Lumon’s Prejudiced Performance Review for Milchick & Burt’s Dinner Invite for Irving (Exclusive)

[Warning: The below and video above contain MAJOR spoilers for Severance Season 2 Episode 5, “Trojan’s Horse.”]

Severance‘s in-office schedule resumed in the latest installment of Apple TV+‘s hit series as the innies of MDR mourned the loss of Irving  (John Turturro), with a corporate funeral.

While Mark (Adam Scott) is grappling with the reality of Helena’s (Britt Lower) deception as Helly makes her long-awaited return, Dylan (Zach Cherry) mourns the loss of his friend who was terminated from working with them after last week’s ORTBO. But it wasn’t the end for Irving as the episode reveals his outie resuming his odd behavior of taking mysterious phone booth calls in the middle of the night.

This time, he confronted his “stalker” Burt (Christopher Walken) who was sitting nearby observing from his car. Introducing himself to Irving, Burt invites him to dinner and it seems as though the attraction their innies shared at Lumon remains underlying within their brief interaction here.

Apple TV+

“What I was thinking when I was shooting these scenes… It’s like audiences with actors. They see them so many times they think they know them, and then they meet them in private… and it’s the same guy, but it’s different. You know?” Walken says of the interaction for our latest installment of iLUMONations: A Severance Aftershow. “I thought that might be sort of like Burt and Irving. You think you know the guy, but… it’s a little bit different.”

Only time will tell how their dinner will go, but we do know Burt’s husband will be present for the gathering and that they enjoy expensive wine. Meanwhile, inside Lumon, Mr. Milchick had to throw innie Irving’s funeral for the MDR team, while also attending his first performance review as the manager of the severed floor.

Before he entered the meeting though, he ran into Natalie (Sydney Cole Alexander) and asked her how she felt about the race-swapped paintings likening them to Kier Eagan. While he didn’t receive much of a response, he discovered that the prejudice and microaggressions did not end with the race-swapped paintings as there was more than one complaint filed against him in the performance review, one of which was his use of big words.

But why does Mr. Milchick put up with Lumon’s prejudices? According to Tillman, “He is a company man through and through. And just because you have a bad couple of days at work, you’re not going to walk away. And what he does in the subsequent episodes is he takes those paintings and he pushes them away in the closet.”

“I’m reminded of the many times that we ourselves, in our own society, our human nature, where we’re around people who are problematic, where we work for companies that are problematic, where we’re in relationships with people and they do something or say something that we ordinarily would walk away from or think we should. But we excuse it,” he adds.

We saw Milchick “tightening the leash” with MDR upon his return to the severed floor as he shared a chilling moment with Mark before sending him out for the night, asking the employee if he’d mentioned to Helly that he’d had sex with her outie on the ORTBO. Needless to say, the innies might need to watch out for the man in charge who is going through challenges of his own.

See the full video interview, above, and stay tuned for more on Severance as Season 2 continues on Apple TV+.

Severance, Season 2, New Episodes, Fridays, Apple TV+