Severance Season 2 Episode 8 focuses almost exclusively on Harmony Cobel, following her back to her frosty, eerie hometown – and we get a big reveal about her past with Lumon and the severance procedure.
Last week’s episode of Severance was incredibly emotional. In the wake of Mark’s collapse from reintegration, he “journeyed” through his romantic and traumatic past with Gemma. Meanwhile, we learned the truth about Gemma’s whereabouts and what Cold Harbor actually means.
However, one character has been curiously absent since Episode 3: Ms Cobel. We last saw her facing off against Helena and demanding to manage the MDR team – it didn’t go well. Helena told her she’d fallen victim to her own hubris, but before they could talk to the Board, Harmony could tell something wasn’t right, so she fled.
Five episodes later, we’ve caught up with her on her way back to Salt’s Neck, a location unlike anywhere we’ve seen in Severance so far. It’s a shorter episode – and a pivotal one.
Welcome to Salt’s Neck
Episode 6 opens with Harmony driving along the coast, eventually arriving at Salt’s Neck, a rundown, blustered town. She stops to brush her teeth and catches sight of someone putting a vial in a bag before breathing it in; it’s clearly a drug of some form, but it’s unclear what it is at this point.
Harmony sees Devon’s name ringing on her phone, but she ignores it. Instead, she heads to the Drippy Pot Cafe; it may as well be a waiting room for the dead and the living. One of the patrons talks about a “clusterf**k” in North Pine, and he’s handed a mysterious bottle – again, it’s obviously a drug.
When Harmony walks in, she’s greeted with stares, silence, and the passive-aggressive offer of coffee. “The town is older than I remember… frailer,” she says. “Yeah, from the market readjustment from a few years ago and the fluctuating interest rates, there was a retrenchment from some of the core infrastructure investments,” Hampton explains. In other words, it’s a ghost town.
Salt’s Neck is addicted to ether
Apple TV+She tells him to meet her at “the factory.” When he gets there, it becomes clear it’s an abandoned Lumon facility – more specifically, an old ether mill (where Kier and Imogen met, according to the company mythos).
Things are very tense between them. “You know how f**ked it is for you to ask me to come here,” Hampton tells her, but she doesn’t have time for chit-chat. She needs him to drive her to Sissy’s; she can’t go herself, because Lumon could be watching the house.
“How much trouble are you in?” Hampton asks. “Enough,” she replies.
Whoever Sissy is, she’s considered a pariah by the locals. Harmony tells Hampton he can stay in the truck because she just needs to go in and get something. “Why would I help you with anything?” he asks. “We were once chums… old colleagues lift each other up,” she says, and he replies: “Colleagues? Child f**king labor.”
It then becomes clear what the people of Salt’s Neck are addicted to: ether (the episode is called ‘Sweet Vitriol’, an earlier name for ether, which is used as an anesthetic). Harmony can even tell her old friend is “higher than a bearded vulture.”
Harmony and Sissy face off
Apple TV+Hampton drives Harmony to a house on the far outskirts of the town, standing alone near the edge of a cliff, looking out onto the sea. “Tell her to drop dead from me,” he says as she approaches the house. As Sissy opens the door, Harmony barges in and goes upstairs as she complains about the “huff peddler” outside and threatens to “call the authorities.”
She goes into her room, but most of her belongings are gone. As she walks back downstairs, we get a brief shot of a Lumon “quarterly striver” plaque of Sissy’s full name: Celestine Cobel.
Sissy tells Harmony she sold her things to the poor. Harmony asks if anyone has visited or phoned, and Sissy says Mr Drummond called. “What have you done, little mouse?” she asks.
Harmony rips out the phone line and demands the key to her mother’s room. “That room stays shut until all who remember her sit with Kier, you know this… why do you bring nothing but woe into my life?” Sissy says, and Harmony tells her she’s the one who “cursed this house with woe.”
Harmony asks Sissy what her mother’s last words were. “She said nothing after you pulled the tube [presumably the same one we saw at the start of Episode 3 with the name Charlotte Cobel on it] from her gullet,” Harmony says, and Sissy smacks her in the face. “There was gratitude in her eyes to be freed from her suffering. If only she had been a believer, perhaps she would have found solace in the Nine,” she tells Harmony.
Sissy explains that Charlotte was struggling every day until she died, and Harmony said she would have cared for her if she wasn’t at school. “Where you belonged,” Sissy says.
Harmony finds her mother’s deathbed
Apple TV+Harmony still resents Sissy for not giving her the chance to say goodbye to her mom. “Your studies were more important, Mr Eagan saw Kier in you… and the Wintertide fellowship, even at the factory, no apprentice was more industrious than you,” she says (remember, Miss Huang is currently working on Lumon’s severed floor as part of a Wintertide fellowship).
Sissy’s memory turns bitter. “Such a disappointment you’ve proven to be,” she says, and Harmony asks what Mr Drummond told her. “Return and plead forgiveness, child. The Eagans will grant it,” Sissy claims, but Harmony isn’t convinced.
She runs up to Sissy’s room to find the key to Charlotte’s room. She has a lot of Lumon and Kier-related paraphernalia; small statuettes representing the Four Tempers, newspaper clippings about Jame Eagan’s appointment as CEO, early leaflets about work-life balance under Lumon, and cards about how one “must be cut to heal.”
She finds the key and unlocks Charlotte’s room. It’s depressing: as gales howl against the window, she wanders around, looking at her late mother’s clothes and photos and sitting on her bed. She takes out the tube and attaches it to the equipment beside the bed, before sucking on the nozzle and weeping.
Harmony and Hampton take ether
Apple TV+The sun sets on Salt’s Neck, and Hampton storms into Sissy’s to get Harmony. “I have to find it,” she says, but he acts like he doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
“I liked her,” he says, talking about Charlotte. “She hated Lumon more than I did, that’s all I needed to know… [and] at least she doesn’t have to live with Sissy anymore.”
He asks Harmony if he wants to get high before taking in a mighty big breath of ether. Hampton laughs off his groggy cough before Harmony sniffs some herself. “I haven’t done that since I was eight,” she says, rather disturbingly. Between their giggles, she says it’s “shameful” that he sells it, and they kiss.
Harmony invented severance!
Apple TV+Before they leave, Harmony checks Sissy’s cellar and finds her book of “annual reminiscences” from her time at the Myrtle Eagan School for Girls. We get a brief look at two of the pages, celebrating Harmony’s accomplishments.
She keeps looking around, finding a trophy from her Wintertide fellowship. She hid something inside: a notebook that she invented severance.
“Lumon destroyed this town, you owe them no loyalty,” Harmony tells Sissy, but she says, “There was no town before the factory. And what about your own employ? Everything you have, you owe back to the Eagans as fealty.”
When she shows the notebook to Sissy, she asks Harmony why she never showed it to her before. “I was told Kier’s knowledge is for all… that if I sought credit, I would be banished,” Harmony explains.
Sissy tries to throw the evidence into the fire, but Harmony stops her. “I hope you die as painfully as she did,” she tells Sissy. “It was her hand that removed the tube, not mine… your mother was a coward, more sick in the soul than in the body, filled with malice and resentment,” Sissy says.
“I thought you were different, my flower. I tried to help you grow, but now I see, you are a weed just as she was.”
Hampton shouts for Harmony after he sees somebody coming, and he even lets her take his truck. As she drives away and he stares down a set of headlights, he says, “Come tame these tempers, assh*les.”
Harmony finally answers the phone and speaks to Devon, who tells her that Reghabi has helped Mark with reintegration. She asks to speak to Mark, and when he comes on the line, she demands to know everything that’s happened.
Make sure you know when the next episode drops with our guide to the Severance Season 2 release schedule, and check out our guides on Cold Harbor, Asal Reghabi, and the Glasgow Block. There’s another big theory you should read up on too: Helly might be pregnant.
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