Have We Misunderstood A Severance Villain Named [spoiler] This Whole Time?

In typical fashion, tonight’s new episode of Severance on Apple TV+ (titled Sweet Vitriol) managed to completely upend a lot of what we thought we knew about the show — and did so in a way that feels both understated and seismic at the same time. In this post, I'm going to zero in on tonight's big reveal, and also look at what it means for the story's bigger picture. Before I continue, though, the obligatory warning: Major spoilers are ahead.

After last week’s mind-bending episode Chikhai Bardo, which many viewers have raved was one of the best hours of TV they've ever seen, the show pumped the brakes with a much shorter and slower installment this week. But don’t mistake that for a filler episode. On the contrary, Sweet Vitriol delivered a bombshell revelation that redefines one of the show’s most enigmatic characters — Harmony Cobel — while also hinting that we may have completely misunderstood her motives all along.

The bulk of the episode follows Harmony returning to her desolate hometown of Salt's Neck, a place seemingly devastated by the closure of a Lumon factory. She’s there to retrieve something hidden in her old childhood home — schematics for the severance chip. The twist? The blueprints make clear that she’s the one who designed the chip.

With that reveal, everything about Harmony Cobel’s role in Severance clicks into place — and simultaneously fractures into a million new questions. Looking back with this new information, so much of Harmony’s behavior throughout the series suddenly feels like part of a long game — not to protect the severance procedure, mind you. Maybe even to break it.

Consider, for example, the way Harmony insinuated herself into Mark’s life by moving in next door to his outie. We'd (or, at least, I) always assumed she was keeping tabs on him because of his importance to Lumon. But what if she had a different agenda altogether? What if she was deliberately trying to induce memory bleed in Mark — to force his innie and outie to remember something from each other's worlds, namely the sight of Harmony?

There’s already plenty of evidence that could support this theory. Remember the candle that Harmony stole from Mark’s home and later placed in the wellness room during his session with Gemma? Harmony then watched that session footage intently, almost as if she was hoping to see something cross the severance barrier. When Milchick reassures her that Mark and Gemma didn’t remember each other, Harmony seems ... disappointed. Definitely not relieved.

Even sending Ms. Casey back to the testing floor, despite knowing the trauma it would cause, could have been an attempt to break down the wall between innie and outie memories — not out of cruelty, but out of desperation.

The most tantalizing part of this whole theory is that Harmony might be trying to sabotage the very technology she created. If she realized too late that Lumon used her invention to cause suffering — if the severance chip was never meant to serve the greater good — then it would make sense that Harmony has been trying to destroy her own creation from the inside.

This theory actually makes certain things make more sense, like the bizarre scene from Season 2, Episode 2, where Mark confronts Harmony (aka Ms. Selvig) outside her real-world home. When Mark demands answers, a caught-off-guard Harmony simply ... screams bloody murder, and drives away. In hindsight, though, maybe that wasn’t simply unhinged behavior. Maybe she was screaming out of frustration — not because Mark was asking questions, but because he still wasn’t remembering what she'd been trying to make him remember.

Remember how quickly the board shot down her claim that reintegration is possible? That's because Lumon's whole house of cards would collapse if the severance barrier ends up being ... not much of an enduring barrier after all. You'd think that Harmony, of all people, wouldn't want to undermine her own creation. Yet, here we are.

With just one crucial reveal, Sweet Vitriol has cracked open an entirely new layer of Severance’s labyrinthine mystery. We thought we understood who the villains and heroes were in this story. I may be engaging in a case of confirmation bias here, but tonight's episode even revealed that Harmony has the perfect motive for wanting to destroy Lumon from within; she was one of the corporation's many child laborers, and she never got to say goodbye to her mother before she died. That's how much of her life Harmony has given to Lumon.

If Harmony is indeed trying to undo what she built, the question now becomes: What happens when the person who created the wall is the one most desperate to tear it down?

The post Have we misunderstood a Severance villain named [spoiler] this whole time? appeared first on BGR.

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Have we misunderstood a Severance villain named [spoiler] this whole time? originally appeared on BGR.com on Fri, 7 Mar 2025 at 09:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.