledge is for all,” and if that wasn’t enough to get Harmony to fall in line, she was threatened with banishment if she spoke up.

*So, while I know you can transpose any number of cult-like groups onto the pattern of Kier and Lumon, what struck me the most while watching this episode were the parallels to Scientology. Kids swept up into the cult through their parents, child labor being normalized, genius and original thinking being rewarded by the leader getting the credit (and those who step out of line are banished, never to be spoken of or with again). Eagan being a stand in for David Miscavage wouldn’t be a huge stretch. Plus, working with some form of emotional manipulation/mental breakdowns isn’t such a stretch from the Scientologist stance of psychiatry and how they audit members to learn their secrets. Just some food for thought.

Something that always intrigued me about Patricia Arquette’s performance as Cobel was how she was calm and cool when things were going well, but then would absolutely fly off the handle at the first sign of stress or something not working out. It struck me as odd. This is an adult woman who reached a decent place in management and she can’t emotionally deal with things not going her way? She would freak out, react rashly, fail to see all the angles. Well, now I get it. Cobel has been emotionally frozen as an adolescent. Presumably, she was a young teenager at the oldest when she got into Winter Tide (which is the same program Ms. Huang is trying to get into – and now that we know child labor is a normal thing with Lumon, I’m willing to accept that she’s just a kid working and nothing else), left her home, and was forced to “grow up” fast. Especially if she was crafting the plans for the severance procedure.* So, she lost her connection to her family. She’s been working since she was eight (probably younger). Of course she’s emotionally stunted. The death of her mother shattered her – she wasn’t there (was she at Winter Tide?) and she didn’t get to close that chapter of her life until just now. Cobel never learned any coping skills, anything about how to navigate the world, because she’s always been beholden in some way to Lumon. Looked at in that light, Arquette’s performance makes sense – and it’s a great one.

*Severance has only been around for 12 years, per Lumon. If Cobel came up with the science back in her youth, Fields’ comment that Burt was working with Lumon 20 years ago might not be wrong after all. Maybe the severance procedure was going on underground for over a decade before they went public with it and Burt was just an early test subject.

The bombshell of the piece – that Cobel is the one who truly understands severance – is one that will reverberate throughout the series. Drummond presumably knows where she went and will know what she took (Sissy is going to rat her out if she gets the chance – if Hampton (James Le Gros) doesn’t stop the goons first). But Cobel is on her way to Mark and Devon – and she knows what Reghabi was up to. And hopefully how to fix it. While I don’t think Mark and Cobel are ever going to be on the same side, this partnership is going to be fun to watch.