Severance Season 2 Episode 8 Reveals A Terrifying Truth About The Cult Of Kier

This article contains major spoilers for “Severance” season 2 episode 8, “Sweet Vitriol.”

“Severance” season 2 has given plenty of attention to individual characters’ journeys so far, and “Sweet Vitriol” continues the trend with Harmony Cobel’s (Patricia Arquette) trip to her dilapidated hometown, Salt’s Neck. As the former severed floor manager’s backstory unfolds, we learn that the town has become derelict after Lumon closed a large factory that was the area’s main employer. This is one of the first times we’ve seen Lumon’s influence from a comparatively objective standpoint, and the sway the company held — and for some residents, continues to hold — over the slowly dying Salt’s Neck reveals one particularly interesting thing about Lumon’s policies.

The episode’s point of view is dramatically different from what we’ve seen on the show so far. Apart from being named after the company’s founder, the town of Kier doesn’t seem all that influenced by Lumon, and the company’s pseudo-religious cult of Kier has largely been presented as a way to keep severed workers’ innies in check, not unlike the perks system and the unnerving retrofuturistic design of the severed floor. The revelation that Lumon has been imposing its cult-like practices on its real-world employees is quite concerning — as is the fact that the company seems to have done so for decades.

Until “Sweet Vitriol,” the Kier cult has largely been framed as the Eagan family’s personal quirk that Lumon uses as an internal way to keep the severed workers in check, with Cobel’s creepy Kier altar and Mr. Milchick’s (Tramell Tillman) private discomfort with some of the most egregious company cult practices the only small hints that something else is amiss. However, this episode reveals that the cult long pre-dates severance, and was already around to indoctrinate Cobel well before she invented the fundamentals of said process. 

Based on what we see of the people of Salt’s Neck, they either continue to be in the Kier cult’s thrall or severely resent Lumon and all it represents. What’s more, the implication seems to be that Salt’s Neck is just one of the places where the Eagans and their cult of personality have held sway over the decades. After all, Cobel herself was educated in some sort of Kier-themed religious school, which not only explains a lot about her demeanor and the way Patricia Arquette is playing her, but also confirms that Lumon was already powerful enough to have its own cultist trainee facilities back when she was very young.

The episode effectively confirms that the cult of Kier is already a real-world belief system with at least some measure of notoriety, and that it and Lumon have a long-standing tendency to wreck lives. Since Lumon’s mysterious severed floor plans (which “Severance” season 2 may already have revealed) seemingly aim to bring the whole world into Kier’s fold in some way or another, this track record of utter disregard of the average person’s welfare is one of the biggest Lumon red flags yet, and bodes ill for just about every major character on the show.

New episodes of “Severance” premiere on Apple TV+ weekly.