Social Media Is Loving This Specific Milchick Line From Severance Season 2 Episode 9

Use smaller, monosyllabic words rather than needlessly complex words for simple ideas — and also, stop reading now if you haven't watched "Severance" Season 2 Episode 9, "The After Hours."

In "The After Hours," Seth Milchick, the manager of the severed floor played by Trammell Tillman, finally cracks. While outside of Lumon Industries' severed floor, Mr. Milchick meets with his ostensible superior, Mr. Drummond (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson), and Mr. Drummond is, to put it lightly, not happy that the company's best refiner Mark (Adam Scott) is missing in action. Mark's big assignment, known only as Cold Harbor, is due today, and when Mr. Drummond tells Mr. Milchick that he's in big trouble for not corralling Mark as needed, Mr. Milchick falls back on an old habit that's already presented a problem with Mr. Drummond before: he "uses big words."

Mr. Milchick thanks Mr. Drummond for his "remonstration," and Mr. Drummond attempts to humiliate the severed floor manager by making him apologize in a more casual way with a simple "I'm sorry" — chiding him once again for using his considerable vocabulary. Mr. Milchick drops all pretense, a gleam in his eyes, and tells Mr. Drummond to "devour feculence" — which, as he summarily explains, means "eat s***."

"I am manager of the severed floor, which means two things," Mr. Milchick continues. "First, I am owed a measure of respect, even by my superiors. Second, and more obvious, said floor comprises the whole of my jurisdiction. To put that monosyllabically, it's not my fault what Mark Scout does when he is not at work, it's yours." (The way Tillman says "monosyllabically" here, making a meal out of every syllable, is a work of art. Give him an Emmy now.)

Unsurprisingly, "devour feculence" is making waves on the Internet, especially on social media ... and what I mean by that is that fans are loving it. On X (formerly known as Twitter), user @pilarsantiago simply posted a GIF of Mr. Milchick dancing in season 1's music dance experience with the caption "devour feculence" and a crying face emoji. But wait! There's more!

A lot of people on X, in particular, made an immediate decision about the phrase "devour feculence" — namely, that they realized they need to start using it in everyday life. User @The_McCabe also posted a GIF of Mr. Milchick dancing with the caption, "'Devour Feculence' is going into my lexicon i'm afraid."@lexxdadon agreed, writing "'devour feculence' is going into the lexicon IMMEDIATELY" with a gif of B.J. Novak's Ryan Howard writing in a notebook on "The Office." @el_diamante3 expressed a similar sentiment, writing, "'Devour feculence' is the greatest phrase of all time."

Over on the Severance subreddit, the thread where fans flocked to discuss the episode after it aired was filled with odes to Mr. Milchick's turn of phrase. u/Low_Effective_436 simply wrote "Devour feculence" on the thread, and u/AnxietyIsABtch replied, "I was cheering on Milchick so hard during that scene!" (u/nitid_name took it one step further, saying, "I was screaming 'throw him over the edge!'"

"All of a sudden my brain dusted off its college education and understood exactly what he meant," u/vstacey6 wrote of the revelation they experienced during the episode. "I couldn't even control my mouth! The words 'eat sh** mother f**ker" came right out." In the same thread, u/niboras pointed out that the complaint about Mr. Milchick's advanced vocab from his performance review obviously came directly from Mr. Drummold: "At least we now know who complained about the big words." u/LankyCancel1156 was stunned by the entire exchange, writing, "100% most surprising line of the series. Brilliant delivery." (I'm inclined to agree, honestly.)  u/SophieBiscuits might have had the best (and most productive) response, though: "I'm making the T-Shirts as we speak." 

It's clear, right from the beginning of "The After Hours," that something is really off with Mr. Milchick. Frankly, this makes sense on a few levels. He got reamed out by Mr. Drummond in his performance review in the season's fifth episode "Trojan's Horse." His ORTBO ended in disaster. Mark apparently hasn't been to work since he experienced a nosebleed followed by a serious medical event due to his reintegration, leaving the aforementioned Cold Harbor project stalled at 96% — and as we've been repeatedly told throughout the series, Cold Harbor is a very, very important project for Lumon Industries as a whole. 

Mr. Milchick's surprising "outburst" directed at Dr. Drummond is only one of the wild things that he does in "The After Hours," though. At the beginning of the episode, he shocks Sarah Bock's weirdly young deputy manager Miss Eustace Huang by telling her that her Wintertide Fellowship is coming to an abrupt end — even though she says she thought she'd be able to close out the quarter — and that she's heading to train at a Lumon facility. (Specifically, he tells her, "Your bed will be moved from your parents' home to the Gunnel Eagan Empathy Center in Svalbard, where you will work to steward global reforms," and there are like, five horrifying things about that sentence alone.) Before Miss Huang can wrap up her work, Mr. Milchick demands a sacrifice of her ring toss game, which he says is traditional for Wintertide "graduations," watching with satisfaction as Miss Huang smashes her beloved handheld game.

Then there's his phone call with Mark, which directly follows Mr. Milchick's confrontation with Mr. Drummond. Mark calls Mr. Milchick and feigns sickness at first before giving up and saying he just needed a day off. "Isn't that what Lumon's about? Balance?" Mark asks a silent Mr. Milchick, who seems to be crying in his office. "I mean, work is just work, right? Do you know what I mean, Mr. Milchick?"

Mr. Milchick, as usual, plays things close to the vest in this episode, but this is the first time we've seen real cracks appear in his façade. We'll just have to wait and see what happens to him in the season 2 finale, which drops on Apple TV+ on Thursday, March 20 at 9 P.M. — and is titled "Cold Harbor."