Severance Season 2 Episode 8: The Ether, Explained
Do not drive over to the factory to meet an old chum if you haven't seen "Sweet Vitriol," the eighth episode of season 2 of "Severance." This is your final spoiler warning!
This article also contains discussions of addiction and child abuse.
After living without Patricia Arquette's steely Harmony Cobel for a few episodes of "Severance," we finally catch up with the former head of Lumon's severed floor while she's driving around in her Volkswagen White Rabbit to parts unknown. At the beginning of her standalone episode "Sweet Vitriol," we see Harmony arrive in the run-down town of Salt's Neck (which, it turns out, is also her hometown), and when she meets up with an old friend (or, as she put it, "chum"), who we eventually learn is named Hampton (played by James Le Gros). Hampton runs a small dining spot called The Drippy Pot, and while he serves coffee to an elderly patron, he also slips him a bottle; shortly before that, we saw Harmony observe a man huffing a substance out of a paper bag while living in a broken-down bus. So, what's the substance in the bottle and the bag? That would be ether, a flammable solvent that can be used as an anesthetic.
Through Harmony and Hampton's conversation outside of the factory where she asks him to meet up, we learn that Salt's Neck was once home to an ether factory owned by — who else?! — Lumon. After getting into the wholes severance game, Lumon apparently closed the factory, devastating the town's economy and leaving behind what appears to be a whole bunch of ether addicts.
The ether in Severance is an addictive substance — and used to keep Salt's Neck up and running
Hampton, as we learn in "Sweet Vitriol," is also an ether addict — Harmony pretty much points this out immediately, telling him that he's "high as a bearded vulture" — and when he offers some to Harmony after she spends the night in her late mother Charlotte Cobel's room (sucking on her breathing tube and crying), she accepts pretty quickly. She then remarks that she hasn't done that since she was eight years old, and we also know that, as children, Harmony and Hampton both worked at the ether factory that kept Salt's Neck running. (Hampton bitterly tells us this when he says that the factory used child labor.)
Salt's Neck was obviously an early hotspot for Lumon activity; we already knew that Harmony attended Myrtle Eagan School For Girls run by the Eagan family (itself further testament to just how long the cult of Kier has been around), and in "Sweet Vitriol," we also get the reveal that she was the recipient of the prestigious Wintertide Fellowship as a student. (We've heard of Wintertide before; in a previous season 2 episode, Trammell Tillman's Mr. Milchick indicates that Sarah Bock's weirdly young Miss Huang is a contender for the fellowship. In fact, everything we learn in "Sweet Vitriol" points towards the idea that Miss Huang is a student at a different Lumon-run school, making her presence even more disturbing.)
The episode's biggest reveal, obviously, is that Jame Eagan (Michael Siberry), father of Helena Eagan (Britt Lower), isn't the guy who invented the severance procedure where your "innie" goes to work and doesn't share memories with your real-world "outie." Harmony invented it. Though this invention changed the game for Lumon, all it did was screw Harmony over; the Eagans took credit for her work, and once the company moved into severing, it apparently abandoned the ether situation in Salt's Neck. Still, let's focus on that aspect of the company for one second, because it creates an unsettling parallel with a devastating real-life problem.
This Severance reveal makes the Eagan family look even more evil
Okay, so, to recap — the Eagan family, which is in charge of Lumon, kept an entire town running using a highly addictive substance that they created using child labor, spawning a generation of people who became addicted to the aforementioned substance. Minus the child labor aspect (hopefully), this almost immediately evokes the Sackler family, which has faced numerous lawsuits and societal ruin after they helped begin America's opioid epidemic.
Through their company Purdue Pharma, the Sacklers, as evidence has proven throughout the years, knew exactly how addictive their drug OxyContin was but worked to ensure that physicians overprescribed it (though I should say that my description is a vast oversimplification of the entire issue and that you should watch "Dopesick," "The Fall of the House of Usher," and/or "All the Beauty and the Bloodshed" or read Patrick Radden Keefe's book "Empire of Pain" to really learn about it in full). In this way, the Eagans are like the in-universe Sacklers on "Severance," not caring about any human collateral as they ran their business mercilessly. We know the Eagans are evil, but this development definitely makes them even more awful.
"Severance" airs new episodes of season 2 on Thursday nights at 9 P.M. EST on Apple TV+.
If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues, help is available. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).
If you or someone you know may be the victim of child abuse, please contact the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child (1-800-422-4453) or contact their live chat services.