At under 40 minutes, "Sweet Vitriol" is the shortest episode of Severance produced so far, in the first or second season. In terms of the plot, relatively little happens. We spend all of our time with Harmony Cobel, who returns to her frigid, distant hometown as she tries to piece her life back together after getting sacked from Lumon. She meets up with an old friend turned resentful enemy. She clashes with a woman named Sissy who helped raise her; I think she's her aunt but we're never told for sure.
We learn that Harmony grew up a child laborer at a factory owned by Lumon, that she was indoctrinated into the religion of Kier early in life, and that her mother didn't approve. Her mom died while she was away at school and she never got over it. Finally, we learn that Harmony created the original designs for the severance technology, but was convinced to forego credit for the greater glory of Kier.
Only at the end of the episode does the main plot come back in: armed with her original severance plans, Harmony answers the phone call from Devon and drives off to help Mark...or maybe hurt him, or use him as leverage to get back in good with Lumon. It's too early to tell.
All of this is pretty straightforward. But Severance is interested in more than just the plot. It wants us to sit with these characters, with this place, with this story, and see what feelings bubble up.
Severance review: Season 2, Episode 8, "Sweet Vitriol"
More than any other show on right now, Severance is a cinematic experience. The last episode blew my mind with its artful, eerie transitions. We also get a lot of great ones in "Sweet Vitriol." I particularly loved the prolonged overhead shots of ice on the water. I also loved the shot of Sissy's isolated house on a cliff overlooking the sea: square, stark, remote, and surrounded by nothing.
Severance has never been a warm show, but "Sweet Vitriol" is frigid. Everyone in this town seems to live lonely, dingy, isolated lives. They walk through the snow-laden streets stepping over half-buried cars. The Lumon factory has long since shut down. It's now another empty husk. That's where Harmony meets her old friend, who was a "child laborer" with her back when. She needs him to drive her up to Sissy's house, because if she takes her car, "they" will notice.
Who is they? Who else could it be but Lumon? They're everywhere, even in blasted places like this, places where the local cafe has only a couple of people in it at peak hours, places where Sissy sits on whiling away the hours on her lonely bluff, certain that no one would care to visit.
But Harmony does come. The best scenes are her and Sissy arguing about the past; should Sissy have called Harmony to come home when her mother was ailing, and who's decision was it to pull the plug anyway? When Harmony enters her late mother's room for the first time in years, she is so overcome with emotion that she lays in her mother's bed for hours, breathing in and out through the tube that nursed her while the shadows lengthen and disappear on the floor. Although they had a falling out, her friend must have been very close at one point, because he doesn't drive away. He comes up to check on her and asks if she wants to get high, not by smoking joint but by huffing ether. "I haven't done that since I was 8," Harmony laughs.
Yes, Harmony Cobel laughs, something I didn't think we'd ever see. We don't get a ton of forward plot momentum in "Sweet Vitriol." What we get is an understanding of who Harmony was, and what fanatical devotion to Kier can do to a person. As usual, Severance comes through with the details. We see photos of Harmony at a young age, back when her industriousness earned her a change to climb the ladder at Lumon. At night, all Sissy has to light the house are oil lamps, hinting at the things that devotees of Kier are willing to deprive themselves of for the good of their religion.
It's no wonder that Harmony was eager to escape this place. It's no wonder that she's resentful of Helena Eagan, who was handed her position of authority within Lumon without having to earn it. Although we don't know everything about the power structure at Lumon yet, I wouldn't surprised if it worked like most cults, where the rank and file are kept in line by propaganda and doctrine while those at the top are only in it for their own selfish ends. Harmony, despite a lifetime of programming, seems to be catching onto that. We'll find out next week what choice she makes: fight Lumon, or get revenge.
Verdict
"Sweet Vitriol" is the third Severance episode this season to not feel like any other episode of Severance, after "Woe's Hollow" and "Chikhai Bardo." It's almost too much. Where are Dylan and Irving? What's happening with mark and Helly? What's going on at the Lumon offices? But I also like that the show is willing to go off on these experimental jaunts.
"Sweet Vitriol" is a difficult episode of television that not everyone will enjoy, but Severance has the courage to mount it anyway, because it thinks that's worth doing. And the beauty of the filmmaking is hard to gainsay. With its barren bleakness, "Sweet Vitriol" reminded me a lot of the films of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, stuff like The Seventh Seal, Winter Light and Cries and Whispers. Not every show needs to aim that high stylistically, but I'm certainly not going to complain when one does.
Severance bullet points
- Right at the top of the episode, Harmony wakes up in her car and brushes her teeth, catching site of a wretch huffing a bag yards away, perhaps thinking that there goes she but by the grace of Kier. Or maybe she's coming to realize they've never been very different.
- When she was gone, Sissy sold all of Harmony's things "to the poor." What did the poor buy them with?
- The ruined town certainly looks like a cold harbor, but I don't know if it actually has anything to do with the Cold Harbor project that Mark is working on. But given how instrumental Harmony was to the development of the severance technology, it's certainly possible.
Episode Grade: B-
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