Many of Severance’s main characters have no past. An innie, whose consciousness was created for the sole purpose of working at Lumon Industries, remembers nothing prior to the day a chip was wedged into their brain and they woke up a brand-new person.
That whole scenario is its own flavor of gazing-into-the-abyss existential horror, and it’s something Severance spends a lot of time exploring. But among the characters whose pasts we do know something about, the horror of what’s lurking back there might actually be worse than simply a giant black hole of nothingness.
It’s hard to put that thought away while watching “Sweet Vitriol,” the show’s most recent entry. After being MIA for most of season two, Harmony Cobel roared back for an episode that cleared up mysteries about where she came from, especially the specific sort of environment that shaped her into such a Lumon diehard.
From the start, we’ve known that Harmony is unusually devoted to Kier Eagan, Lumon’s rather eccentric founder. In season one, she has no apparent interests or purpose other than Lumon, using her out-of-office time to involve herself—uncomfortably closely—in the life of Mark, whose innie is her employee, and whose outie is her next-door neighbor. She has a Kier shrine tucked into her basement, recites prayers evoking Kier’s “tempers four” and “values nine,” and she sings the Kier hymn (“Kier, chosen one, Kier/Kier, brilliant one, Kier”) before doling out punishments.
When she’s fired at the end of season one for overstepping multiple boundaries, she’s furious in a way that transcends merely getting booted from a job, even considering the fact that said job encompassed her entire identity. “She’s a soldier,” Lumon defector Reghabi calls Harmony in season two—and that’s certainly been the case. But after she realizes she’s been betrayed by Lumon, there’s ambiguity about how her loyalties might shift.
We got an inkling that Harmony might really be changing her path in “Sweet Vitriol,” but first we got a whole lot of detail that made us realize just what a big deal that would be if it happens. Raised in Salt’s Neck, a former Lumon factory town that’s now a depressed ruin perched on what feels like the literal end of the world, Harmony worked in the ether mill as a child, and even huffed the stuff before her academic excellence caught the attention of Lumon boss Jame Eagan.
The prestigious Wintertide Fellowship was presumably her ticket out of Salt’s Neck and into an important job at Lumon’s office in Kier—a career trajectory buoyed by her brilliant designs for the severance procedure, since this week’s bombshell moment revealed that Harmony created severance, not Jame Eagan. At the time, she bought into the idea that Kier wanted her to share all her knowledge, which in this case translated to “giving her boss license to take full credit for her genius yet sinister invention.”
Harmony’s process of deprogramming from the cult of Kier didn’t start this week; we know she regrets abandoning her Lumon-hating mother, who ended her days wheezing in agony in that grim house in Salt’s Neck. (The circumstances are made even more bleak by the other person living in that house: Sissy, Harmony’s aunt, the only person left in town who still worships Kier as a god.) Whether or not Harmony will be able to confront her past and maybe make some big changes moving forward has yet to be seen.
But Harmony’s far from being the only Severance character with a fraught past. (We won’t even get into the late Kier Eagan himself, whose mythology has been burnished into peculiar anecdotes that may or may not be true: a meet-cute with his future wife over noxious fumes at the ether pit; the twin brother who… masturbated himself to death?)
As last week’s “Chikhai Bardo” thoroughly explored, Mark and Gemma’s relationship began with sunshine and sweetness, but was in struggle mode at the time they were forcibly separated. For them, looking back has been almost too painful a prospect, even with those joyful memories still present. Mark’s desperate need to not think about his past is why he decided to get severed in the first place, figuring it would give his mind a break from grieving while his innie was awake.
Even Severance characters who haven’t gotten as much of the spotlight have alluded to pasts that hint at misbehavior. In Dylan’s case, it’s more irritating than malevolent; as his outie’s wife has told his innie, he’s had trouble figuring out his place in life, drifting from job to job and hobby to hobby. Lumon brought him career stability—in his case, being severed has apparently brought him more focus—but his lackadaisical attitude persists at home. We can tell (even if Dylan can’t, as he breezily tells his quietly exasperated wife that he wants to test-drive a new car) that the strain has long since started to wear his marriage down.
But probably the most intriguing season two development with regards to a mysterious past—no disrespect to Mark and Gemma or Harmony, they’ve all gone through it—has got to be Burt Goodman. Season two’s sixth episode, “Attila,” hinted at some extremely dark behavior going back decades in Burt’s life—stuff so evil he decided to get severed so at least part of him might have a chance at going to heaven with his husband, Fields.
With Salt’s Neck finally explained, and Mark and Gemma’s storyline heading toward some kind of season-finale revelation, we’re dying to dig into Burt’s secrets next. Even more tantalizingly, it’s clear that whatever he was mixed up in was tied to Lumon, too—where his career goes back years before he became a severed worker puttering around the paintings in Optics and Design.
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