Warning: The review of Severance season 2 episode 8 will contain spoilers.

Whenever a TV show veers away from its main story to focus on a secondary character, or an understated plotline, it can often feel like the show is spinning its wheels, filling out the network’s episode order mandate. I’m reminded of the season 2 Ted Lasso episode “Beard After Hours”, where the creative team had no plans to write an additional episode, but was thrown a curveball when Apple ordered one more. But episode 8 of Severance doesn’t feel quite so purposeless as it explores the mysterious origins of Ms. Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette), even as we edge closer and closer to the season 2 finale.

What has Ms. Cobel been up to in the past few weeks of Severance? We last saw her in episode 2 driving off towards the empty countryside after rejecting an offer from Helena (Britt Lower) to join some phony Lumon committee, and her absence hasn’t exactly been missed in the intervening weeks. For as enlightening and creative as episode 8 is, creator Dan Erickson was probably wise to make it the shortest of the show so far.

It’s not that Cobel is no longer relevant to Severance, but her place in the grand scheme of things feels less assured with all the developments of season 2. Still, her journey within episode 8 feels significant to the main themes of the show. That is, the search for personal and spiritual fulfillment as your workplace’s culture slowly suffocates you. To achieve this, she returns back to her home town, a working-class, seaside town where Kier Eagan got his start. Whoever picked the location for the town deserves a raise because it’s clear from every detail we see that it was likely once a thriving community, carried on the back of the Lumon factory, but was decimated once the company left.

Cobel’s first lifeline is a former friend, owner of a local diner, clearly upset by her presence. We don’t get a definitive picture of their relationship at first (nor do we ever really know his name, but he’s played by James Le Gros) but their conversation outside the abandoned Lumon factory is dripping with implications. She convinces him to take her to her childhood home, where her elderly, senile aunt still lives. She’s in search of something, but it’s unclear what it is – and her prolonged absence from the show doesn’t help to provide any clues.

Cobel is easily one of Severance‘s most enigmatic figures, and while I appreciate the details we get about her early life, I don’t know if it’s necessary to dedicate an entire episode to her, especially with the bombshell revelations in recent weeks. Season 1 depicted her as a dedicated Eagan acolyte, one of the most devoted believers in Kier and his teachings (remember the creepy basement diorama from episode 6?), so how has that shifted now that she’s essentially been kicked out of the company?

Her aunt (played by Jane Alexander) is still a fervent believer, often quoting Kier’s teachings, and we get a number of glimpses into how Cobel was raised. She began working in the Lumon factory at an early age, along with her friend/ally, (and, as we already knew, attended the Myrtle Eagan School for Girls) so she was essentially doomed from the start. Severance is all about breaking free from oppression, and episode 8 captures this in a bottle, even if it is ultimately frustrating. Harmony Cobel has gone from a strident enforcer of Lumon’s policies to perhaps their biggest adversary – and if you don’t think that Lumon views her as a threat, why are they staking out her childhood home? Now Cobel has fully, officially severed herself from Kier and his ways, as she denounces her mother and the town that birthed her before leaving.

The final minutes of “Sweet Vitriol” are admittedly shocking, even if they raise a number of questions that may or may not hold up to scrutiny. After getting high on – what else – ether, Cobel finds what she was looking for: a notebook full of blueprints and data. If I’m picking up what episode 8 is putting down, it seems that Cobel, not Jame Eagan, invented the Severance procedure, or the reintegration procedure(?), and gave the credit to him because of her misguided beliefs in the Eagan’s infallibility. This feels like a major rug-pull from the show, given how there’s been no previous indication that Cobel had any kind of scientific training or medical knowledge (though I guess I’d have to go back to season 1 with a fine-toothed comb to see if this is or isn’t true).

It’s the kind of plot development that has the potential to sink a show, but I think Severance is on solid enough ground – and has put forth an otherwise incredible season 2 so far – that it can survive a slight stumble like episode 8. If the final reveal is true, it raises a number of possibilities for the show going forward, both for the remainder of season 2 and any future seasons. How can she utilize this knowledge to help Mark (Adam Scott), Devon (Jen Tullock) and the innies to solve reintegration and possibly bring down Lumon? How does this change our perceptions of Cobel, Lumon, and everything we’ve previously seen? Did Harmony experiment on and/or sever her mother at some point, leading to her declining mental state? What other damning information about Lumon does Cobel know? How much of her Kier idolatry is really gone, and how easily can she be swayed back into Kier’s good graces? I can practically hear the rabid Severance fans shouting “when are they going to get to the fireworks factory” once episode 8 ends, realizing we’ve spent an entire episode completely absent from the main cast, and putting the rapid momentum on pause. While I think “Sweet Vitriol” is far from a waste of an episode, and provides a solid showcase for Patricia Arquette, I wonder if the Severance creative team would have been better served by sprinkling the events of the episode throughout the season.

• You Got Your Lost in My Severance!: There simply have to be a number of clues and Easter Eggs within the Cobel family home, specifically in Harmony’s stash of childhood belongings. Season 2 has presented a number of fruitful possibilities for spin-offs, silly as the idea always sounds, but I think there could be a legit spin-off series about Cobel’s childhood town.