Severance Season 2 Episode 8 Review: Sweet Vitriol

You probably won’t add Salt’s Neck to your travel bucket list after Severance Season 2 Episode 8, “Sweet Vitriol.” The ghost town visited by Harmony Cobel unlocks secrets of her past and possibly the key to Mark’s future.

Although style-wise this episode hews much more closely to the usual Severance visuals than Severance Season 2 Episode 7, “Chikhai Bardo,” it’s still a risk. Spending an entire episode on the villain of the show requires the audience to care about her.

That’s a big ask when the character has been missing for multiple episodes and wasn’t liked to begin with! Fortunately the episode balances the right amount of mystery and human interest to make you care at least a little about Mark’s freaky former neighbor/boss.

With the dim, desolate landscape, trading in trees for the seaside, Salt’s Neck immediately gives Lumon vibes. Do they only build in places that are depressing?

Her arrival to her hometown introduces an old (child labor) colleague turned drug dealer Hampton (James Le Gros) and Cobel’s relative Sissy (Jane Alexander). Both characters show the extremes of how Lumon ravages lives for its loyalists and rebels alike.

Patricia Arquette does a great job revisiting how Cobel can act when her repressed feelings bubble to the surface. Her gasping for oxygen using her dead mother’s tube in a desperate attempt to get some sort of closure over her death is a jarring scene to witness.

She doesn’t fully earn your sympathy, but you at least get the understanding that Cobel didn’t have much choice when it came to being raised as a Lumon acolyte. She grew up a poor factory worker and only escaped through a Lumon scholarship.

Remember when Helena was criticized for saying she didn’t earn anything, she was born into it? Yeah, that anti-nepo baby dig was personal!

The shocking reveal that she is also the inventor of the “severance” procedure and that credit was stolen from her adds another layer of understanding to her bizarre obsession with the Cold Harbor project and Mark. No wonder she feels such ownership and now has a love/hate relationship with the Egans.

It’s hard not to read into the fact that the episode runtime is shorter than most episodes of Severance at only 38 minutes. Although I’m not sure I needed to see 10-20 more minutes of Sissy and Cobel arguing, I wouldn’t have hated some answers about what actually happened in this town. (Can we revisit the child labor thing? At least Miss Huang has a desk job.)

If the ether the town is addicted to was previously explained, it’s something already forgotten by most of the audience. Why did Lumon shut down the factory and pivot to whatever the hell MDR is doing?

The refusal to include any flashbacks is a reminder of Severance‘s withholding nature to serve the greater story, whether you like it or not. Clues are not being served on a silver platter to viewers.

At least Cobel finally picks up Devon’s phone call by the end, ensuring this isn’t the last we’ll see of her this season.

What did you think of this episode of Severance? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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Severance airs Fridays on Apple TV+.

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