The Severance Season 2 Finale Raises So Many Questions About The Show's Strangest Character

This article contains spoilers for "Severance" season 2 in general, and Mr. Milchick in particular. 

Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman) is the kind of guy the protagonists of Mike Judge's 1999 black comedy "Office Space" would have nightmares about. He's a born middle manager with an exaggeratedly friendly and calm demeanor that nevertheless veers toward stern sharpness whenever someone starts pushing the boundaries of the Lumon policies he enforces. Sharply dressed, well-built, and nigh-unfailingly polite, Mr. Milchick seems like a James Bond villain's elite henchman who adheres to a white collar gimmick until it's time to put 007 in a headlock — only, he never, ever drops the facade. After two seasons of "Severance," Milchick has only offered brief glimpses of a true human being underneath his businesslike exterior — and even then, it tends to take extensive humiliation or physical pain for him to do so. 

Milchick is simultaneously effective, buffoonish, fearsome, cartoonish, captivating, chilling, and profoundly, profoundly strange. This makes him an excellent and memorable character who's arguably the very best thing "Severance" has to offer. However, he also makes very little sense once you start looking closer ... or does he? Since "Severance" is a show that pays a whole lot of attention to detail, it's highly likely that everything we've seen of Milchick actually does make perfect sense — we just don't have all the available information yet. 

In the wake of the "Severance" season 2 finale, "Cold Harbor," it's the perfect time to take a closer look at what the sophomore season has taught us of the erstwhile severed floor manager. Let us explore Seth Milchick, and why the character seems to contain multitudes. 

A "Severance" viewer might not realize how much time Mr. Milchick spends quietly standing around until "Cold Harbor" shows him suddenly break into a run after he welcomes Dylan (Zach Cherry) back into the severed floor. This unexpected show of haste makes perfect sense considering the number of miracles Milchick has to regularly pull off. After all, he's now the severed floor manager, but seems to also retain his old duties since Miss Huang (Sarah Bock) is technically just a glorified intern. 

Early in season 2, Milchick first manages to scramble together a replacement Macrodata Refinement Team around Mark S. (Adam Scott). After the innie rejects his new coworkers, the manager personally tracks down the original team and convinces them to return. He then unfolds a vast set of new perks and improved working conditions, which seem custom designed for the returning team members — and therefore likely had to be made up on the fly. 

What's worse, it's clear that the entire professional life of Seth Milchick is like this. At any given time, he juggles multiple serious managerial and employee liaison responsibilities with an array of entertainment and team-building duties, which it's implied he's designed from the ground up. For instance, season 2 episode "Trojan's Horse" reveals that Milchick sets up the refreshments for Irving B's (John Turturro) "funeral" himself, presumably to the point of learning to carve a giant melon in the fired MDR worker's likeness. Considering his usual minimalistic movements and unrushed presence, Milchick must spend every second of his offscreen hours scurrying around in a state of semi-panic. 

Along with his caleidoscope of responsibilities, Mr. Milchick's power and status seem to wax and wane depending on the scene. He's able to deftly shut down someone like Mr. Drummond (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) in season 2 episode 9, "The After Hours." Yet, in the very next episode he's back juggling master of ceremony duties, awkward comedy skits, and complex choreographies he performs with the dozens-strong Choreography & Merriment department — which, incidentally, he has been secretly managing all along.

Milchick seems to genuinely enjoy some of the happier team-building activities before they go awry, such as the infamous dance party in the season 1 episode "Defiant Jazz." However, the season 2 finale shows that he's not particularly happy with his demeaning song-and-dance duties on Lumon's super-important Cold Harbor day, when all other higher-ups are staring at monitors, performing ominous animal sacrifices, and doing other serious stuff. Along with the consistently demeaning and occasionally outright racist treatment Lumon subjects him to, such moments heavily imply that the company views Milchick as little more than a cog in the machine.

And yet, despite all this, Lumon clearly puts an enormous amount of trust in Milchick. The company routinely counts on him to manage its most important assets and to pull off bona fide managerial miracles. This creates a strange situation where Milchick can easily come off as a comic relief corporate stooge in one scene — and in the very next, he flips the switch and becomes an eerily powerful Lumon higher-up who's so deeply in the know that he can casually drop inside intel like the deified and long-dead Kier Eagan's real-life height, or send an Eagan-sponsored underling packing to Svalbard. 

Mr. Milchick often expresses discomfort with Lumon's ways. Many of his more embarrassing severed floor manager tasks are also the kind that you'd never in a million years imagine his vitriolic predecessor, Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette), doing. His interaction with other Lumon people is uncomfortable at best, and despite his serious facade, the many stunts he pulls on the severed workers often put him in a peculiar Arlecchino role that doesn't really have a comparison point on the show. So, what in Kier's name is his deal?

Yes, Milchick may simply have taken a similar "Lumon school to Lumon middle management" path as Cobel and Miss Huang, and be an efficient true believer who happens to disagree with some of his beloved company's policies. However, the occasional glimpses of actual personality — for instance, his extremely relatable reaction to reading the self-help nonsense of Ricken Hale (Michael Chernus) – don't really scream "indoctrinated pawn" to me. On the contrary, Milchick often seems like a perfectly swell guy who just happens to work as a punch-clock villain. 

This brings us to another possibility. Lumon has been known to use shadowy actors and other performers to interact with the severed workers, preferring to keep the deeply creepy company executives a little further behind the veil. Since Milchick is the primary company liaison to the severed workers, wouldn't it make sense for him to be an actor as well? Among other things, this would explain his surprising dance skills, penchant for floral language, and the way he's liable to drop his role and lose his cool when he faces unexpected pushback. Being suddenly forced to play both the floor manager role and his existing one would also be plenty reason for his frustration shine through.

Funnily enough, some of the more far-fetched "Severance" theories would explain Mr. Milchick to a concerning degree. While the man himself insists that he's unsevered and is able to wander the town of Kier with his personality intact, the major "Severance" season 2 revelation is that Gemma (Dichen Lachman) has multiple innies. This implies that Lumon can do all sorts of as yet unrevealed things with the severance process, and it's natural to start suspecting that just about every character on the show has had at least some secret brain work done. 

In Milchick's case, having one or more secret innies with specific skill sets would explain his abundance of expertises, as well as the subtle shifts in his attitude. If nothing else, it would be a very Lumon move to steal a couple of hours from Milchick every now and then to force an extremely confused Seth M. to learn baton twirling and attend melon-carving classes. 

While I'm at it, there's also the theory I posited about Lumon's cloning program endgame after season 2, episode 7, "Chikhai Bardo." Far be it from me to outright claim that Seth Milchick is a clone, but if the implications that Lumon is dabbling with cloning tech turn out to be true, well ... the most complicated person in the show with apparently supernatural time management skills isn't the least likely guy to have several identical copies running around. 

All in all, it's pretty plain to see that something is up with Mr. Milchick, and it's easy to expect that the show has several aces up its sleeve when it comes to him. Here's hoping we see at least some of them in "Severance" season 3.