Severance Season 2: Milchick’s Big Breakdown Explained

This article contains spoilers for “Severance” season 2 episode 9, “The After Hours.”

As “Severance” actor Tramell Tillman told /Film in his 2022 interview, his character, Mr. Milchick, isn’t the kind of guy who yells and screams at people. “On the outside, he seems like a duck on water — very still, calm — but on the inside, underneath the water, there’s so much going on,” Tillman said. “With that, it helps to create that suspense, that mystery, and just keeps everybody on their toes on the severed floor, which I believe is 100% manipulation. It’s all tactic.”

Despite his serene exterior, the trippy “Severance” season 2 has been hard on Milchick. After Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) was fired and the Macrodata Refinement Team’s innies managed to briefly take over their outie selves in season 1, he’s been scrambling to hold down the fort. His severed underlings challenge him and give him grief at every turn. His superiors give him borderline impossible tasks, including recovering the thoroughly disillusioned members of the original MDR team and keeping their morale up with an increasingly elaborate system of rewards and punishments. He’s instrumental to the success of Cold Harbor, the most important project in the history of Lumon (and possibly the world?), yet he gets zero respect, and the company rewards his Herculean efforts to keep the wheels from falling off with incredibly inappropriate pseudo-religious imagery and direct criticism of the very way he speaks.

In other words, it’s been increasingly clear that Mr. Milchick is not a happy camper. In “The After Hours,” the kettle finally boils over. True to form, the character barely raises his voice in the entire episode — but “The After Hours” nevertheless allows Milchick to have the meltdown that’s been a long time coming. 

Seth Milchick doesn’t flip tables or punch walls. When he cuts loose, he does so in his characteristically reserved way. Still, just about every action he takes in “The After Hours” is that of a man who’s finally had enough and has the time of his life letting the world know. 

Milchick has made clear before that he’s not a fan of Miss Huang (Sarah Bock), but now, he takes action. It’s heavily implied that he cuts her internship short because he wants to get rid of her, and seems to have specifically pulled strings to send her to a Lumon facility in faraway Svalbard, an extremely isolated Arctic archipelago. As a cherry on top, he can barely hide his mirth when he forces her to smash her sole prized possession, a handheld ring toss game, as a “sacrifice.” Isolated, this might seem like simple office politics, but Milchick ups the ante when Mr. Drummond (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) blames him for Mark’s (Adam Scott) absence from work. After some internal seething, Milchick deliberately returns to the overly floral language Lumon previously reprimanded him for using, telling Drummond to “devour feculence” before helpfully translating it as “eat s***.” He then goes on to shut the stunned Lumon higher-up down in a calm but extremely hostile fashion before walking away without a care in the world.

After metaphorically devouring feculence for so long, Milchick has finally found his breaking point, happily burning bridges as the completion of Cold Harbor draws near. Right now, there’s no way of knowing whether he’s about to break completely bad or if he’s slowly freeing himself of Lumon’s thrall like Cobel before him, but one thing is certain: Viewers can expect big things from Seth Milchick in the season finale.