On Severance, the Past Is a Dark and Ominous Place

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 found ... Read full article.