Severance Season 2’s Funniest Scene Is Also a Commentary on Employment Discrimination

"You want to circumcise your brain, that's your business. But it doesn't mean I have to hire you."

Dylan G (Zach Cherry) and Miss Huang (Sarah Bock) in the office in Severance season 2.
Photo: Apple TV+

This article contains spoilers for Severance season 2 episode 2.

Despite its decidedly haunted vibe, Apple TV+ sci-fi workplace thriller Severance can be a surprisingly funny show.

Blessed with plenty of comedic talent in front of the camera (Adam Scott, Zach Cherry, John Turturro, etc.) and behind it (Ben Stiller), Severance has no issue finding some humor amid its disturbingly purgatorial premise. Among Mr. Milchick’s doomed “Music Dance Experience,” Ricken Hale’s self-help book filled with useless clichés (“A society with festering workers cannot flourish, just as a man with rotting toes cannot skip”), and an office “waffle party” that doubles as an Eyed Wide Shut-style masked orgy, the first 11 episodes of Severance feature plenty of laugh-out-loud moments.

For our money, however, the funniest scene of the show thus far arrives in Severance season 2 episode 2 “Goodbye, Mrs. Selvig.” Arriving roughly halfway through the hour, the moment finds outtie Dylan George (Cherry) looking for gainful employment after losing his job on the severed floor at Lumon Industries. In a Coen Bros.-esque twist, Dylan’s job search takes him to a door manufacture named “GREAT DOORS” for an interview with a man who is very passionate about doors.

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“How old were you when you knew you loved doors?” Mr. Saliba (Adrian Martinez) asks Dylan.
“Five,” Dylan responds confidently.
“If you could be any kind of door, what would you be?”
“Pocket.”
“Interesting. Tell me more.”
“Well you’re doing your door thing and then when you’re not needed you can just…”
“Just tuck yourself away,” Saliba says with a smile. Then, reaching back for the hardest question in his door arsenal, he poses to Dylan: “Flat finish or eggshell?”
“Semi-gloss,” Dylan says, triumphant.
“That’s hot,” Mr. Saliba says, leaning back, almost in bliss upon witnessing such a natural doorsman.

The interaction between Dylan and Mr. Saliba serves as a little comedic release valve amid all the tension of this excellent second episode. After all, in the scene immediately preceding Dylan’s interview, a dour and conflicted Mark Scout (Adam Scott) looks out his window upon a snowy landscape, debating whether he should return to work at Lumon. In the scene immediately after it, Mark lashes out at his sister Devon (Jen Tullock) for not fully comprehending his pain following his wife’s death.

The interaction also serves as a little in-joke for the creation of Severance itself. Series creator Dan Erickson just happened to be working at a door factory when he conceived of the idea for the show and eventually sold it to Stiller’s Red Hour Productions. In the season 2 episode 2 episode of The Severance Podcast with Ben Stiller & Adam Scott, Erickson tells Stiller and Scott that the Dylan and Saliba interview was “verbatim the exact interview that I actually had at the door factory, word-for-word.”

“Really?” Scott asks Erickson.
“No,” he says.

Of course, like many great comedic moments on Severance, Dylan’s interview at GREAT DOORS eventually gives way to something more sinister. After Mr. Saliba asks Dylan about his previous work experience at Lumon (“They make their doors in house. It’s fucking hubris”), Dylan reveals that he was a severed employee and the vibe immediately shifts, slamming the door (*bows*) on any chance of Dylan getting hired right then and there.

On one hand, Mr. Saliba’s distrust of severed employees does make some sense. Though Dylan’s resume claims he has several years of work experience at Lumon Industries, he functionally does not. It was Dylan’s innie who worked at Lumon, not him. Dylan has no access whatsoever to the experience, knowledge, and skills gained from his time at Macrodata Refinement – so complete is the severance procedure in bifurcating a brain’s consciousness in two. On the other hand, however, it’s clear that Mr. Saliba’s souring on Dylan comes from a place of prejudice. He’s not turning Dylan down due to a a lack of compatibility, he’s doing it because severed people are icky.

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“We need a certain kind of person here, Mr. George, not a certain kind of two people,” Saliba says. “You want to circumcise your brain, that’s your business. But it doesn’t mean I have to hire you. And personally I think it’s abhorrent.”

This, quite plainly, is discrimination. And Dylan identifies it as such. Still, that doesn’t get Dylan any closer to securing the job or the much-needed health benefits it will provide. It’s unclear what kind of legal protections exist for severed employees in the Severance universe. What is clear though is that they really need it. Our glimpses into Lumon’s perception among the outside world are brief but they consistently reveal a populace that is skeptical of the mysterious company and its cadre of innie workers.

It’s in this way that Severance season 2 appears to have stumbled onto some timely socio-political commentary for the second week in a row. Just as last week’s “Lumon is Listening” message accidentally satirized the current corporate landscape, Dylan’s experience in “Goodbye, Mrs. Selvig” is reminiscent of the current rollbacks of employment discrimination programs at the federal and corporate levels. Workplace discrimination is always a topic worth examining, but surely the folks behind Severance didn’t anticipate that Dylan’s struggle to overcome his severed identity would feel this relevant upon season 2’s release.

The first two episodes of Severance season 2 are available to stream on Apple TV+ now. New episodes premiere Fridays, culminating with the finale on March 21.