Harmony visits her home town in this week’s episode of Severance, which is getting more and more mysterious. Here’s our review of the episode.
Last week’s episode of Severance might have been the AppleTV+’s most ambitious episode yet. We finally found out where Gemma is; she’s being held at Lumon and experimented on. My best guess is that Lumon is planning to make the severance procedure more commonly available and Gemma is forced to go through generally unpleasant experiences, such as a dentist visit or a plane crash, to see if severance could help with these common fears.
This week’s episode, titled Sweet Vitriol, is just as bold in its storytelling. If you were hoping to check in with Mark and the rest of the MDR team, you’re going to have to wait a bit longer, I’m afraid. Episode 8 is all about Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) and includes one hell of a revelation, which we won’t spoil here.
The ex-Lumon employee drives to her old home town of Salt’s Neck. It’s mostly a dead town and most people seem to have developed a serious drug problem as we see them sniffing something ether-like. Harmony enters a cafe and things are immediately tense between her and the owner, Hampton (James Le Gros). Harmony refers to them as colleagues, but Hampton says they were just “child fucking labour”.
You might remember a couple of episodes ago that Mr Milchick told Ms Huang that he needs to determine whether she is “Wintertide material” before she graduates from Lumon’s esteemed programme. Harmony received the prestige fellowship decades ago, making Ms Huang’s role even more tragic. It seems that Lumon are big supporters of child labour and most, if not all, of Salt’s Neck were brought up to work for Lumon and worshipping Kier Eagan.
With each episode, Severance is revealing itself to be so much more than just a drama about the workplace. Season 1 was largely about a huge company taking advantage of its employees and treating them unfairly, horrifically even. Season 2 digs into Lumon even more, revealing it to be more of a cult than a major capitalist company. I wonder if Lumon also burns bad boyfriends after shoving them into a dead bear. A bit of Ari Aster humour there for my fellow Asterites.
Severance is heavily story-led and every episode requires your full attention, which is why most of these reviews have focused on the plot. I want to address the striking visuals we’ve also been served. Ben Stiller is once again in the director’s chair for episode 8 and, alongside Woe’s Hollow, another Stiller episode, Sweet Vitriol is a visually handsome chapter.
Stiller shoots the seaside town with a distinct clarity. In another director’s hands, Sweet Vitriol could have been a more horror-leaning episode as Harmony visits her mother’s house where her Lumon-obsessed aunt Sissy still lives and openly despises Harmony. Sissy’s bedroom includes a creepy shrine to Kier Eagan and the entire house feels like it’s frozen in time, locked in a constant state of oppression.
Severance is still piling on even more mysteries to its already heavy story. With only two more episodes to go, we’re about to be overloaded with information and new revelations. The storytelling and the new, larger scope of season 2 is constantly ambitious. It can be a bit much, it’s never anything but deeply impressive and intriguing. We can only hope creator Dan Erickson pulls off the finale and season 2 secures its legacy as an all-timer season of TV.
New episodes of Severance premiere on AppleTV+ every Friday.
