This article contains spoilers forSeveranceseason 2, episode 1.
Summary
After a three-year hiatus,Apple TV+finally released the season two premiere ofSeverancelast week, and there are already plenty of mysteries to ponder. Series creator Dan Erickson and director Ben Stiller wasted no time throwing audiences back into theweird world of Lumon Industries, offering a shaken status quo and a few new characters to go with it. But while new innies like Bob Balaban’s Mark W. or Alia Shawkat’s Gwendolyn Y. made for a fun surprise, the biggest shock came from Miss Huang (Sarah Bock), the new deputy manager brought in to replace the recently promoted Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman).
The reason Miss Huang’s presence came as such a surprise to both the characters and the audience stems from one simple fact: she’s a child. While Bock herself is 18, Miss Huang appears much younger, and the image of a child in an environment like the severed floor of Lumon Industries, especially in a position of authority, is highly destabilizing, not to mention incredibly weird. So far, her presence is yet another mystery added to the pile ofSeverance’smany odd details, but it may have something to do with one of season one’s biggest twists.
What Miss Huang Might Be Doing On the Severed Floor
At the end of season one, viewers got one whopper of a twist. Mark’s (Adam Scott) dead wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman) was not only still alive, but also worked on the severed floor under the nameMs. Casey, the wellness director. Mark had unwittingly interacted with his outie’s supposedly dead wife on more than one occasion, as had the other innies. While the audience had an episode or two to process this information, Innie Mark discovered it for himself while on the outside using Lumon’s “Overtime Contingency"in the season finale.
Severancestill hasn’t explained how this was made possible, which leaves the door open toplenty of speculation. Does the severance process have the ability to bring people back from the dead, or keep some part of their consciousness alive? Was Gemma really dead from the beginning, or was Mark just told she was so that Lumon could use her for its own purposes? And if so, why? Season one gave viewers a brief glimpse at the elevator to the “testing floor” after Ms. Casey is involuntarily retired, sending her down a dark hallway to an ominous elevator. If Lumon can somehow keep people alive using severance, then who knows what they’re capable of.
It’s possible that Miss Huang’s presence might be the result of whatever’s happening on the Lumon testing floor, the product of some of the company’s inscrutable experiments. While the cast and creators haveshut down the idea that there’s any cloninggoing on, it’s worth wondering if maybe Miss Huang is a new type of severed worker, one who was raised on the inside. Viewers already know Lumon is raising adifferent kind of kid(the goat kind, that is), so would a human kid be any different? She obviously takes her role very seriously, making it clear that she’s Mark’s supervisor, not his friend, so she’s clearly all-in on the company culture.
It hasn’t been made clear one way or the other if she’s severed, but it’s unlikely that a child would be hired to hold such a sensitive position without something else going on behind the scenes. It also doesn’t appear that she has any real responsibilities; glimpses of her workday show her passing the time playing on the computer or with one of those water ring-toss games (Keir Eagan themed, of course). All this points to her being some kind of elaborate smokescreen for whatever Lumon is up to.
Miss Huang: the Face of a Less Evil Lumon
Following the so-called “Macrodat Uprising” of season one, Lumon seems keen to present a kinder, gentler image of severance going forward, after Mark and his fellow Macrodata Refinement innies exposed the realities of the process to the world. Bringing Miss Huang into the mix might be an attempt to make the severed floor seem more inviting, or at least not as hellish as people have been led to believe. After all, if a kid is allowed to work there, it can’t be all bad, right? Of course, nobody on the outside has any idea what is happening on the severed floor, so any changes are mostly for the innies' benefit. Miss Huang might have been brought in just to keep Mark and his colleagues off balance, or she might be another glimpse of the depth of Lumon’s inner workings.
At the end of the day, this is all just speculation. Time will tell if what’s going on with Miss Huang will be revealed, or if she’ll end up as another in a long line of weird stuff happening at Lumon. Her presence was surely meant to raise more questions and further disorient both the characters and the viewers. Whether those questions ever get answered or not, the addition of Miss Huang toSeverancemanages to make Lumon even more inscrutable and unsettling than before.
