‘Severance’ Season 2, Episode 8 Recap And Review: I’m Not Sure How I Feel About This One
ByErik Kain
, Senior Contributor.
Severance
For the first time since I’ve been writing about Severance, I have to say I have mixed feelings. Season 2, Episode 8 (which has the peculiar title ‘Sweet Vitriol’) is an odd bottle episode, hot on the heels of last week’s bottle episode. Two bottles in a row is a tough sell in even the best show, and taking this much time away from the main story is an odd creative choice. Spoilers ahead.
This was not a bad episode, by any means. But the big revelation at the very end leaves me feeling . . . unsettled, and not in a good way. Not in a “ooh, cool twist” way. In my spoiler-free review of the second season, I wrote:
First off, I do feel differently on the second watch. I liked last week’s Gemma (Dichen Lachman) episode a great deal the second time around, and I think that’s because I watched both these episodes back-to-back originally, and it was odd to have two episodes totally detached from the main story of Mark (Adam Scott) and the rest of the MDR crew in a row. I still think that’s a bit odd in terms of structuring the season, but my second viewing of last week’s episode hit me in the feels more than the first time around. My second viewing of tonight’s episode made me appreciate the dreamlike nature of Harmony Cobel’s (Patricia Arquette) visit to her home town of Salt’s Neck.
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Side-note: I’m not sure where this is supposed to be in the fiction, but right away I thought “This looks like Newfoundland” and on my second viewing I thought, “This looks like the Bonavista area of Newfoundland” and apparently that is where it was filmed. I visited Newfoundland and spent some time in Bonavista in 2019 and it’s truly a fascinating, beautiful, otherworldly place. There were no glaciers floating by when I visited, but it was in October rather than the dead of winter.
Severance
In any case, I do find Harmony’s odyssey compelling. Returning to a Lumon company town that was once thriving thanks to the local Lumon ether mill, only to find it dying, its people “older” and “more frail” as Cobel puts it, reveals a great deal about Lumon’s past. The town is sick. Many of its inhabitants are ether addicts now. Almost all of them are deeply anti-Lumon. Only one remains loyal to Lumon: Harmony’s aunt, Sissy, who lives alone on a rocky peninsula outside of town. We learn that she “still lives by the nine” which makes her a pariah in the community.
We also learn that Ms. Huang (Sarah Bock) is not the only child employed by Lumon. When Harmony stops by a cafe to speak with an old friend, Hampton (James Le Gros) we learn that both of them once worked in the ether mill as children. Child labor is very much one of Lumon’s many insidious practices. There’s another connection to Ms. Huang here: When Cobel was young, she was also a Wintertide Fellow. Earlier in the season, Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman) says to Ms. Huang, “You cannot graduate from this fellowship until I have deemed you wintertide material.” It appears that Lumon youth deemed to have a great deal of potential are offered a special track with this Wintertide Fellowship, though the details of it and the rest of the child labor force remain fuzzy.
Cobel returns to her childhood home with the help of Hampton, a man who now peddles ether to the local addicts, who hides her in the back of his truck in case Lumon has people watching the house. This sounds paranoid, but we learn that Mr. Drummond (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) has phoned Sissy, and at the end of the episode a vehicle approaches as Cobel speeds away. Hampton stays back apparently to hold them off. “Tame these tempers,” he says grimly as the headlights approach.
Severance
We learn a few things at Cobel’s childhood home. First, that her mother died after a long illness once she was taken off her life-support machine. Cobel blames Sissy for this, telling her she would have taken care of her mother if she hadn’t been away from school. “I didn’t even get to say goodbye,” she tells Sissy, a mixture of grief and rage warring inside her. Or perhaps a more apt phrasing: Woe and Malice.
We also learn that Cobel was deemed worthy of the Wintertide Fellowship after proving how industrious she was as an “apprentice” at the factory. Her schooling was “more important” than being able to see her dying mother, at least according to Sissy, who is the most fanatical Lumon acolyte we’ve seen outside of the Eagans themselves at this point. It was Sissy who molded Harmony into what she eventually became; her mother was anti-Lumon through and through.
But the biggest and most profound and story-altering revelation comes at the end, when we learn that it was actually Harmony Cobel who invented the severance procedure. And the Overtime Continency. And the Glasgow Block. All of it was her invention, her idea, her work and Jame Eagan (Michael Siberry) took the credit. Not only did he take the credit, Lumon forced Cobel to keep quiet about it or face banishment. Sissy attempts to burn the papers with Cobel’s designs, but she grabs them back in time.
Here is where I become deeply divided – severed, if you will – on this twist. On the one hand, it’s kind of a cool twist. Jame Eagan is a fraud. Severance wasn’t cooked up by the all-mighty, all-knowing Eagans at all, but by one of their lackeys. On the other hand, a nagging doubt has entered my brain. This means that Cobel isn’t just a ruthless middle-manager and a (now straying) Lumon devotee. She’s also a brilliant scientist! This is . . . weird.
Severance
For one thing, I liked Cobel’s role just the way it was. I don’t know that I really like learning that she’s actually a brilliant scientist who came up with all of this. There’s a “chosen one” aspect to this shift that bugs me. Cobel as the fanatical Lumon soldier and frankly bizarre MDR floor manager (as well as her weird Mrs. Selvig persona) was pretty much perfect. It makes sense that, once rebuked and cast out by Lumon, she would have a crisis of faith and turn on the company she was once so devoted to, and we really didn’t need this backstory to flesh that out. Now Cobel is an entirely different character with a much more vital, fundamental part in the story of the severance procedure and its implications.
This alone is a lot to swallow, but there’s a part of me that keeps thinking this was a change made after Season 1 was already out. This was something not in the story from day-one, but tacked on as a twist for Season 2. It just doesn’t quite fit as organically in the story as everything else, and it worries me. It worries me because even though I know there’s always an element of “making it up as you go” when it comes to TV shows, I don’t want this one to go off the rails like so many others before it, and this moment feels a little off the rails to me.
I also preferred severance as something of a mystical technology. It didn’t need an inventor or an explanation. Sort of like The Force in the Star Wars prequel movies; it became less amazing the more George Lucas tried to explain how it worked.
In the end, Cobel takes the call from Devon (Jen Tullock) and learns that Mark is reintegrating. She asks her to put him on the phone and says, “Tell me everything” as the music picks up and she drives her pickup into the night, back toward Kier and back toward the main story that we’ve left lingering in the wings for the past two weeks. Just two episodes left, dearest readers. What fresh new hell awaits?
What did you think about this (very short) Cobel-centric episode? It appears that Mark’s reintegration is no longer going forward, so he’ll go into the final two episodes of the season only mostly reintegrated. What will that mean for his psyche? And will they go through with Devon’s plan to use the birthing cabin to talk with Mark’s innie? So many questions, so little time.
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Read my Episode 7 recap and review here.
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When do new episodes of ‘Severance’ come out? Here’s the Season 2 episode schedule
The second season of smash-hit series “Severance” is in full swing on Apple TV+.
According to the streaming platform, the series follows Mark Scout (Adam Scott), who leads a team at Lumon Industries whose employees have undergone a severance procedure that surgically divides their memories between their work and personal lives.
In the second season of the Emmy Award-winning series, Mark and his friends learn “the dire consequences of trifling with the severance barrier, leading them further down a path of woe,” the series description on Apple TV+ reads.
Here’s what you need to know about Season 2 of “Severance,” including how many episodes the season has and when new episodes come out.
Season 2 premiered on Friday, Jan. 17 and new episodes will come out every Friday through March 21, according to Apple TV+.
The next episode, titled “Sweet Vitriol,” is set to be released on Friday, March 7.
Apple TV+ said in a statement to Today.com last month that new episodes will be available at different times around the world.
“It would be safe to assume that the first episode of Season 2, as well as new episodes of ‘Severance’ thereafter, will become available to stream Thursday evenings PT and ET, and Friday around the world,” the statement obtained by Today.com read.
The second season will contain 10 episodes, according to the streamer. Season 1 had nine episodes.
The ninth episode is scheduled to debut on March 14, while the season finale will be available beginning March 21.
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When does the next episode of ‘Severance’ come out?
How many episodes are in ‘Severance’ Season 2?
‘Severance’ Season 2 episode schedule
Severance Cannot Save You
The show seems to be delivering an uncomfortable verdict on one of its biggest questions.
This article contains spoilers through the seventh episode of Severance, Season 2.
The promise of Severance is a seductive one: The titular procedure separates a person’s work self from the rest of their identity, granting them a literal work-life balance. Lumon, the biotech company that offers severance—which involves implanting a microchip into employees’ brains—markets it as a method to free oneself of difficult feelings or experiences. What those who elect to undergo the process aren’t told is that their severed personalities, “innies” who toil away in Lumon’s offices, seem to be fully formed human beings of their own. But they have no free will, chained to a numbing in-office existence about which their “outies” remain oblivious. That reality has chilling ramifications for everyone directly affected by the procedure, which the show has only just begun to reveal in its second season. Neither severance nor Severance, we come to find out, was meant to offer an escape from anything.
Much of Severance’s success rides on its cryptic, thematically rich world building, which invites viewers to form theories about nearly every aspect of the story it tells. Even some of the most basic elements of the plot remain opaque—such as the purpose of the mundane computer tasks that some of the innies are asked to perform. (The show implies that their seemingly menial jobs at Lumon have an importance that extends outside the company itself; the tension ramps up when an especially productive employee named Mark, played by Adam Scott, begins to investigate the true fruits of his labor.) But beyond specific questions about what Lumon is really up to, Season 2 has inspired deep philosophical debates about what makes a person a person, rendered through the show’s specific lens: Is a severed person home to many unique souls, or just one, fragmented into parts? Can an innie have a different fate from their outie?
The executives in charge of Lumon have given no indication that they’ve ever bothered to consider these questions. Those at the top seem to be preoccupied with the technology’s mechanics, not its repercussions; they appear to be stress-testing the barriers between innies and outies. Season 2’s devastating seventh episode, “Chikhai Bardo,” highlights this dehumanizing experiment with horrific detail. We see that Gemma (played by Dichen Lachman), Mark’s wife, presumed dead in the outside world, has been trapped on an inaccessible floor of Lumon. She is the subject of a cycle of emotionally taxing trials, while her husband’s innie plugs away on a floor above hers.
Read: When work is a terrifying dystopia
The evaluations involve repeated severance of Gemma’s brain, producing different personalities that are exposed to various forms of routine pain (such as dental work and tumultuous airplane rides); their responses are measured against the original Gemma’s recollection of them. The end goal isn’t clear, but it appears that Lumon’s scientists wish to ensure that an innie and outie cannot share memories. When one of Gemma’s severed personas, a Lumon wellness counselor known as Ms. Casey, meets Mark’s innie in Season 1, they are strangers to each other—which would seem to confirm that the technology functions as intended.
But even if they don’t share each other’s memories, the innies and outies do have related desires. Mark, who chose to be severed in order to compartmentalize his grief over Gemma’s death, falls for another innie, Helly (Britt Lower). Their colleague Irving (John Turturro), overwhelmed by his loneliness when outside Lumon’s confines, also develops feelings for someone. Dylan (Zach Cherry), whose outie is disillusioned by his suburban doldrums, finds a fanatic sort of motivation within the mysterious computer assignment his team is required to complete. And alongside pursuing a romance with Mark, Helly takes every opportunity to rebel against the company’s bizarre rules and rituals; her outie is similarly headstrong, as she chafes under her despotic father’s authority. (He also happens to be Lumon’s CEO.)
Innies and outies share elements of their foundational selves; as such, they not only have the same basic wants, but also seem to face the same fears and consequences. Mark’s budding relationship with Helly is threatened by his outie’s continued feelings for Gemma. Irving becomes despondent after learning that his innie lover has abruptly retired—and thus disappeared—from Lumon. Dylan, despite the confidence his work has given him, begins to obsessively covet his outie’s family and home life.
Read: What are the puzzles of Severance about?
For each of the innie workers, the realization that their two halves share some core truths is both a comfort and a torment. They seem doomed to repeat patterns, unable to break free of them. Yet the show obscures whether innies and outies should be considered parts of a single being, making it difficult for viewers to know how to judge their behavior. If they can be considered independently of each other, one persona could be seen as more virtuous than the other. If so, perhaps an innie—who knows nothing of reality outside Lumon’s controlled environment—would be more appreciative of the life that their outie seems to take for granted. Exploring these hypotheticals matters only to a point; their shared body will bear all of the outcomes regardless.
That innies have some level of autonomy is good news for them, and bad news for Lumon, whose project to create powerless mind-serfs is looking more sinister by the episode. But there are limits to that self-determination; an outie’s problems are their innie’s, too. Severance began with a relatively simple prompt—if you could separate yourself from your dissatisfaction and pain, would that be enough to make you a happier person? The show seems to be delivering an uneasy verdict: New discomforts will only take their place.
