In the show’s biggest twist yet, Severance gave us… a bad episode? Immediately following the exceptional Chikhai Bardo, one of the show’s best episodes, comes something completely different. Sweet Vitriol, an instalment solely focused on Harmony Cobel, absent for much of the second season, is dividing opinion. Usually I don’t seek out reviews or Reddit threads for Severance but I have been doing the past couple of days because my own opinions have been divided. Fittingly, I’m in two minds about it. I love the ideas in the episode, the details, but they were sparse. I’ve enjoyed thinking about it afterwards, but, to be honest, watching it was a bit of a bore.
Sweet Vitriol is dripping in metaphor rather than plot. A tone poem rather than a dense novel. The reveal of the severance procedure being the brainchild of Cobel is a big plot twist, sure, but that’s it. Instead, the episode is interested in feel and tone and the world. Metaphor can only go so far. What was there was good but what was there was not enough to prop up an episode. Cobel created severance to escape this slow dull place but in showing us that, the series made a slow dull episode.
I understand we need to spend time in Salt Neck, to see how it reflects Cobel. She shares the town’s cold exterior, and the location is a metaphor for her journey: once prosperous under Lumen but now a neglected shell of its former self, drained of its commodity and discarded. But the plot feels too stagnant while we’re there, not to mention the minutes spent driving to and from the town. Unless I missed a lot of important detail, which is possible considering Hampton’s mumbling meant I could only understand half of what the guy said.
But as dull as I found much of the languid episode, it does a decent job of presenting why Cobel would create severance rather than simply reveal that fact. She grew up stuck in the middle of nowhere, a victim of child labour, and had an awful home life with her aunt. She dreams of escape and dreams up how to do so. The broken town as a whole tried to shut off their minds with an ether epidemic, the original form of escape severance offers. Sweet Vitriol is an origin story, more so for Cobel than the procedure. As empty as it seems, I admit, I had a better understanding of why Harmony acts the way she does and feels she deserves more than she’s getting when the credits rolled.
It’s a beautifully shot episode but too often felt like it was falling back on the visuals for want of anything else. It’s a rare trip outside for the series, exteriors rather than interiors, and deeply cold rather than the warm flashbacks of the previous episode. Sweet Vitriol finally gives Patricia Arquette something to do but I wish there was something more for her to sink her teeth into, other than that breathing tube. I wanted some extra kink to the relationship with her mother. I didn’t get much of an understanding of that relationship; it felt too simple. I thought Cobel may have had a child that died, and that’s why she’s such a mother to Mark and acting as a neonatal nurse, but it being her mother still works to inform her actions last season.
Of course, even on a trip out to Newfoundland, there’s still a basement holding secrets. While it did irritate me how most of the episode was Cobel searching for something we had no investment in until she found it, I did like the visual metaphor of its location: her plans for severance stashed in the hollow mind of Jame Eagan. And it explains the shot in the opening credits of Cobel’s mind containing Mark, literalising her brainchild. I was just thinking it was a Twin Peaks: The Return reference.
There’s some minor revelation about the cult of Kier. The Eagans were outsiders who brought great wealth and industry to this town, yet also child labour. The kids were indoctrinated at a young age like religion so often does. Harmony breaks out of this, seeing the truth once she works for Lumen while her Aunt, stuck in Salt Neck, remains devout. The episode is the first to begin truly destroying the Eagan myth, presenting them as nothing but charlatans stealing IP and other, more tangible resources.
Yet despite my issues with Sweet Vitriol, perversely, I wish it committed to a longer runtime. If this is to be an especially arty and pretentious extracurricular episode then the show should have completely embraced that fact unapologetically. Because it’s the shortest episode of the series, 37 minutes including credits, it felt like the producers weren’t totally confident in it, that they agree it was barely a story in its own right. Perhaps it could have been condensed to a subplot in a different episode, or maybe stretched over a few so Cobel wouldn’t be MIA for four episodes. Although, it would be hard to build and maintain the desired tone and feel that way.
Ms. Casey would want me to enjoy each episode equally but I’m afraid I’m going to have to disappoint her. This article was less about explaining my opinions and more about me working them out, working through them. Ultimately, Sweet Vitriol doesn’t totally work for me and is my least favourite episode of Severance. But when this is the worst episode of a show, it’s a damn good show.
