Streaming Wars is a weekly opinion column by IGN’s Streaming Editor, Amelia Emberwing. Check out the last entry Daredevil: Born Again — An Unexpected Connection to the Netflix Series Could Right a Decade-Old Wrong.
This column contains spoilers for Severance Season 2.
Earlier this week, I wrote about Severance Season 2’s penultimate episode being a lot darker than it seemed. Dylan G’s decision to effectively die by suicide is a pretty jarring moment, even if it’s difficult to wrap our heads around due to him (presumably) continuing on in the series as his outie. There’s a lot more to the episode, with our boys Burt and Irving having what feels like but probably isn’t a last farewell and Mark dealing with everything going on with his brain at the moment. But there’s something outside of all of that that I actively cannot stop thinking about.
WTF is going on with Helena and Helly R.?
We start the episode with a brief swim before Helena (Britt Lower) heads to her father’s estate for breakfast. As is always the case with the Eagens, literally every second of their encounter is weird. Helena eats a hard-boiled egg, to which her father says “I wish you would take them raw” in the creepiest way humanly possible. This is followed later on in the episode by an equally unnerving encounter, this time on Lumon’s severed floor. As Helly R. tries to memorize the directions left by Irving to get to the dark hallway, she is interrupted by Jame (Michael Siberry). He tells his daughter’s innie that she “tricked” him, and calls her “My Helly.” True to character, Helly responds with a simple “WTF?” But, dear reader, “WTF” is somehow not enough for whatever the hell is going on here.
There is something wrong going on with both versions of Helly in this episode, I can’t put my finger on it, and it is driving me mad. The likelihood of all of this being easily explained is not small, but for some reason I need that answer. The goats don’t even drive me into this kind of hyperfixation spiral.
As mentioned, meetings with any Eagan are always on the unnerving side. But there is something different about Helena at the beginning of this episode. At first, I thought the episode title “The After Hours” was a hint toward the overtime contingency rather than just the cabin Cobel (Patricia Arquette) was taking Mark (Adam Scott) to, implying that Helly R. somehow found a way to take over her outie’s body for the morning. I’d talk myself out of it one moment, and then talk myself right back into the theory the next. But this proverbial brain tennis eventually took me in a completely new direction.
What if it isn’t Helly R. pretending to be Helena? There’s something too simple about that theory. It feels too clean. What if, instead, they’re not flipping the earlier story of Helena taking Helly’s place on the severed floor, but coming back to it? Stick with me here.
At first, this line of thinking seems absurd. Nothing’s happened to nudge the woman – who was literally homegrown inside a cult – outside of her loyalist tendencies, right? Wrong!
Two inciting incidents have occurred that may have snapped Jame Eagan’s daughter out of her Lumon fugue state. The first is the aforementioned overtime contingency. A woman who has, as far as we know, never rebelled a second in her life got the opportunity to be free. To dissent. To speak up and speak out about something she didn’t support. We also know that she was following Helly R.’s rebellion in Season 1. How refreshing (and possibly terrifying) that must be for someone who grew up an Eagan!
The second inciting factor was getting to live as Helly when she was masquerading as her innie. Adventures, rebellions, sex?! Helena has grown up in a world that looks down on laborers, but doesn’t seem like the type of person who has ever been confronted by the idea of being free, even if that freedom was occurring while trapped in a dead-end job.
Two non-Eagan focused scenes in “The After Hours” seem to corroborate this line of thinking. All Helly R. has done from the moment we met her is stand up and/or defy every authority figure she encounters. Still, there was a strange spark in her when she looked Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman) in the eye after he accused her of insubordination and she responded “yeah, no shit,” with a grin before slamming the door to his office. Additionally, Dylan G. (Zach Cherry) may have been unnecessarily mean to his friend during his heartbreak, but he has a line during their conversation where he brings up the fact that no one can tell when Helena takes over her body, not even Mark.
The final salvo in this strange line of theorizing comes by way of Jame Eagan himself. At first, Helly’s “WTF?” to her dad (who she had never met) convinced me that Helly and Helena were each where they belonged, Helena with her father in his compound, and Helly on the severed floor. But, once I realized the possibility that we spent the whole episode with Helena rather than Helly, it all made sense.
“What the fuck” seems like a strong response from Helly R. However, “what the fuck” is a completely reasonable response to seeing your father in a place where he absolutely does not belong.
Jame’s little “you tricked me” confounded me for days, but it seems Daddy dearest may have cracked the code on Helena’s little game.
If it is Helena living her alternate life as a woman unbeholden to anyone and on a newfound mission to say “eff the man,” then the follow-up question becomes “to what end?” Has Helena had a change of heart after experiencing a brief taste of what it’s like to live outside of her family’s monotone cult, or is it just a phase?
To that, I don’t have an answer just yet. But I can say that it all has me damn excited for next week’s Season 2 finale. What are your Helly R. theories?
More from the Severed Floor
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