She Is a Rising Fire: Severance, “Sweet Vitriol”
Published on March 7, 2025
Credit: Apple TV+
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Credit: Apple TV+
Dread was the temper this week—dreading the possibility that such a short episode wouldn’t be as fascinating, as stuffed with meaning and character revelations, as Severance’s usual runtimes allow. But from the very start, “Sweet Vitriol” is in different territory, and it works. It’s compact, focused, lonely, and efficient, all of which is in keeping with its mysterious subject.
Spoilers are going on a road trip!
The first image is churning, chilly water (an unsubtle metaphor, and an effective one). There is no title sequence. And, maybe most disconcertingly, we’re outside again, passing through rocky landscapes with the long-missing Harmony Cobel. The colors of the landscape recall Woe’s Hollow, but here there are rocks and shrubs, not so many trees. The way the town of Salt’s Neck appears beyond the road felt like the opening to a horror movie, and the episode kept leaning on that. I would like someone much more versed in horror than me, a horror baby, to analyze this whole season in terms of horror cues. Sometimes it’s the camerawork, sometimes the music, sometimes the places and tropes: the creepy storage room full of dust and stuffed animals, the lone, hateful outcast trying to impose her will on the world.
Harmony moves through all of it in her own way. She is unmoved by the man dosing himself with ether in the doorway of a run-down building. She stomps into the sad, cold-looking Drippy Pot in such a way that everyone looks. The light here is so icy and chilly, it makes Lumon blue practically look warm and inviting. And you have to wonder, as the episode goes on, if that persistent blue is a direct, Kier-chosen connection to this tragic little town, created and destroyed by Kier’s ether mill.
To be honest, I did not think the ether mill was going to be a major plot point, despite mentions in both seasons. It was spoken of in historical terms, a thing long gone; Kier lived decades before the show’s characters. But “Sweet Vitriol” uses a familiar narrative—the town dependent on a corporation, built up by its presence and destroyed by its absence (and/or by its workings)—to give us Harmony’s backstory, to answer some pressing questions from earlier in the season, and, in classic Severance form, to raise plenty more questions in the process.
Here is the other side of Lumon, which has been there all along, just in somewhat more glamorous clothes: A company that uses people up while pretending to do good for them. “Colleagues,” says Hampton (an excellent James Le Gros), scornfully, in response to Harmony using that term for the two of them. “Child fucking labor.”
Those hellish childhoods clearly forged a deep link between these two, because despite his grumpy reaction to her, despite the cold and the cafe, despite the fact that she asks him to go to a place to which he clearly does not want to return, Hampton’s response to Harmony’s directions—there is never a question, only terse statements—is immediate, at least at first. (The song that plays over his acquiescence is “Where Do We Go from Here” by Charles Bradley, which is on an album called Victim of Love, which seems relevant to the situation.) Once he knows what she wants, he drags his heels.
Plot-wise, this episode is driven by the question of Harmony’s actions and motivation: Why is she here, and what is she looking for? But the emotional engine runs on fraught, complicated history between people who knew each other years ago. Every conversation between Harmony and Hampton is full of unsaid things, things they don’t need to say because they’re so familiar to each other; their pauses are long, their questions unquestioning. I could watch Le Gros’s performance here over and over again. The way he carries himself feels deeply familiar, as does the way old resentments seem to vie with an innate warmth. Plus there’s all that ether he’s huffing, which probably isn’t doing him much good.
The other figure from Harmony’s past is her aunt Celestine “Sissy” Cobel (Jane Alexander), the town pariah, presumably because she still “lives by the nine” and is a Kier devotee even after Lumon left the town in the lurch (and created a bunch of ether addicts in the process). White-robed, isolated, with a massive altar to Kier and her Lumon award plaques clearly displayed, Sissy is an alarming figure, and must have been daunting to young Harmony. She clearly has mixed feelings about coming here; she was well on her way to Salt’s Neck before she turned around, earlier in the season, and went back to Lumon. Harmony’s story this season, though we’ve only seen it in bits and pieces, has been all about her loyalties: her devastation when Lumon let her go, her willingness to consider going back, and her realization that they were never going to give her what she wanted.
Which is, it turns out, what she made. What makes this episode feel so rich despite its brevity is that the audience gets a revelation—that Harmony Cobel, not Jame Eagan, invented the severance chip—right alongside Harmony, who learns that her own personal mythology, the story she’s told herself all these years, is false, too. She’s been carrying around that breathing tube, and her mother’s hospital bracelet, thinking that Sissy made the choice to take Harmony’s mother off her ventilator. But no: Charlotte Cobel did it herself. Or so Sissy says, anyway. Sissy lives by the nine, but none of those core principles is honesty. “Wiles,” though, that’s one of them. What she says clearly feels true to Harmony, though.
The knowledge that Harmony Cobel invented the severance chip puts an incredible number of things into a new light, primarily why she was so fixated on Mark and Gemma, on testing their inability to recognize each other. But also why she was so desperate to return to the severed floor rather than acting as some sort of advisory committee member, and why she felt she was in a position to bargain with Lumon at all. It explains her ferocious rage at being sacked, and why she was so interested in the possibility of reintegration—the implication seems to be that she thought it was possible, though Lumon either rejected that or didn’t want it to be possible.
Her actions are still creepy as all hell, especially when you consider that she may have had a hand in choosing Mark and Gemma for the weird-ass experimentation situation they now find themselves in. (Plus the whole acting as a lactation consultant!) But they were, you might say, professional creepy, rather than personally creepy.
We also, with Sissy, get more confirmation that true believers treat Kier as a god, with her line about how Harmony’s mother room stays shut “until all who remember her sit with Kier.” Harmony’s history, too, is illuminated: her mother hated Lumon, her aunt was a believer, and Harmony toiled in the ether mill before going to the Myrtle Eagan School for Girls—and then getting the very same fellowship that Miss Huang is now on. She created the severance chip (at what age??), only to have her work claimed by Jame, and be threatened with banishment if she revealed the truth. (A truth which Hampton almost certainly knew; he seems aware of what it is she’s looking for.)
With all of that, there’s such a rich, painful vein of grief and connection throughout this episode. Patricia Arquette has also been very good in this role, so disconcertingly strange and compelling, but here she seems vulnerable, angry in a new way, her grief and childhood trauma all bundled up into her own successes (it’s Sissy who says it was more important to be at school than to say goodbye to her dying mother—a message perhaps young Harmony took too much to heart).
And, maybe, her old loves are relevant, too. While the light changes and Harmony mourns on her mother’s deathbed, keening, Hampton waits. Maybe he’s “high as a bearded vulture,” but he waits out there, in the cold, alone, in a place he doesn’t want to be. He only comes into that house when he feels it’s necessary, and then he lets her search out her precious notebook alone, too. (Nice touch that it’s in Jame Eagan’s empty head, an item Harmony knew Sissy wouldn’t get rid of.) And Hampton lets Harmony drive off in his truck, leaving him to some unknown, Lumon-inflicted fate. Sure, that moment gives him a grand line—”Come tame these tempers, assholes,”—but I worry that if we see Hampton again, he won’t be fully Hampton, you know?
At any rate, banishment isn’t much of a threat if you’ve already been banished and lost whatever faith you once had. My absolute favorite moment in an episode full of gorgeously weighted moments is the way The Cult’s “Fire Woman” starts playing as we leave Hampton on the side of the road. It builds in the background as Cobel, finally, picks up Devon’s call. The song keeps building as we see just how much Harmony understands, the way she immediately knows it was Reghabi reintegrating Mark. And then it leaps into full force as soon as Cobel says, “Tell me everything.” All the music in this episode is, as usual, fantastic—the tiny hint of the Kier hymn while Harmony paws through her old things!—but this song choice is gold. And brazen, coming after that long scene in which it’s so clear Sissy is going to chuck Harmony’s notebook into the fire, and we have to just suffer, waiting for that confrontation to happen.
But that notebook isn’t what’s going up in flames. Harmony Cobel is going to burn Lumon to the ground. At least, one hopes so.
SIPS OF SEA BISQUE
- I love the production design so much: the old, worn-out Lumon advertisements on the sides of buildings, the way some of them look a bit old-timey, a different font, not quite as sleek and modern as the version we’re used to.
- Harmony has so many good lines here; I can’t decide if her delivery of “We were once chums” is my favorite, or if it’s the stilted wording of “I’ll not be the punching dummy for your resentments!”
- Sissy’s altar is full of Lumonic details: the heads of the tempers, the cards with the core principles, a little card that says “You must be cut to heal,” a newspaper article about Jame Eagan becoming Lumon CEO. And then there’s that little face she rubs! What a piece of work.
- For two seconds I thought Harmony and Hampton might bang on her mother’s deathbed.
- Wikipedia tells me that in the 19th century, there were drug parties called “ether frolics,” which is sure an interesting term in this context.
- There’s too much to screenshot and zoom in on—eagle-eyed Redditors caught a reference to goat husbandry in the yearbook!—but I especially liked that Harmony was the Wintertide fellow in the “year of wiles.” Wish we could read her whole notebook.
- Harmony mentions, and it’s not the first time we’ve heard it, that Kier met Imogene in the ether mill. Is Lumon one big ether-fueled trip made manifest?
- We know Harmony invented the chip, but we don’t really know why. Did she think it up after being upset about her mother? Was it at Lumon’s direction? How do you get from stirring ether vats to inventing that level of technology?
- Credit where credit is due: this artful episode was directed by Ben Stiller and written by Adam Countee and K. C. Perry.
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The post She Is a Rising Fire: <i>Severance</i>, “Sweet Vitriol” appeared first on Reactor.
