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After a revelatory episode 7, Severance Season 2 takes a frigid turn in episode 8, “Sweet Vitriol.” The episode focuses solely on Harmony Cobel’s (Patricia Arquette) icy homecoming to the town of Salt’s Neck. Once home to a Lumon ether factory, the town has since deteriorated after the company drained it dry.
The Salt’s Neck factory is just one of the many puzzle pieces that make up Cobel’s history, which we learn about in greater depth throughout all of “Sweet Vitriol.” The episode dives into her family life, introducing her fanatical Kier-worshipping Aunt Sissy (Jane Alexander) and touching on her late mother Charlotte, who never bought into the cult of Kier. “Sweet Vitriol” also reveals that Cobel took part in the prestigious Wintertide Fellowship, the very same fellowship Miss Huang (Sarah Bock) is completing at Lumon.
Most importantly, though, Severance drops a major bomb: Cobel is the true inventor of the severance procedure.
Harmony Cobel is the real inventor of severance.
Credit: Apple TV+
In the final scenes of “Sweet Vitriol,” Cobel retrieves the very thing she came to Salt’s Neck to find: an old notebook. Its pages contain graphs of brain waves — including “standard pre-severed brain waves” — as well as sketches of the severance chip.
“Mine! My designs!” Cobel yells at Sissy as she leafs through the book. “Circuit blueprint, base code, Overtime Contingency, Glasgow Block. All of it.”
With that, it’s clear: Jame Eagan (Michael Siberry) isn’t actually the inventor of severance, as Lumon would have the world believe. Instead, it was none other than Cobel, who may have even started work on the concept of severance in her days as a Wintertide fellow. Yet the cult of Kier forbade her from taking ownership of the invention.
“It was told Kier’s knowledge is for all,” she tells Sissy. “If I sought credit, I would be banished.”
So not only does Lumon torture its employees, it also plagiarizes children! What new lows will the company stoop to next?
Cobel inventing severance explains why she was so obsessed with Mark and Gemma.
Credit: Apple TV+
“Sweet Vitriol” sets up a fascinating arc for Cobel going forward. Not only does she seem to be willing to help Mark (Adam Scott) and Devon (Jen Tullock) with Mark’s reintegration, she also has left Salt’s Neck with her old notes. Could she be trying to claim the credit she’s owed, decades down the line?
But even more fascinating is how the severance invention reveal re-contextualizes Cobel’s earlier obsession with Mark and Gemma/Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman). Throughout Season 1, she found ways to push them together, like having Ms. Casey observe the MDR workers. Cobel was clearly trying to study if either remembered the other from their Outie lives. As a married couple, they were the perfect test subjects to see whether emotions or relationships could bleed through the severance barrier. Her adopted persona, Mrs. Selvig, was another opportunity to see whether Outie Mark’s life had changed since his Innie reconnected with another version of Gemma.
Cobel could have just been carrying out this strange experiment in the grander service of Lumon, but knowing that she created the severance procedure itself adds a deeper personal stake to it. She was really trying to see if her invention could hold up under the most rigorous tests, if the procedure she created — and can’t take credit for — has limits, or if she’s created something impenetrable to even love and grief. Has she played god, or is she fallible?
That reasoning is also why reintegration scares her so much. Reintegration risks spilling Lumon secrets, but more than that, it risks undermining her life’s work.
Severance Season 2 is now streaming on Apple TV+, with a new episode every Friday.
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“Sweet Vitriol” reveals that Ms. Cobel (Patricia Arquette) came up with severance, which explains a lot of her Season 1 behavior.
