*Spoilers for Severance seasons 1 and 2 and Trigger-Warning for discussion of r-pe*
I’ve been having a ball talking Severance theories with folks on social media every week after each episode. I love that the show asks the audience to think deeply about its premise of a corporation whose employees volunteer for a severance procedure that prevents them from knowing what work they do all day and that the show gives us new clues each week to help us solve the show’s mysteries. I love that we’re debating the ethics of the procedure which essentially creates a whole new person (the “innie”) who’s enslaved to the corporation and has no memory of their “outie’s” life. It’s fascinating and disturbing, the lengths we go to in order to avoid feeling pain or even discomfort. I love a show that makes the audience examine our own character.
The fun of theorizing around a mystery-box show like Severance is coming up with theories that are rooted in actual evidence that the show’s writers and performers give to the audience: through dialogue, cinematography, props, production design, body language, facial expressions, etc. I’ve seen some AMAZING theories so far, but I’ve also seen some duds. Truly, some of us are watching the show with our Third Eye and the other two are closed! But, it’s been awhile since we had a mystery-box show this epic—(maybe Lost in the early aughts?)—so, I understand if we’re a bit out of practice. And sometimes our theories wind up revealing more about us and the way we view the world rather than whatever the showrunners might have intended.
One theory that has been getting on my last nerve for the past few weeks is that Lumon’s highest-ranking Black un-severed employees are going to team up to take the company down. Yes, according to some loud fans, Severed Floor Manager Seth Milchick and Natalie, the comms director and public face of Lumon, are oppressed prisoners who will band together to take down their evil corporation. Again, that’s the middle manager of Evil Corp. and the actual public face of Evil Corp. Banding together. To take down the company they sold out to years ago. Okay.
It all started back in Season 1. Milchick was a deputy manager of the Severed Floor workers, or the “innies,” Mark S., Dylan G., Irving B. and Helly R. He often played the “good cop” to their floor manager Ms. Cobel’s “bad cop” (ignoring the fact that a cop is a cop, I guess). While each of the innies are called by their first names, Milchick and Cobel get the title of Mr. and Ms.—despite the fact that Milchick is much younger than Irving and at least not far enough in age from Mark, Dylan and Helly to be called Mr. But, by Lumon law, innies are not considered people. They are essentially enslaved to both Lumon and to their outies, who decide whether they live or die, what they eat, how they dress every day and more. That makes their managers, Mr. Milchick and Ms. Cobel, their overseers. Overseers, if you remember from slavery, are bad people.
But Milchick starts to get some sympathy early in season one when he sends our innie heroine Helly R. to the “break room.” Unlike the typical corporate break room where people, you know, take breaks, Lumon’s break room is a bit more literal. It’s intended to “break” the rebellious spirit of wayward innies by hooking them up to a lie detector test and making them read a pre-written apology statement thousands of times until the lie detector test says that they mean it. As Milchick tortures Helly in the break room—“I believe you still don’t mean it,” he repeats over and over —she pleads with him, like, hey, you’re a reasonable guy, you know torture is bad, don’t do this. And you know what he does? He proceeds to torture her anyway for the rest of her time on the clock that day and picks up again the next morning when she comes back to work. But he looked sad for a second when he did it! So people were like, “Oh, a flash of humanity??? Maybe he’s not so bad???” I repeat: he tortured Helly R. for several hours over a two-day period!
The actor who plays Milchick, Trammel Tillman, is fantastic in the role; he’s playing the character with layers; he can code switch with the best of them, and plaster on that corporate, toothy grin while he’s seething inside and lying straight to an innie’s face. It also doesn’t hurt that Trammel/Milchick is very good looking. And hey, audiences love a handsome villain redemption arc! So people are rooting for Milchick to one day stop being the bad guy.
Yet, by the end of Season 1, all he has done is spark a revolution with both his incompetence and his evilness. First, he accidentally leaves a radicalizing book from outside of Lumon for the innies to find that teaches them the exact opposite of what Lumon has been brainwashing them to believe: Your job needs you—not the other way around! Milchick also wakes up innie Dylan after work hours at outie Dylan’s home, where innie Dylan accidentally finds out his outie has a kid, a son who calls him daddy! Milchick rips the kid out of innie Dylan’s arms and puts Dylan back to sleep. This not only incentivizes Dylan to revolt, but also reveals to Dylan and the other innies that it’s possible for the innies to take over their outies after work—even off Lumon’s grounds. Big mistake, Milchick. Huge.
The final act of Milchick’s unmitigated evil in season one was to kill Irving’s budding love with fellow innie Burt. Once Milchick discovered that they were falling for each other, Milchick had Burt “retired,” which is Lumon corporate speak for killed, as an innie only exists on Lumon’s severed floor, and if their outie never comes back to work, the innie is essentially dead. It was unnecessarily cruel and the final straw that sent Irving, Lumon’s most faithful innie employee, into a rage. “Let’s burn this place to the ground!” Irving says, and that’s exactly what he, Dylan, Mark and Helly attempt to do in the season one finale—none of which would’ve happened without Milchick’s cruelty.
Half-way through Season 2, Milchick is still a torturous, evil company man, except now he’s been promoted for his troubles. With Cobel fired, he’s now floor manager, and though he’s pushed some ludicrous “kindness reforms,” (again, playing “good cop”) it’s evident that Milchick has no idea what kindness is. The break room has been transformed into an actual break room, with posters co-opting images from the innies’ season one revolution into corporate propaganda. Instead of being locked in their departments, as Milchick did to the team in season one, he’s now given them hall passes to roam the halls freely when they need a break. And he says he’s removed all the cameras and recording devices from the floor so the team can speak freely to each other. The best way to keep a prisoner is to make them believe they’re free, as Cobel said in season one. Of course, Milchick knows there’s a mole among the team that’s reporting back everything that they say, so what do they need cameras and recording devices for? Again, this is more of Milchick’s corporate cruelty shining through, treating the innies as subhuman things to be toyed with and manipulated for the needs of the company.
But then, Lumon was racist to him.
Genuinely, this is where all the “Milchick’s about to turn on Lumon!!” hot takes are coming from. The only Black guy in management—middle or otherwise—faced some racism this season from Lumon’s governing Board, and that is enough for people to not only sympathize with him but to project a radicalized spirit into him. Here’s what happened:
After Milchick is promoted to Cobel’s old job of Severed Floor Manager, Natalie, the Black comms director and liaison between Lumon’s Board and everyone else, comes into his new office with gifts. “The Board is jubilant at your ascension,” she tells him, speaking as the mouthpiece of the Board with that same plastered corporate smile Milchick does so well. “It wants you to feel appreciated.” Natalie gives him the gifts—a cycle of iconic paintings of Lumon’s founder (and god—did I mention Lumon is also a Scientology-level religious cult??) named Kier. Except in these paintings, the very white, blue-eyed Kier is in blackface. Painted dark brown, with a glorious mustache just like Milchick’s own. I’m surprised they didn’t also copy Milchick’s incredible ‘fro onto Kier as well.
Natalie explains that the Board wants him to be able to see himself in Kier and feel a connection. Actress Sydney Cole Alexander plays the scene with chilling ease, stuffing down any of Natalie’s unauthorized emotions.
“Oh, my!” Milchick says, taken aback by the gifts, but I’m not entirely sure why! Is he mad that his employer —whose whole business model is slavery —sees him as a Black person, instead of just “Seth, the great manager of the Severed Floor”? Or is he mad that the Board thinks he needs Kier to be Black in order for him to obey and be loyal to Kier and Lumon, even though he’s clearly done so for a number of years already? I guess it says something about Milchick that he’s not happy with this ridiculous, empty racist corporate gesture of “inclusion,” but I seem to be in the minority of people who don’t know exactly what the audience should get out of his discomfort with the portraits. The nicest way I could phrase my confusion is: Corporate sell-outs don’t like corporate sell-out things???
The sympathy for not only Milchick but Natalie got more intense when Natalie shares that the Board wants her to convey that they also gave her blackface Kier paintings when she ascended to her comms director/face of the company role. Yikes. Milchick struggles to express gratitude to the Board for the horrifying gifts and Natalie, ear-piece firmly in her ear, interrupts him to say, “The Board has ended the call,” through that blank staring grin she always wears. So they’ve both suffered a bit of racial humiliation at the hands of Lumon, with Natalie now serving as both the mouthpiece and the handmaiden of the Board, responsible for inflicting it on another Black employee. Milchick doesn’t blame her for her role, however, and tries to connect with her over the “complicated” feelings the paintings evoke, but she gives him nothing to bond over. She leaves and he buries the paintings in the back of his closet.
A month later, just before his first monthly performance review as floor manager (HILARIOUS, Severance writers! The only thing worse than a corporate performance review is having it monthly.) Milchick tries again to connect with Natalie over the paintings and she once again blank stares him into oblivion and says don’t keep our masters waiting. This has led people to conclude that Natalie is a prisoner of the Board—they may even be lurking inside of her head, if she’s severed!—and can’t connect with Milchick. I even saw a theory that Natalie must be severed to the point that she’s no longer a Black woman and that’s why she can’t connect with Milchick.
I hate to use this language, I truly do. But they have pushed me to the edge. Have these people never met a coon??????????
Genuinely! Non-rhetorical.
Have these theorists never met a Black person who identifies as Black and is the happiest agent of white supremacy one could ever meet? NYC Mayor Eric Adams. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Trump Secretary of Housing Ben Carson. Skinning and grinning, as the elders say! Not to leave out democrats: were these theorists asleep during the Biden genocide when his formerly pro-Palestine Black woman press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre became the administration’s mouthpiece, excusing and obfuscating the genocide of Palestinians? Did we forget the Black woman ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield who single-handedly (literally! it was her single raised hand that did it, several times!) blocked UN votes for a ceasefire in Gaza? Black people aren’t inherently immune to selling out other marginalized people for a check, for prestige, for power. They don’t have to “sever” from their Blackness to excuse their choices to advance, either. We just know, as the saying goes: all skinfolk aint kinfolk.
Milchick and also to a higher degree Natalie, are extremely powerful Black characters in the Severance world. Natalie not only serves as internal comms for Lumon (keeping even the CEO-in-waiting, Helly R.’s evil outie Helena, at arms length from speaking to the Board directly) Natalie is also literally the face of the company. In the pilot episode, we see the twice-marginalized Natalie out in front, taking the bullets from journalists on the news who questioned the legality and ethics of Lumon’s severance procedure. That grinning face defended, obfuscated, and shielded Lumon from accountability and criticism, all while presenting the company as an inclusive, progressive place just by hiring her, a Black woman, to be its public face.
Black agents of white supremacy whitewash their corporate and governmental overlords with their presence every day.
Remember when “Grandpa Joe”—the author of the Crime Bill which targeted and mass incarcerated hundreds of thousands of Black people while his own white criminal son walked free—was seen as not racist because he had a Black woman Vice President and played second fiddle to Obama for a few years? Remember when every criticism of Kamala upholding her genocidal boss’ policies—even when it was clear she would lose the election over it—was dismissed as racism and sexism against her? Remember when we couldn’t hold Obama accountable for expanding and exceeding Bush’s racist immigration policies; building 100 miles of border wall in Mexico; not closing Guantanamo Bay; droning more people (and American civilians!!) than any other president in history; signing the Blue Lives Matter law protecting police in the middle of the BLM uprisings; and deporting more people than any president until Biden’s term— because he was already facing racism from white people so we just had to sit on our hands? It’s not his fault he can’t do anything to help Black people specifically—they’ll kill him! Apologists hushed Black critics in the lead up to his 2012 re-election.
Well, damn. Wouldn’t it be better to get someone in power that can actually do something for us instead of being satisfied that the person with all the power who’s not doing anything for us is also Black??
If you can’t tell, these Milchick and Natalie defenses are triggering old wounds! I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to see that the same people that think Natalie is in some Get Out sunken place situation held against her will by Lumon also have “The 92%” somewhere in their social media profiles. Get Out is an interesting parallel, though not for the reasons they point out. In the same way, eager audiences who have been socialized to see white women as inherently innocent, ignored every single evil thing that Allison Williams’ character Rose did in Get Out to proclaim that Rose was actually hypnotized by her parents and wasn’t doing evil things knowingly. The leaps, the bounds, the lies we tell to make conventionally attractive evildoers innocent of their crimes.
Natalie is a pretty, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, Black woman who did enough to earn the complete trust of the Board she represents. While we don’t yet know her backstory and why she chose to work at Lumon, we do see that she comes and goes freely onto the severed floor and in the outside world, showing zero signs that she is severed herself; showing zero signs that she doesn’t revel the power she has in her role—even putting CEO-in-training Helena in her place in episode 5 of season 2. She happily spouts Lumon propaganda on camera and off, and is even in the process of hijacking the book that radicalized the innies in season one in order to turn the book and its author into yet another Lumon propaganda tool. Co-opting a revolution is what Milchick and Natalie do best. (It’s giving Obamacore!) If being the mouthpiece for the slave-holding company didn’t radicalize Natalie, giving a fellow Black employee a few racist blackface paintings isn’t going to do it either.
Same with Milchick. Yes, the Board praised him in his monthly review for receiving the racist paintings with “grace” and appropriate enthusiasm, and that had to be humiliating. And sure, getting reamed out in a performance review for using paper clips the wrong way and using “too many big words” when he speaks has to be frustrating. Especially when they’re deriding his ideas as “calamitous” in the same breath! Being criticized for being “too kind” to the innies has to be upsetting when his whole identity is I’m the good cop (not to mention, as a tall, muscly, dark-skinned Black man, he has to be the least threatening version of himself to succeed in this snow-white corporate world). But Lumon’s biggest insult to Milchick’s injury to date might just be filling his old job of deputy floor manager with an actual child! Ms. Huang looks about 12 at most? She’s maybe a robot, maybe a clone, maybe a severed child with an adult’s consciousness in the chip in her brain—who knows! But as far as we the audience and the innies she supervises can tell, she’s an actual small child. Where Cobel had him as a right-hand man, he has a mouthy pre-teen who just might be ratting on him to his supervisors. The disrespect! And after all Milchick has done for these people!
But people have taken these racist inconveniences Milchick has suffered as evidence that this clearly power-hungry Black man is one small step away from leading the revolution against Lumon.
First, don’t disrespect my revolutionaries Helly R., Irving B., Mark S., and Dylan G. like that! They’ve already started the revolt inside Lumon. Not to mention, Dr. Asal Reghabi, the rogue Lumon doctor who left the company and has now reintegrated two severed employees. If you want some Black revolutionaries to cheer for in this show, Reghabi and Dylan G are right there. Milchick and Natalie, if they ever tire of the power they wield gleefully over others long enough to try and take Lumon down, they would be joining a revolution already in place, at best.
But I don’t think they will. Milchick is horrible to Dylan, a fellow Black man whom he doesn’t even see as human. He manipulates Dylan to obey him by dangling time with Dylan’s outie’s wife in front of him and threatening to take that time away if Dylan gets out of line. Just as Natalie has no racial solidarity with Milchick, Milchick has no racial solidarity with Dylan. Milchick lies to the innies as easily as breathing. He tortures them. He whitemails them. He throws their smores into the fire to punish them for laughing. He taunts Mark S. for being a victim of r-pe (more on this later). And he’s really mean to and resentful of his child-assistant, who, though annoying, is a child (maybe!). All in the name of Lumon. Some of this stuff is corporate policy. A lot of this stuff he chose to do on his own. If enslaving the innies instead of treating them like people wasn’t enough to radicalize him against this company, a little racism won’t do it either. Perhaps he’ll get fired like Cobel, and perhaps lie in wait for the chance to take down the company like I think Cobel is doing. But it will be about revenge, not moral obligation, not justice—not revolution.
And that brings us to the worst theory I’ve read yet: that Helena Eagan is also trapped by her family, against her will. Yes, the Evil Corp. CEO-in-waiting, and noted r-pist of innie Mark (yes, it was r-pe! Mark did not consent to having sex with Helena! He thought he was having sex with Helly R.! that is r-pe!) is somehow the real victim in all of this. Sure, Helena was only a child when she planted the idea in her father’s head (pun intended) that everyone in the world should be severed. But she’s a full-grown adult now—thirty years old, according to Milchick in the pilot episode—and doing her part to make sure that global severance domination happens.
Oh, she’s so sheltered by her family’s religious cult and she’s never had a boyfriend and she’s jealous that her innie has found love with Mark S. and she just wants to experience it for herself! NONSENSE. This lady is a legit psychopath. Did you see the look she gave to Irving in his tent when he refused to ignore the signs that she was a mole?
Terrifying!
She’s not down there on the severed floor to experience the love she’s never had—she’s not capable of it! She’s down there to spy, undermine the innies’ revolution, break down their alliance, and gain leverage to keep them under her control. This is why she manipulates Mark into having sex with her, r-ping him by deception, knowing that he believes she is someone else. That’s who Helena is—a manipulator and a deceiver. (This other theory, that Mark S. starts being mean and cold to everyone in ep. 5 because he’s “reintegrated” with his mean, cold outie rather than because he’s upset, hurt, confused, scared and violated in the aftermath of learning that Helena sexually assaulted him is disturbing! Reintegration is obviously a slow process, Mark is not yet fully reintegrated and the usually light-hearted Mark is reacting understandably to the trauma of Helena’s serious physical and emotional violation of his body and heart!)
What leverage Helena gains by r-ping Mark is yet to be seen, but it might be a pregnancy. Nothing like holding a man hostage with a baby—that’s as retro as your bangs, Helena! I hate this theory, but it seems to be an obvious outcome, since there is a baby crawling around with Kier’s head on it in front of Mark in the season two opening credits. The Kier baby’s head is also covered in snow that it shakes off, mimicking the snowy terrain of Woe’s Hollow, where Helena infiltrated the innies and r-ped Mark. Horrific if true!
R-pe is never about love or attraction, it’s always about power, and Helena, as the heir to Lumon, has the ultimate power over all of them, but especially the innies. It’s unclear what excuses she’s making—if any—for r-ping Mark, someone who is clearly deemed “special” to the company, though we still aren’t sure why yet. But we do know that Milchick knows what Helena did to him and uses it to threaten Mark S. in the elevator in episode 5 this season. Two evil heffahs ganging up on poor Mark.
Sure, Helena’s daddy, the current Lumon CEO, Jame Eagan, is the original evil one. He invented the severance procedure that enslaves everyone; He calls Helena “fetid moppet” when she embarrasses him in public; He raised her in a cult with no love and no care and no nurturing (seriously, where is her mother??). And you know what, thems the breaks sometimes. She is, again, 30 years old. She does not deserve innocence to be projected onto her. She’s shown nothing but delight at being cruel to people—from Cobel on down to the innies! I do not feel sorry for her and hope there is no redemption arc in her future. Let Helly take over Helena’s body full time and do something good with it, like pop a Plan B for starters, end the Eagan line and then destroy that company once and for all.
In my last piece on Severance, I wrote of the show’s premise as a metaphor for what capitalism forces us to do—sever from our humanity in order to survive. Milchick, Natalie, and to a lesser degree, the more powerful Helena, have metaphorically severed parts of their humanity in order to keep working at Lumon. Sure, they’re victims to varying degrees, in the way we’re all victims of capitalism. But that does not remove their agency. And that does not make them innocent. (The strong defenses of these characters choices though makes me wonder what excuses people are making for their own behaviors at work. If you see yourself relating to Helena, Milchick and/or Natalie, maybe change course ASAP!!)
Props are obviously due for not only Tillman, Alexander, and Britt Lower who plays Helena/Helly, as their nuanced portrayals of truly awful characters have sparked a level of audience sympathy that, as you can see, has blown my mind. But jumping out the window to see some phantom goodness in villainous characters only helps to obscure and excuse villainous behavior.
It’s concerning that people don’t see Helena tricking Mark into sex as r-pe. It’s concerning how much sympathy the Black characters who are doing evil things in order to gain power are getting just because the face-eating leopards they work for started nibbling on their faces. What did they expect?? In the meantime, let’s just enjoy these excellent TV villains for who they are and, if that’s where the writers are going with their characters, let these calamitous malefactors earn a redemption arc with their actions instead of our projections.
But let me go before the Board gets on me for being long-winded and using too many big words.
Stay watchin’!
Brooke
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