Spoilers

The consequences of the ORTBO…

The gloves are off and no one gets to be much more than a cog in a machine this week. Lumon has had enough of coddling its employees – it has shareholders to satisfy, a board to please and a crucial project to complete.

It has remembered that the severed are slaves and reminds itself that slaves aren’t human and shouldn’t be treated like people.

For those employees fortunate enough not to be slaves… well they’re just run of the mill indentured to ideas, to a social stratification that leaves them isolated and to corporate policies that are designed to shift blame for mistakes onto them and preserve the sense that senior management only ever make the right decision.

Milchick is the lightning rod for all of this. He tries, so tentatively it’s like he’s a shy kid asking someone on a date, to explore if other people feel like he does but he fails. Why does he fail? Because the population within which he works is atomised – all sense of communal solidarity and social sympathy gone in favour of survival.

For Milchick is now playing for survival – his survival. You might think this would make him a natural ally of the severed but it doesn’t. He’s the first rung up of actual people, it follows that he cannot conceive of what help the slaves might provide him and so he continues to abuse them, continues to pass on the abuse from those who abuse him. It is the most fundamental power play – divide and conquer. Milchick is now divided against himself but that only drives him to internalise the blame for other people’s mistakes. Not least among these ‘mistakes’ is the impossible situation he’s in regarding how he’s managing the severed.

Told of repeated policy changes he’s then criticised by seniors and juniors for not anticipating these changes and making them work – as if slamming a car travelling at 70mph into reverse can be smooth.

But fascists only ever look at themselves in a favourable light because they have enemies to blame for their mistakes and Milchick is, this week, that enemy. Why? Because the severed are slaves and as such, I repeat, they aren’t human and so can’t be considered to blame for acting out. Indeed, they must be treated like animals – as incapable of reasoning, hoping and aspiring, capable only of being frightened into doing what they are required to do which is not only to walk to the slaughterhouse but to do so without raising a fuss.

None of MDR handle the events of the previous episode well but Mark in particular is a massive douche (again). Why? It’s clear he has lost his hope and as such is trying to hide from scrutiny, from everyone, by doing exactly what’s asked of him. Yet such flight can’t last forever because anger boils beneath the surface when we’re asked to deny ourselves and it’s seething within him. I hope he finds his way.

Verdict: Overall, this was a great follow up to the ORTBO, exploring the consequences of that calamity and reminding us all that, in the end, solidarity, protest, resistance isn’t free but without paying that price we will get eaten up by those who feel like they can.

9/10 monthly feedback sessions

Stewart Hotston