Helena Eagan, like the rest of her corrupt, evil family, is a monster. But Severance season two’s biggest twist showed she’s still human. Unlike the severed employees her company exploits, she wasn’t able to truly split herself into two. She knows everything about her Innie, Helly R. That means Helena also knows exactly who she would have been without Lumon’s corrupting influence. And that has created more than just jealousy in the future CEO. It has created an identity crisis that has made the show’s most meaningful idea about what makes us a person even better.
Mark and Dylan both agreed to undergo severance because they’re running from something. Mark is running from his grief, Dylan from his failures. Irv, with his locked chest and secrets, also seems to have similar reasons for undergoing the procedure. But Helena Eagan did it for propaganda and self-gain. She was hoping to promote severance so the company she’ll one day run could overcome legal hurdles impeding its grand sinister plans. Yet, despite having an entirely different reason than her “colleagues,” Helena Eagan is suffering, too. And for the same reason.
The other Outies are failing (not even trying, really) to work on themselves in the real world. Same as Helena. However, she’s the only one forced to reckon with that. She’s been watching Helly closely. Helena couldn’t have imitated her Innie as well as she did if she didn’t know everything about Helly even before the Macrodat Uprising. (Helena’s mole operation began shortly after, which wasn’t enough time for her to cram all the necessary research into learning about Helly intimately.) Following Helly’s life forced Helena to find out what she would be like in another existence free of family. Even worse, “Woe’s Hollow” revealed that Helena’s Innie is also undeniable proof of something Helena has clearly always feared: she’s a bad person living a miserable life.
We learned Helly R.’s Outie was an awful person in season one when she refused to let her quit the severed floor. “I’m a person. You are not,” Helena Eagan said when her Innie begged for freedom from her nightmare existence. But in season two’s second episode, when Helena watched the security footage of Helly kissing Mark, we saw Helena realize she had it all backwards. Helly R. is a person. She is both loving and loved. Helly is caring and cared for. She matters to people and people matter to her. She might be trapped on Lumon’s severed floor, but she’s free to be herself. And who Helly is is a good person.
Helena, though, is not even a person. She is nothing more than a tool used without concern by a global conglomerate. She is so bound in service to Lumon she let the company split her mind in two. Helena allowed Lumon to make her literally disappear for eight hours a day, all without the grace of ignorance about her other life. And when her Innie escaped, her own father blamed her for something she didn’t do.
This experience has made Helena Eagan realize just how trapped she is in a terrible life of servitude. It’s a life she hates so much she stole her own Innie’s life and Mark’s affection.
Helly R. never returned to Lumon after the Macrodat Uprising, but Mark didn’t know that when he slept with her. And while in the moment, when she told him, “I didn’t like who I was on the outside. I was ashamed,” it seemed like Helly R. was sad about her Outie’s true identity, by episode’s end we knew Helena was talking about herself during a quiet moment of self-reflection and vulnerability. Helena Eagan—who moments earlier mocked Kier’s teachings revealing she knows everything Lumon is built upon is absurd bullshit—hates herself.
Why wouldn’t she? She can no longer deny who she is. Helena is a cold, calculating monster who isn’t even a person. She’s just an employee, molded by her family, whom Lumon abuses without care. She’s just like the severed employees whose love she craves. Neither Lumon nor her own father cares about Helena. But she knows, firsthand now, people care about Helly R., someone not beholden to the Eagan family nor Lumon’s plans.
Helena also knows that if she were free of her Eagan identity she would have found happiness. She’d have found love and real human connection. Now she must live with that painful knowledge, which ties back into the very core of what Severance is really about.
From the moment Mark Scout went from crying in his car to smiling at work, Severance has been a story about identity and what it means to be a person. And since that opening sequence, the series has shown why we can’t ever split ourselves in two. We are who we are and there’s no running from that, even for people who literally sever themselves in two. But now Helena Eagan’s own unique experience with severance has made that idea even richer. She is who she is, a smart and capable woman who knows right from wrong, truth from lies. The question, now that she has had to not only face the hard truth she tried to deny about who she is but also who she could have been, is what she will choose to do with that knowledge.
Helly showed Helena who she could be. Then Helena got to live that life. She got to be her best self for a few hours everyday. Now she can either continue being a monster who serves Lumon and hates both her life and herself, or she can choose to be the Helly she has always been capable of being. Because while Severance has shown deep down we are always ourselves, we’re still complicated, complex creatures. And every day we get to wake up and decide which version of ourselves we want to be.
Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist, a company that does not believe in severing employees. He thinks…. You can follow him on Bluesky at @burgermike. And also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.