Clocking in at exactly 36 minutes long, not counting the closing credits — there are no opening credits this week — Severance Season 2 Episode 8 (“Sweet Vitriol”) is essentially a three-hander that finally catches up with Ms. Cobel. Our girl Harmony has returned to her hometown of Salt’s Neck, an icy coastal village that appears ready to fall into the sea. Once a Lumon company town — it’s where Kier Eagan met his future wife in the ether factory — it’s now a no-company town: As Hampton (James Le Gros), Harmony’s estranged childhood boyfriend and a dedicated Lumon-hater, sarcastically parrots back to her, “With the market readjustment and fluctuating interest rates, there was a retrenchment from some of the core infrastructure investments.” In other words, fuck you, Salt’s Neck, Lumon has moved on and left you behind.

The company’s lasting legacy in the town is endemic poverty, faded signage on warehouse walls, and a widespread ether-addiction problem. Through Hampton, we learn that Lumon continued to employ 19th-century style child labor — an item on the DOGE agenda, I believe — in the ether factory, leading half the town to cough its lungs out and the other to become addicts. The only remaining true believer in the area is Sissy Cobel (Jane Alexander), who’s Harmony’s sister or aunt or something, and naturally everyone hates her Kier-quoting guts. She lives like a hermit on the other side of the bay.

So Harmony persuades Hampton to take her on a little trip to Sissy’s house, where she hopes to reclaim some hidden item from her own childhood. The two women argue bitterly the entire time. They argue about Sissy’s continued fealty to Kier and the Eagans, even though they destroyed the town; Sissy’s argument is without Kier and the Eagans, there’d be no town to destroy. They argue about Harmony’s career, how she through away an incredible amount of promise, including a coveted internship overseen by CEO Jame Eagan himself. They argue about the presence of Hampton, who’s waiting outside; he’s a known ether dealer, and Sissy despises him for it despite having pushed him and Harmony into the ether factory as children. (Or something — Sissy’s age and role in Harmony’s life, as well as the question of whether Hampton and Harmony are kissing cousins, are never quite spelled out.) 

Most ferociously, they argue about Sissy’s role in euthanizing Harmony’s mother by removing her breathing tube — the same one Harmony’s been lugging around — before Sissy finally tells Harmony her mother pulled the tube out on her own. In one of the episode’s more memorable scenes, she lies in her mom’s bed, hooks the tube up to the ancient respirator, and breathes in the fumes of the liquid still inside. After sunset, Hampton finally comes inside to get her, and the two sit on the bed and get high off ether, then kiss briefly before Hampton cuts it off.

But Harmony hasn’t given up what she’s looking for. In an outdoor cellar, she finds it: The original designs for the severance chip, created by…Harmony Cobel! Turns out Jame stole the idea from her lock stock and barrel while she was interning for him. As a devotee of the Lumon cult, she kept quiet, but no longer. She peels the hell out of there in Hampton’s truck, the Cult’s “Fire Woman” blasting on the soundtrack (but not, sadly, the truck’s stereo), when Devon Scout calls for like the fourteenth time. Harmony finally picks up, demands Devon put the now-reintegrated Mark on the line, and demands he tell her everything.

You could say this is another episode that breaks the usual Severance mold, if it weren’t for the fact that breaking the mold is basically this season’s mold in and of itself. From the first episode’s new MDR team to the ORTBO to last week’s Mark/Gemma spotlight to Harmony finding out you can’t go home again, fully half of this season’s episodes have been exceptions to the rules. 

It’s successful, for the most part. Murky indoor lighting and the electric blue glow that passes for nightfall on prestige TV hamper the look of the thing as captured by director Ben Stiller, but the town is vividly drawn and dramatically situated. As an illustration of just how little Lumon, or any major company, cares about its employees, their families, and the outside world at large, Salt’s Neck could be a gigantic museum exhibit on the topic.

But the show has never really managed to make sense of Harmony Cobel. Part of that is down to the performance of Patricia Arquette, a fine actor who nevertheless struggles to make the character cohere into something more than a collection of villainous utterances and out-of-nowhere screams. The faux-archaic speech patterns of Lumon devotees, heard in full back-and-forth mode when Sissy and Harmony argue, has always sounded like a pastiche of speech rather than the way an actual existing subculture expresses itself — remember Helena’s awful father calling her a “fetid moppet,” like he’d done some kind of Mad Lib? These weaknesses undercut all of the episode’s big dramatic moments — except perhaps those between Harmony and Hampton, who’s allowed to sound like a real person instead of a character on a sci-fi show.

Just as worrisome for the show’s long-term prospects is the filmmakers’ lack of judgement in having Devon and Mark actually go ahead with Devon’s insane plan of calling Ms. Cobel for help. Even putting aside the fact that this risks them losing the assistance of Reghabi, the doctor who engineered the reintegration process, Cobel was last seen fleeing Devon’s house after it was revealed that she’d been posing as a midwife in order to gain access to Devon’s infant, in pursuance of her continued stalking of Devon’s grief-stricken brother. I’m sorry, but I’d murder someone who did that to my baby before voluntarily contacting or seeing them again for any reason, outside of a courtroom. She may well be the literal last person I’d have called for help whose name isn’t Milchick or Eagan. 

Severance is a solid show with a lot going for it, obviously. Even if it wears its influences on its sleeve — did you happen to watch The Conversation in honor of Gene Hackman’s death? I bet you Severance composer Theodore Shapiro did! — I think it’s mostly fused those influences into something uniquely its own. The talent of the cast members given the strongest material (Tramell Tillman, Adam Scott, Jen Tullock, John Turturro) lifts all boats, so to speak. But a show this fixated on precisely calibrating people’s behavior really can’t shoulder-shrug away behavior that’s inconsistent or inexplicable based on either the show’s own rules or our own experience of reality. Unless and until we’re given a good reason Devon and Mark trust Cobel — or until we find out they don’t, and they’re running some kind of ploy — it’s a hard to trust we’ll find what we’re looking for when we reach our destination.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.