The term “filler” as it refers to television has its roots in anime, designating those episodes that either embellished upon the original manga source material or deviated from it entirely before returning to the main plot. It’s a specific phenomenon that highlights the complications of developing an animated series alongside a print version the show eventually outpaces. There are entire online databases built to guide those viewers who want to skip the padding and get to the good stuff. Nowadays, the term is routinely thrown at any episode of television that doesn’t drive the plot forward, and Severance, Apple TV’s dystopian workplace mystery box show, is the latest series to have some of its fans slap the label on an excellent episode of television. The show’s second season is nearly complete, and its eighth episode, titled “Sweet Vitriol,” provided a key piece to its ongoing puzzle. But if you stick to certain sides of the internet, you’d think it was just 37 minutes of padding meant to fill this week’s slot in the release schedule and hold us back from learning the next great revelation. It’s like we’ve lost all sense of how to experience a story if it doesn’t constantly give us theory-crafting fodder.
In a way, this is a prison of Severance’s own making. The best mystery box shows are regimented and intentional, leading viewers by the hand through a dark hallway, illuminating only a few steps at a time before finally bringing us out the other side. Severance, not beholden to the 20+ episode season syndication deals that undermined the pacing of shows like Lost, feels especially methodical, showing fans exactly what it wants them to see and letting them extrapolate over the next week about what it all means. Whereas a network show may be beholden to the whims of executives who decide to keep the story and its mysteries going beyond what its creators intended, the creators of Severance have the creative freedom to focus on a core mystery without worrying about such external pressures.
Series director Ben Stiller has been up front about how deliberately the Severance team has been developing the show. In an interview with Collider, he explained that the team doesn’t want Severance to become a show that drags on forever just because it’s become successful, and that’s a key part of why its mystery works.
“You have a responsibility to the audience that you’re going somewhere with it,” Stiller told Collider. “That’s always been a part of it for us, really understanding where it’s heading to, and Apple’s been really supportive of that and been sensitive to what the story is and not saying, ‘Okay, this is something that has to keep going as long as it’s successful.’ It should go as long as the story goes, and that’s something we have an idea of, and we’re working towards as we’re starting up our Season 3 work.”
That intentionality is what makes the accusations that “Sweet Vitriol” is mere “filler” feel like missing the forest for the trees. At just 37 minutes, it’s the shortest episode in the show’s history, and it abandons the disconcerting severed floor at Lumon Industries entirely to focus on the exemplary Patricia Arquette’s Harmony Cobel. After fleeing Lumon following attempts by the company to remove her from her original position managing the MDR crew (or perhaps Lumon had something more permanent in mind), Cobel drives to a small, out-of-the-way factory town built by Lumon that’s practically deserted. It’s a haunting, dying reminder that a corporation will build up people and places just to abandon them the second they’re no longer useful. I’m sure the ex-manager found it clarifying to see the town where she was raised by Lumon as a child laborer desecrated and left to rot, even as its former citizens still praise Lumon founder Kier Eagan like a god.
But the rot runs deeper than a town left to die by its corporate overlords. Despite all the claims by fans that the episode is “filler” and offers nothing meaningful to the broader Severance mystery, it actually drops one of the biggest bombshells yet on the Lumon legacy, one that was worth an entire episode’s 37-minute runtime to lead into it. Cobel returns to her childhood home, which is on the outskirts of Lumon’s town and full of its own mysteries just like the Lumon Industries office. The difference is that most of those mysteries were explained by the end of an episode, rather than spread across a season and designed with theory-crafting in mind. Cobel’s aunt Sissy, a devout Lumon follower, is still here, still praising a corporate founder who left her and everyone else in this town for dead while chastising her niece for her apparent desertion of Lumon. Cobel takes a moment to grieve her lost mother, who she didn’t get to see in her final days because she was away devoting her life and labor to the company that raised her as their work dog.
All of this culminates in the revelation that it was Cobel herself who created the Severance chip, not the Eagans who have historically taken credit for the technology at the center of the show’s entire mystery. She gave up her mind, body, and soul to this company, and all it led to was her becoming a pariah erased from its history books. As Cobel claims her old schematics and leaves her childhood home once more, she essentially receives a phone call from the A plot as the main characters ask her to betray Lumon and help them dig deeper into its mysteries. After everything Cobel’s been through, how could she possibly say no?
If someone says “Sweet Vitriol” didn’t move the plot forward, I’d say, “My brother in Christ, this is the plot of Severance.” It’s as if some viewers only understand the concept of unraveling a mystery if it’s in the form of new facts that can be made into weekly theory-crafting TikToks in which they can guess what’s coming next. In a series like Severance, whose entire lore is built upon the fraught relationships people have to things like labor, corporate exploitation, and of course trying to find ways to avoid the unpleasant things in life by bisecting your brain, worldbuilding is done on the backs of characters, not the other way around. “Sweet Vitriol” is a character piece, revealing nearly everything there is to know about one of the most enigmatic figures in a series full of them, and these insights into her aren’t just some intrusive side story detracting from what Severance is “really” about. If your starting point when watching an episode of Severance is “What is Lumon doing?” you should also be asking “What has Lumon done?” and you’re not going to find answers to that by hanging out with people whose lives, most days, are only eight hours long.
