‘Severance’ Season 2 Episode 8 review: “Sweet Vitriol”

Severance’s various mysteries have unfolded steadily through Season 2. However, Cobel’s (Patricia Arquette) role in it all has had very little screen time, until Severance Season 2 Episode 8, “Sweet Vitriol.” This episode acts as a short 37-minute check-in on Lumon’s former employee as she heads back home to acquire something from her childhood home. Along the way, tidbits of Cobel’s life come together like a withering old puzzle that’s missing a few pieces. The result is a frustratingly withholding character-focused episode.

There’s been quite a few hints as to Cobel’s past. Her shrine to Kier in Season 1 and her steadfast determination to keep MDR working spoke to a dedication to Lumon that seemed unshakable. Yet there were other hints in Season 1 that she perhaps wasn’t quite on their side. She pleads with Mark in the Season 1 finale to leave Lumon, and in the Season 2 premiere, mocks Mark for going back so easily when Lumon bribed him with a pineapple. The breathing tube she carried around a possible hint at a motivation for why she stays at Lumon. She seems to hate and love Lumon in equal measure, creating a fascinatingly complicated antagonist.

“Sweet Vitriol” tries to enlighten us to who Harmony Cobel was and is but we’re still mostly in the dark. Lingering landscape shots and vague dialogue attempts to make this episode out to be more important than it is. As Cobel searches for her belongings, so too do we long for a point to these proceedings.

Compared to Episode 7’s big lore-dropping focus on Gemma, “Sweet Vitriol” holds back too much. Cobel’s indoctrination into the world of Kier is evidenced in the way she and the people of her past talk of child labor and the Kier pillars. But there’s very little to glean from what her current motivations are, except the book she was looking for, a journal of ideas and sketches of all current running Lumon projects. Her own ideas, which Lumon took credit for.

Cobel’s story comes at the cost of a stronger episode.

What is supposed to be a character-defining episode for Cobel ends with very little definition attached to it. Who are these people she left behind, and more importantly, how do they further define Cobel? It’s easy to pick up on a lost romance and a vitriolic relationship with an older woman who may or may not have been a family member of some kind. But this far into the show it doesn’t feel like enough to hold onto.

Cobel leaves her childhood home with her notebook of ideas and finally picks up Devon’s phone call. Despite Reghabi’s warning, it seems Devon caved and wants Cobel’s help. Reghabi obviously doesn’t know Cobel as well as she thought, because Cobel seems determined to go against Lumon, and agrees to help with Mark’s reintegration before the credits roll. But the process from getting to point A, when Cobel wanted to return to Lumon to run the severed floor, to point B, joining forces with Devon and Mark, gets muddy.

While the scenery of the episode and great music make up for a lot of the episode’s short falls, it’s not enough. “Sweet Vitriol” tries a little too hard to be a different episode, a more character-driven outing, trying to reach for some kind of profundity.

While “Sweet Vitriol” provides some answers to Cobel’s past, these reveals come at the cost of a stronger episode, and best summed up with “this could have been an email.”

Severance airs new episodes every Friday on Apple TV+

Katey Stoetzel

Katey is co-founder and tv editor for InBetweenDrafts. She hosts the “House of the Dragon After Show” and “Between TV” podcasts and can be read in various other places like Inverse and Screen Speck. She wishes desperately the binge model of tv watching would die, but still gets mad when she runs out of episodes of tv to watch.