Severance explores memory, identity, the cost of labor, and how systems control or segregate people (here via the “severed” vs “outie” selves). Milchick embodies institutional power, the tension between conformity and self, and the emotional labor of existing inside that tension. Tillman’s performance invites us to see how Blackness folds and transforms under the lens of corporate work environments —not as an afterthought, but as part of the fabric of behavior, opportunity, visibility, and invisibility. Milchick isn’t a stereotypical villain: he’s a “company man,” a middle manager in Lumon Industries whose complicity, ambition, anxieties, and awareness of his tenuous power make him one of the most complicated antagonists on TV. Tillman has said that he built Milchick’s character drawing on people he worked with in corporate America, trying to reflect what it is for Black folks who are often “one of the few,” navigating power, loyalty, and identity. Firsts still matter because they ...