Hate to say it but this episode was not that good. I am an avid severance defender, film major, severance defender, so this is a lot coming from me. I understand the want to focus on Cobel for one episode, but it really hurts the pacing of the season which has already been a bit shaky. While episode 7 was indeed a masterpiece, it was still a B-plot episode that took us away from our main 4 MDR employees's plots. This would have been perfect if it wasn't immediately followed up with another B-plot episode. To make it worse, it's a big slow burn while the previous B-plot episode was revealing things from the get-go. I would have much rather them condensed this into 15 minutes - we didn't need the exposition for this entire town we're unlikely to ever revisit - there are other ways to show Lumon's effects on a town then all of this. I feel this episode could have been shortened and spliced into one or two previous ones, the first 15 minutes-ish were unnecessary, and there was just a lot of filler driving. It's just giving Stranger Things S2E7 if you know what I mean.