This article contains spoilers for Severance Season 2 so far, including its penultimate episode “Sweet Vitriol.”
Season 2 of Severance has delivered up to this point, with the series firing on all cylinders since its long-awaited return back in February. However, there’s been a distinct lack of Patricia Arquette’s Harmony Cobel. The show’s lead-in to the Season 2 finale changes all of that, giving us a Cobel-centric episode that rearranges everything we knew about the severance procedure up to this point.
The episode brings an end to Cobel’s road trip, finding her in a sleepy coastal town long past its heyday. Everything we see is decrepit, up to and including the Lumon factory that “saved” the town before slowly killing it. We get a glimpse at the former leader of Macrodata Refinement’s childhood, confirming that Lumon was into child labor well before the introduction of the severed floor’s Miss Huang (Sarah Bock). Cobel’s mother died a tragic death in this town, while her fellow child laborers grew to adulthood addicted to ether and with nowhere to go once the work dried up. Those left remain loyal to Kier, with the exception of James Le Gross’ character Hampton, who seems to have grown to hate Lumon long before Cobel joined the party.
Hampton helps Cobel make it to her childhood home undiscovered — Kier is always watching, after all — and it’s here that she finds what she was looking for: a notebook that blows the lid off the entire damn series.
Earlier this season, when she was staring down Helena Eagan (Britt Lower), Cobel implied that Lumon owed her. She was, in fact, quite adamant about it, willing to let go of decades of work and spit in the face of the non-offer for her to take a position outside of the severed floor. In “Sweet Vitriol” we learn why: it wasn’t an Eagan who created the severance procedure, but Harmony Cobel herself. Turns out that her adamance was justified after all.
This also means that Devon’s (Jen Tullock) instincts were right when it came to calling Cobel about her concerns about Mark (Adam Scott), even if it was ill-advised due to Cobel’s previous allegiances. There is, in fact, no one more suited to ensure Mark survives re-integration than Harmony Cobel. But the real question remains: whose side is she actually on?
On the one hand, hell hath no fury like a longtime loyal laborer who realizes how exploited they’ve been over the years. On the other, Cobel has been indoctrinated in the Kier cult her whole life. Was her life’s work being stolen from her enough to actually bring her to help Mark?
Moreover, what does this revelation mean for the mystery surrounding Gemma? Lumon operates on a need to know basis, with each of their departments being distinctly siloed from one another, but Mark and Gemma’s fates seem intrinsically intertwined in a way that extends beyond their love for one another. It stands to reason that Cobel doesn’t just know what happened to Gemma and where she is now, but that she spearheaded the whole thing from the beginning.
Mark’s illness seems likely to delay Cold Harbor’s completion, but will that matter if the other macrodata refiners are showing up for work? That doesn’t seem to be the case, considering Lumon’s insistence on keeping him around, but he’s going to have to return to work eventually either way, if only to bust Gemma out of her cell.
Like all revelations in Severance, learning this information about Cobel sparks a number of major questions even beyond what we’ve already discussed here. For instance, will Cobel make it out of this season alive? She’s got enemies on all sides and Lumon has made it clear that they aren’t worried about silly things like laws. However, it’d be a significant blow to the series to lose her character so soon, especially after we’ve missed her much of Season 2. Redemption followed by death is a longstanding storytelling trope, but here’s hoping the show’s writers choose to subvert that in favor of keeping one of the series’ most interesting characters alive.
At any rate, Severance Season 2’s penultimate episode may have shifted gears a bit, but it’s still servicing the overarching mystery in very meaningful ways. This Cobel revelation could mean major things for all of MDR, and expands the universe significantly by introducing new corners of the globe that Lumon has destroyed. This expansion matters because we won't be stuck on the same mystery forever, and there is enough meat on the bones of the Kier cult story to keep this going and, most importantly, interesting for a very long time.
See you back on the severed floor for next week’s Season 2 finale.
