I’m bringing up the spoiler warning statement for Severance fans. Read it. Again:
I am thankful to have been warned of potential spoilers, my fall cut short by those with wizened hands. All I can be is thankful, and that is all I am.
I believe you mean it. Let’s get started!
Last week, Severance took us into the depths of Lumon Headquarters and somehow managed to package one of the series’ biggest info dumps into a beautiful, but bittersweet tale of a dying relationship and the identities it crushed in the process.
This week, the creative team turns their cinematic lens north for some absolutely breathtaking shots taken on location in Newfoundland. Not only do these frigid seaside landscapes break us from the nondescript Americana that defines the usual look of Severance, but they excite our imaginations. Stunning ice floes evoke the opening credits as well as the fractured brains of our protagonists. We even embrace the tableau of a literal cold harbor as we are introduced to the fictional town of Salt’s Neck: hometown of Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette). This lonely town makes the brutalist landscape of Lumon’s parking lot and soulless corporate housing look like a bastion of life and creativity.
Salt’s Neck is barely even there. It’s an icy town, and it makes the audience chilly, too. It’s a film class lesson in atmosphere; viewers buckle against the cold color scheme, frosted glass, and sharp whips of wind whistling at the edges of door frames. Its buildings decay, its population ages, and the remnants of an abandoned Lumon ether factory serves as a stark reminder of the toll that one corporation took on a small town through child labor and a communal addiction to its signature anesthetic. In contrast to the 19th century recreational drug users (sometimes doctors conducting “research”) who once gathered to share in communal “ether frolics,” nobody is frolicking through the streets of Salt’s Neck. In fact, the only business that seems to be able to keep its head above those frigid ice floes is a claustrophobic greasy spoon called the Drippy Pot Cafe.
Inside, a desperate, but still calculating Harmony approaches her childhood “chum” Hampton (James Le Gros, Point Break) and asks for a favor. She needs a ride out to her old home to confront some childhood trauma, track down some important documents, and confront her Lumon-disciple aunt, Sissy Cobel (Jane Alexander, Kramer vs. Kramer).
Once we make it to Sissy’s rocky peninsula, the episode lingers. While we can’t call it fast-paced television, we have to admire the story’s commitment to character building. Not only does this rundown Kier-shrine of a home build on the coldness of the episode, but it awakens a battle within Harmony. Even by the end of the episode, it’s unclear where she has decided to place her loyalties, but we know that Harmony is anything but harmonious. She is a woman in conflict.
Harmony is very disinterested in reconnecting with her fellow Kier-devotee, Sissy. In fact, we feel the friction between the two almost instantaneously. Harmony is ready to rip the house apart, and she can barely contain her resentment for the woman who first welcomed her into the cult of Kier Eagan. While both of these women have shown a propensity for Tempers-based arts and crafts and building shrines to the namesake of a corrupt corporate entity, their devotions are clearly different. We learn that there isn’t enough Kier propaganda in the world to anesthetize Harmony’s guilt and emptiness over the loss of her mother. We are able to piece together that while Harmony was off embracing her Wintertide Fellowship and fighting her way through Lumon’s corporate ranks, her mother was back home dying under Sissy’s care. One day, they pulled the plug on her ventilator. Harmony was absent, and we discover that she has never forgiven herself.
In a particularly painful sequence, Harmony plugs the ventilator tube that was once enshrined in her home (but has been riding shotgun in her Volkswagen Rabbit for the duration of Season Two) into the abandoned breathing machine in her mother’s decaying bedroom. She sucks on the tube in desperation. It’s almost as if she believes if she sucks hard enough, it will take away her pain and offer her the answers to difficult questions. With that imagery in mind, it’s not so surprising when she awakens from an impromptu nap on her mother’s deathbed and accepts Hampton’s offer to get high. Harmony huffs ether for the first time since her childhood, shares a smooch with Hampton, and comes out the other side with a new sense of resolve.
While we still don’t know her intentions, we see Harmony uncover her childhood belongings and promptly produce an old notebook from a compartment within the bust of Kier Eagan she was awarded to commemorate her Wintertide Fellowship. On her way out the door, Harmony confronts Sissy one more time and reveals the episode’s biggest bombshell: she invented Severance.
It seems that she has spent the years since her discovery trusting in Kier’s wisdom, and believing that her breakthrough was an offering to the collective unconscious and shared interests of Kier’s “children.” Despite the strength of her conditioning within the cult, we see that at least a fragment of Harmony’s ego remains alive — a spark that her anti-Lumon mother might have hoped to fan and feed in order to take down the monstrous corporation.
While a full face-turn from Harmony is an exciting prospect for Severance fans, we’ll have to remember to temper our expectations. It’s exciting to imagine the fun new dynamic that her impending team-up with Mark Scout (Adam Scott) and his sister, Devon Scout-Hale (Jen Tullock, Perry Mason), promises, but it’s also hard not to worry. We’ve already seen Harmony switch sides more than once, and a desperate Devon spilled quite a bit of privileged information to a woman who has served as her family’s personal antagonist up to this point in the series.
It looks like we will have to wait and see if they are about to team up with the fiery and rebellious Harmony, or the calculating corporate climber: Ms. Cobel.
P.S. Shout out to Hampton for implying he was about to go to war with whatever Lumon stooge was creeping up to Sissy’s house in their corporate car near the end of the episode. Some of us would like to see that confrontation!
TEMPERING THE EVIDENCE
Last week, we took a detour from our regularly-scheduled theorizing for a Gemma-centric edition of this segment. This week, we will reintegrate all of the pieces.
Severance is so full of lore, iconography, and open questions that we could never explore every possibility. Instead, we will try to make things more manageable by “tempering” the evidence. In other words, we will attempt to shape our theories into a more focused and manageable arrangement. But what is a logical arrangement for such a strange and complicated story?
Fans of the show have become all too familiar with Kier Eagan’s theories about human personality as depicted in a painting, the “Taming of the Four Tempers.” In fact, a top fan theory is that the four members of Macrodata Refinement each represent one of the tempers: Woe (Mark), Frolic (Dylan), Dread (Irv), and Malice (Helly). It is even possible that their unique dispositions must work in harmony (Harmony Cobel?) to complete the department’s hidden function or objective.
Each week, we will check in on five theories. We’ll swap them out if they are resolved, disproven or otherwise lose steam along the way. Each of the first four theories will reflect one of Kier’s “tempers,” and for the last theory, we will “throw a Waffle Party.” In other words, we’ll take a big swing, hold nothing back, and attempt to tame the tempers by exploring our most bonkers prediction.
In order to best keep up with this ongoing segment, consider checking our last standard edition of Tempering the Evidence.
Woe: Severed Death?
This week, we will continue to riff on our theory that Lumon is hoping to conquer death via the Severance chip. Last week, we saw Gemma (Dichen Lachman, Dollhouse) endure all sorts of torments at the hands of a mad doctor in a series of rooms named after files from the Macro Data Refinement (MDR) team; we also learned that the mysterious Cold Harbor room is intended as the final step in her journey on The Testing Floor. Knowing that Mark is the only man qualified to refine this file, we theorized that this room might involve Gemma being forced to endure some version of her own death, or at least Mark’s painful memory of her death.
While ‘Sweet Vitriol’ doesn’t concern itself with Mark or Gemma, its cinematography does linger on a literal cold harbor in the icy seaside town of Salt’s Neck – a dying town. The Lumon ether factory is shuttered, the economy is stagnant (apart from some weather-beaten bottles of recreational ether), and Harmony Cobel is in town to visit her mother’s death bed. When Harmony finally plugs in the breathing tube that launched a thousand theories and takes a snooze in her mother’s moth-eaten bedroom, we can’t help but wonder if our favorite Lumon devotee, the inventor of the Severance chip, would do just about anything to make her pain disappear.
If Harmony conceived of Severance as a way to escape the trauma of her mother’s death and/or the slow, creeping death that comes with a life of ether addiction, it would certainly lend credence to our theories about Gemma’s chip.
Frolic: Ether for the Masses?
If our theories about Severance and death are even somewhat in the right ballpark, then this theory remains correct by association. Salt’s Neck confronts viewers with a town full of aging ether addicts rocking an assortment of respiratory equipment and techniques ranging from medicinal oxygen tanks to good old fashioned controlled breathing with the aid of a crumpled paper bag.
While we don’t need to retread all of the ground from our last theory, there is a bit more to say about ether and its connection to an escape from consciousness. In fact, in the 19th century, the recreational use of ether in social groups was called an “ether frolic.” We all know that “Frolic” is one of Kier’s four tempers, so it’s easy to imagine how appealing it might be for Lumon to develop a clean, electronic alternative.
In fact, if we walk this theory back to the ORTBO in “Woe’s Hollow,” it becomes easy to imagine that the tale of Kier Eagan’s brother, “Dieter” was really just the result of a crazy ether trip. After all, the full name of the compound we are talking about here is “diethyl ether.” Voila. Dieter (credit to Joanna Robinson from The Ringer’s “Prestige TV” podcast for making this connection).
It’s looking more and more likely that the Severance procedure simply comes down to keeping folks complacent while Lumon expands unchallenged into the future.
Dread: Programmable Permanent Innies?
A couple of weeks ago, we used this section to explore the theory of Permanent Innies on The Severed Floor. Last week, we used this section to consider whether or not the multifaceted Severance chip they are testing on Gemma could be used to program a worker’s consciousness to the desired specifications. This would take things a step further than Severance’s bifurcated consciousness and do away with the need for all of those pesky perks. Honestly, has anyone seen the budget lines for finger traps and pineapples!?
If we look back on these theories in light of our new revelations about ether and placating the masses, perhaps they work best in tandem. If Lumon can program anyone to be the person they want them to be, then essentially, everyone would be an innie all of the time. Even if there is a little corner of human consciousness left to the individual who underwent the procedure, can we even call those blissed-out dregs of a human being a person anymore? They’ve been sucked dry of everything that makes them alive.
If your only setting is pleasure, what are you but a Lumon stooge – a permanent Innie?
Malice: Harmony the Usurper?
We’ve been on a break from this theory since Episode Five, but it returns with a vengeance in ‘Sweet Vitriol.’
Ever since the start of the season, we’ve been trying to define the fine line between Harmony Cobel: Lumon Lifer and Harmony Cobel: Corporate Lone Wolf. This week, we are invited to go back and read between the lines. We already knew that Harmony was angry to be sidelined by Lumon after her “heroics” to warn the higher-ups aout the Innie uprising at the end of Season One – but now that we know she is the creator of Severance, her anger feels righteous.
We aren’t quite sure what Harmony will do with the notebook she recovered from her childhood home, but she certainly seems to be a woman on the warpath. She was hiding out in the back of pickup trucks and doing her best to dodge her former employer’s security network. She is clearly ready to cause a ruckus. Furthermore, after the coldest ever episode Severance, it felt fitting to wrap up with a fiery needle drop: “Fire Woman,” by The Cult:
Fire
Smoke, she is a rising fire, yeah.
Smoke on the horizon, well
Fire
Smoke, she is a rising fire.
Sleep with one eye open, Lumon.
Waffle Party: Flock of Eagans?
Last week, we explored the possibility that Gemma’s Severance chip might be fragmented in order to house the consciousnesses of multiple Eagans. We nodded to Jame Eagan’s mysterious reference to a “Revolving” in Season One, an early season nod to Being John Malkovich (1999), and the fact that so many of Gemma’s costume changes seemed reminiscent of Eagan CEOs from the perpetuity wing.
While this week doesn’t offer any new concrete support for this big swing of a theory, this week’s lore dive into Lumon’s ether factories, alongside the likely tie between Dieter Eagan and the recreational use of ether, seems to support the idea that Eagans have a history of recognizing alternate personalities or entities that exist within the human psyche.
While we can hope that Harmony has experienced a change of heart, it’s entirely possible to believe that she once supported this goal of immortality for the Eagan clan. In fact, we are reminded of the depths of her devotion to Lumon this week when we see that her Aunt Sissy keeps a disturbingly similar shrine to Kier and the Four Tempers.
A clear challenge to this theory is the question of how all of these consciousnesses could have been kept alive in the years before Severance technology existed. While we don’t have a great in-world answer at this time, we could repurpose our theory about programmable Innies from the “Dread” section of Tempering the Evidence. Perhaps each Eagan consciousness is thoughtfully filed away as a catalogue of balanced tempers, just waiting to be uploaded into the proper hardware.
At this point, we only have two episodes of Severance 2 remaining, so we are likely on the verge of getting some more concrete information to help us piece together our most practical and our most far-fetched theories. Until then, keep theorizing! We’ll see you next week for ‘The After Hours.’
