Spoilers

Harmony returns to the place she grew up…

We open with an image of the roiling sea crashing against the rocks and it’s immediately apparent that we’re going to see Harmony Cobel. More than that, we’re going to follow a woman’s faith break down into ruins and we’re going to discover why.

It’s a contemplative episode that sticks entirely with Cobel as she returns to the town where she grew up, working as child labour for Lumon. It’s a place ruined by its encounter with the company, wrecked and destroyed when the tide went out to leave only those who couldn’t escape, addicted as they are to some substance provided previously by Lumon themselves.

Severance has been concerned to take its time to explore the inner lives of each of its main characters and, finally, Harmony Cobel has her autopsy – we see where she grew up, we are shown why she has been so fanatically committed to Keir Eagan (in particular) but we also see the source of her incandescent rage.

You could, I think, miss the slow beating of this anger and shame and self-hatred in the languid pacing of the episode but I think it works precisely because it’s concerned with her loss of faith.

Too often people show deradicalisation as a swift process, a volte face, when in reality such a process is actually a process of emotional grief and intellectual combat that results in contradictory actions, self-harm, violence (of the verbal and physical kinds) and has no certain outcome. Will that person want to rescue others at the end of their deradicalisation or will they want to flee or perhaps burn everyone to the ground?

Some cannot escape the shame, the self-loathing. Others cannot overcome the sense of self-destruction that comes with abandoning an identity that has given them meaning and purpose for their entire lives. For what comes after the abandoning of purpose? New meaning doesn’t simply grow on trees and extremism comes with a special form of self-validation that real life, with its crass uncertainties, will never match.

It remains unclear what Cobel is planning – it’s possibly valediction, possibly validation and also possibly revenge but who knows at this point? Harmony has every right to feel aggrieved – not only decades of abuse starting in her childhood but the prospect that this brilliant woman is the only reason Lumon is where it is now.

Sidelining her might be the most dangerous thing they’ve ever done.

What remains clear and underlined twice is that Lumon and those who cleave to its religious aspects see the truth as something they define, to be spoken into being as it serves them and Cobel, in her refusal of that central tenet, is now beyond the pale.

Verdict: A melancholic episode that takes its time but as part of Harmony Cobel’s journey, essential.

8/10 leaky coffee pots

Stewart Hotston