Lumon trusts Seth Milchick. They’ve put him in charge of the severed floor and Macrodata Refinement at the company’s headquarters. He not only leads the department working on “Cold Harbor,” he knows his employer’s grand plans and why Mark Scout’s completion of his wife’s file “will be remembered as one of the greatest moments in the history of this planet.” Yet, despite the Board’s confidence in Milchick and the control it has granted him over Innies, he’s no different from severed employees. Severance‘s Seth Milchick is not a person to Lumon. He’s just another tool for the company to use and abuse. And he knows it.
Seth Milchick never gave viewers a reason to doubt his complete devotion to Lumon during Severance‘s first season. He faithfully executed his many, many duties for the company while wholeheartedly extolling the teachings of Kier Eagan. He was Lumon through and through, something the Board and CEO Jame Eagan certainly believed. During a genuine moment of crisis, the Macrodat Uprising, they entrusted him with taking over for Harmony Cobel. He’s also one of the few people who knows what the “mysterious and important” work of MDR is actually about.
Considering what and who he’s overseeing, Milchick might now have arguably the most important job in the entire global conglomerate. But that promotion also led to the first visible cracks in Seth Milchick’s faith in Lumon. To celebrate his new role, the Board sent him the same offensive, dehumanizing gift they sent Natalie, another trusted Black employee with a high-ranking sensitive position. Lumon gave both “re-canonicalized paintings” of its Kier Cycle. These re-imagined paintings depict a Black man who resembles Milchick himself as the company’s white founder.
Natalie, the Board’s literal mouthpiece, proxy, and public face said the paintings were meant to help Milchick see himself in Kier. But she clearly had the same misgivings about her own “gift.” A woman who previously who never gave us a reason to doubt her Lumon bonafides either, was visibly uncomfortable as Milchick opened them. Why wouldn’t she be? They’re a grotesque thing to give anyone. They erase a person’s humanity. They tell someone they only have worth when seen through another. “Re-canonicalizing” a Black person as a white messianic cult leader makes a terrible thing that much worse.
Milchick put those paintings in storage, but he couldn’t get them out of his mind. In season two’s fifth episode, “Trojan’s Horse,” he asked Natalie how she feels about them. Once again she let her face say everything she wouldn’t dare utter out loud: she hates them, too. The way Milchick asked her also revealed the two most prominent Black employees at Lumon have long dealt with this kind of degrading treatment. He said, “I’m thinking our experiences here have been similar in some ways. We face similar challenges. And perhaps the paintings and the somewhat complicated feelings they evoke….”
Lumon’s Board is both too arrogant and too stupid to realize why depicting a Black person as a white man (who is also their employer’s religious figure) is vile. So it’s not a surprise minorities have faced additional challenges while working there. But part of that is because Lumon doesn’t see any employees, severed and non-severed alike, as people. They are merely cogs in the Lumon machine.
You don’t scold a person for putting paperclips backwards. You don’t criticize someone for “using big words” when your Founder produced the most overwrought prose ever printed and someone needs a dictionary to understand you personally. Those are things you do as a form of control to keep someone in their place. That’s what those paintings were meant to do, too. They weren’t meant to let Seth or Natalie see themselves in Kier, to celebrate their promotions, or to show appreciate for their hard work. They were meant to remind Mr. Milchick and Ms. Kalen that they serve Kier, the Eagan family, and Lumon.
Lumon’s blatant disrespect for even its most trusted employees shows that, to the company, there is difference between Innies and the people in charge of them. Mr. Drummond might hide it better, but he views Seth Milchick the same way he views severed employees. They aren’t human beings worthy of respect and autonomy. Severed employees only exist for a “greater purpose.”
Because they do, Drummond has essentially severing Milchick himself, separating Seth from the kind of boss he’d like to be and the monster he thinks Cobel was. The new severed floor manager, in his own twisted way, was trying to treat Innies like people. He implemented “kindness reforms” and organized the ORTBO. Drummond pushed Milchick to instead “go back to the basics” and “treat them as what they really are.” As far as Lumon is concerned, what they really are is a bunch of biological tools who only exist for Lumon’s purpose.
He might not want to admit it, but Seth Milchick knows all of that. Just as he knows, especially after those paintings made it impossible to ignore the truth any longer, that Lumon doesn’t respect him as an individual, a Black man, or a human being. He’s not “Seth” or even “Mr. Milchick.” He’s just an employee with no more or less work than an office computer or coffee machine.
Until now, the Board was probably right to wholly trust Seth Milchick. For reasons we don’t yet know, he completely believed in Lumon’s plans and the teachings of Kier Eagan. But just as the Innies who work for him rose up against their employer when they realized the company didn’t see them as humans, Seth Milchick might one day realize he shouldn’t put his faith in people who don’t see him as a person.