Sweet Vitriol opens with Harmony Cobel driving past a sign that indicates that she’s leaving a population named Salt’s Neck, with an ominous soundtrack that sometimes veers into the main melody of the Kier hymnal that Cobel herself sang as a reminder to MDR after their escape to O&D that led to Dylan finding out about the OTC in the first place, but also from the instructional tape at the ORTBO, the only other episode that takes place outdoors far from MDR’s outies’ houses. Watching this episode, the Compostilla thermoelectrical factory in León (Spain) immediately came to mind. I want to give an overview of this real world situation, but I want you to consider the way Lumon operates in Severance while you read.

The Compostilla I factory was inaugurated in 1949, 10 years after the Spanish Civil War ended and, consequently, 10 years into Franco’s fascist dictatorship, although at the time Compostilla did not exist. The building was intended to be an anthracite refinery in Ponferrada, a small village in the middle of one of Spain’s biggest coal basins halfway between Zamora and Asturias. It was a very expensive construction project and existed in the context of an attempt at autarchy from the fascist government, in the middle of the post-war famine that was hitting the populations in those colder regions extra hard, most of whom relied on their own crops to get by in the winter. The people working to build the factory, with the exception of a handful of paid workers, were slaves (unpaid workers threatened with violence, jail, or exile) and political prisoners from the Republican side of the Civil War.

The factory itself was a striking behemoth among the small buildings in the surrounding towns, overshadowing the churches themselves, which at the time were the most ornate and imposing buildings in these villages. In the 5 years between the approval of the project and its actual finalization, the Fascist powers had fallen and Spain was one of the few countries that remained uncontested, in part because of the sheer amount of resources that went into our own Civil War before WWII even started didn’t make us much of a military threat. This project, that had been approved with the purpose of using Spanish raw materials to manufacture pieces and machinery for the German war apparatus, was obsolete before it even opened. To justify its existence, the government founded Endesa, a national electricity company that would both produce, transport and supply the whole country, with the factory in Ponferrada at the core of it. Contractually, the company could not sell more than one fourth of its assets to foreign countries, as it was a symbol of the attempt to establish full economical autarchy from the Fascist government.

It was then that the town of Compostilla was built in the outskirts of Ponferrada, with the purpose of providing housing and facilities to the workers of the thermoelectrical central. They didn’t have to pay rent, they had access to fresh and cheap goods (through an economato, a regulated grocery store ran by Hunosa, a company that oversaw most provisioning in the coal basin of Asturias) in the middle of a harrowing famine, they had free electricity and reliable medical care. A lot of people moved to Compostilla at the height of the factory’s production, including my grandmother’s sister, to survive the aftermath of the Civil War. 105 families lived in the factory town from 1949 to 1965. As the rest of the old fascist powers settled into liberal, capitalistic democracy, with the benefit of international political alliancies with the western bloc during the Cold War, their industrial manufacturing surpassed in technical efficiency whatever we were doing over here, generally isolated in a world where, nominally, fascism was obsolete.

In 1965, the central underwent reforms to accomodate desulphuring and filtering of pet coke, not just coal. The workers started experiencing the health issues that come with working in, essentially, a tar pit and living next to it when they were off the clock, and those who had family outside of the factory town took off. A lot of families had to stay because the post-war famine had killed anyone they had that hadn’t come to enjoy the commodities oh-so-generously Endesa had provided. In the next decades, age, illness, and the shift to natural gas as an energy source (that was cheaper to extract and refine for the company) had turned Compostilla into a ghost town, and by 2008 Endesa decided to start the process of shutting down the complex.

In June 2020, there were only 76 workers in the central. None of them lived in the battered remains of the factory town. The factory was demolished in 2023. Endesa has been a private company since 1998, and was recently incorporated into Enel, an Italian multinational electricity provider. This might sound highly circumstantial and localized, but the crises of the business model that Ponferrada (and specifically Compostilla as a factory town) undewent apply to most companies that started out with industrial production and currently operate as multinational oligopolies over their original domain and a few more, vying for monopoly.

Which brings us back to Lumon, and Salt’s Neck. The town Harmony arrives to is not Salt’s Neck, then. We learn that this population was created to house the workers at Lumon’s Ether factory, much like the municipality of Kier, where the MDR outies live, was created next to Ganz to build the housing complexes for the employees at Lumon HQ. In the jagged, icy landscape, the housing complex which were once properly insulated now rust and are barely patched over, I could see the ghost of the decrepit greenhouse Petey stayed in at Half Loop road, which also had belonged to Lumon at one point. There’s even a church, eerily similar to the one near Irving’s apartment.

The people in Kier live in subsidized Lumon housing, eat at Pip’s which is a Lumon side business, go to Lumon fertility clinics, donate at Lumon blood drives, rely on Lumon for healthcare, food, employment and their continued livelihood, since they literally have a Lumon patented chip inside their brains with red tape all over its functions. When Dylan gets fired, it’s not just the prejudice against severance that is harrowing (because some people, like Dylan, cannot work unless they get severed, it was not a free choice), it’s also the knowledge that without Lumon’s protection and provisions, you will essentially die. Hearing the crunchy Kier hymnal in this episode just brought me back to the ORTBO, to “we’re starving, Mr. Milchick” and the reassurance that lumon will always provide, to “marshmallows are for team players”, because it is entirely conditional on how much money you’re making them. The factory town and the greenhouse were abandoned because there were more profitable ventures for the Eagans, and they left a trail of bodies behind, sick people, addicts whose addiction was a necessity to keep them productive, an addiction that guaranteed their loyalty. A small bar that gives away coffee, warm meals and vitriol whippets, because all the food and medicine left with Lumon, who provides until you aren’t useful.

Harmony tells Sissy “Lumon destroyed this town, you owe them no loyalty”, but Sissy correctly points out that there was no town before the factory. Sissy was spared from the misery that wrecked the factory town because she gave them Harmony Cobel, her mind, her body, and her loyalty. Her survival was conditional on submission, and so everything that they have, they owe back to the Eagans as fealty.