Sweet vitriol's shocking rating on imdb just proves this
Severance episodes had mostly good to very good imdb ratings varying from 7.7 to over 9. Which is why I was shocked to see that Sweet Vitriol, which I loved, got a low, at least for Severance standards, rating. Its not just that it was less loved compared to the others. A 6.7 means that some people actively hated it.
While there might be different reasons why, I think that I can guess two big ones and I'm afraid I'll get downvoted for the second.
- People are addicted to fast paced, twist-for-the-sake-of-the-twist, action driven television and film. This is a (neo)capitalism problem. We get easily bored. It's not at all unrelated to the addiction to social media shorts or to the prevalence of Hollywood movies. It's ironic that Severance parodies capitalism, which is also what Netflix series like Squid Game does. But one of the two does it better and there's a reason for that.
On top of that, the popularity of the show has led to a multitude of theories ranging from well studied predictions based on what the show is to crazy speculations that aim to be shocking and original but in reality sound not only implausible, but also pointless.
This has only led to us, the viewers, being more and more thirsty of knowing what will happen, wanting it to happen now, and be twisted and unpredictable and shocking. We want to see the action aka the Lumon office with all the mysteries, but we seem to forgot that some of the most important mysteries are the characters themselves. And that's what the show did in episode 7 and continued doing even more in episode 8.
And it was brave. Maybe too brave because they did two back to back episodes with the second not only being way slower but also focusing just on one main character, no flashbacks, no drama, just her present self trying to come to terms with the past. We didn't see young Cobel, we didn't sew her mother dying, we didn't see Harmony creating the chip, joining Lumon, nothing. We saw the aftermath of a dead town full of old people.
And I think that's what people disliked. Because the Gemma episode was actually full of moments, of life, of horror, of romance. Cobel's episode is slow and internal. For some, this equals boring.
- This brings me to the second reason why people disliked it. Many say that the twist was not hinted enough and seemed implausible. I think it is exactly the opposite. They expected something big and sinister, while what we saw is actually extremely logical. The main villain of season 1, the one whose action do not always make sense, finally makes sense. She's it. She's Severance.
And why so many people don't like that? Well, I think it's because she's a woman. An older woman, with gray hair, rather matronly and, contrary to the fake calm, big smile, almost robotic villains of the show, quite emotional. She has all the qualities needed for people to prefer her being a crazy cult bitch than a scientist. A scientist who is also a crazy cult member but for much deeper and traumatic reasons.
I was shocked that people thought Sissy was Cobel's sister. These two women visibly have a big age difference. And to spare you having to Google it, Arquette is 30 years younger. She just has grey hair which was the actress's choice by the way. It's hard to even say it out loud, but I think that many viewers didn't like watching a slow episode which focused on characters over a certain age.
Sweet vitriol was not easy to like. While visually stunning, it was also full of implied death. A dead town, a deathbed. Which is why I loved that the creators spent time and money to make it a single episode, instead of giving us glimpses of that story as short intervals from action.