I’ve been thinking about Irving a lot during this episode, funnily enough, and not even just in an “I miss my guy” way. I think the fact that him and Harmony are the two oldest members of the “main” cast definitely links them in some way in my mind, even with the 10 year age difference.

I think the historical periods and socioeconomic circumstances that Irving and Harmony grew up in have a quality of structural desperation that contrasts with the personal desperation of the younger members of the cast, although assuming the reality of certain parts of US history remain in the Severance timeline, I would say that Milchick being born during the time period where the first generation of Black americans was entering the mainstream corporate and political sphere would be significant on the point I want to make.

Irving would have been born right at the start of the Vietnam War, with a father in the navy right out of WWII, with Eisenhower interventionism off the charts, and the disaffect towards US internal and foreign policy would only increase in his youth, and it would go on for long enough for him to go to war himself, come back fully disenchanted to the golden years of the Civil Rights Movement and the AIDS crisis, a constant state of precarity between loss, disillusionment, anger and the hope that your fight is going somewhere with constant setbacks.

Despite the 10 years between them, Harmony Cobel grew up in a working class town, already revolving around Lumon, with her mother probably being an employee at the ether mill at that point (which, sidenote: “was she hacking up a lung” in the context of Kier’s courtship of Imogen? Was Jame Eagan pursuing Charlotte Cobel, or Harmony herself? Thinking about the conversation between Harmony and Helena in the parking lot about how she has underestimated her blessings… ). Her mother got sick from the constant chemical exposure and her aunt swooped in to both take care of Harmony (by sending her off to an Eagan boarding school, which did spare her from more child labor at the mill, but also primed her for a career at Lumon) and care for Charlotte, who hated Lumon. The faith was comfort and escape in a life of economic precarity and illness, even if the cause for those things and the venerated figure were the same thing. Loss, disillusionment, anger, leaps of faith once more in the middle of the Nixon administration, with energy shortages, inflation and the slow death of industrial production giving way to the service-based economy that uneducated blue collar workers could not access, much less working class women, but maybe brilliant Harmony with her chip designs could.

Sissy’s house is isolated from the rest of the factory town, a reasonably long drive away. It reminded me of how in Irving’s map the Lenora complex was isolated in an icy nothingness away from the rest of the city center and other Lumon housing complexes, including Burt’s. It makes me think of how, in the severed floor, the distance between departments might be physically not that big, but the dizzying labyrinthic hallways make the isolation even more anxiety-inducing, more inescapable. And also how Irving was familiar with the way to Perpetuity without a map at the ready, knew how to locate the conference room, got back from Wellness with relative efficiency learned the way to O&D through Burt’s map in a cinch because he wanted to get rid of the crushing isolation. Sissy and Irving are old, they live alone, they are principled and disciplined, and their access to care and support is incredibly conditional, the highest honor is isolation.

The scene at the shed at Sissy’s also reminded me a lot of Irving going through his outie’s storage room during the OTC (and Drummond doing the same while outie Irving’s at dinner with Burt and Fields.) Harmony flipping through the annuary with her classmates and Jame Eagan, like the picture of Irving’s dad next to the list of Lumon employees. Who was with Lumon while I was there, in the Severed floor/at Myrtle Eagan school for girls? Harmony has been described as a soldier by Reghabi, as someone who grew up surrounded by the company’s values, that will be loyal to those values no matter how much she pretends she isn’t. But she picks up Devon’s call, she encourages Mark to quit, she wants to learn what went wrong with Petey, she tears down her altar and spits in Sissy’s face that she doesn’t owe Lumon anything, that they took her ideas and twisted them, got the credit, got the money, and hurt people with them. I think about how Irving was definitely in the military, and it was probably because he grew up in a military household where his father set the tone, and it definitely shows in his innie, in the way his outie carries reminders (the medals, the sriracha sauce, ace of spades), but also how how every time we’ve seen him it’s not a soldier we see - he’s reading, he’s painting, he’s collecting information about people who’ve spoken out about Lumon’s cruelty, he’s calling people to update them on his innie’s status, he’s attending dinner at a stranger’s house and remaining relentlessly kind when confronted with a soul-charring amount of internalized homophobia from the people that invited him in the first place.

They were raised to be soldiers in decades where that was sold as the only way to survive the state of the world, and it took them time and it was certainly not without consequence for them and for others, but I believe they’re trying to be something else.