INFORMATION.

[perceptual]

INFORMATION

≡

❑

✕

Helly R.

NAME

Severance

CANON

Post-S1E9

CANON POINT

30

AGE

Human

SPECIES

Britt Lower

PB

5'6" (168cm)

HEIGHT

Slim

BUILD

Hazel

EYES

Red

HAIR

tba

TBA

none

GAME

> FIRST IMPRESSIONS

VISUAL Average height, slim and willowy, with shoulder-length red hair that she wears down and carefully curled.

AURAL Nonspecific American accent, quite low pitched (ex.)

DEMEANOR Determined, sharp, a little tightly wound but not overly serious.

> HISTORY

Helly, an employee at Lumon Industries, works in the Macrodata Refinement department, where a surgical procedure called 'severance' has separated her memories between work and personal life. Her access to memories is limited by physical location, preventing her from recalling outside experiences on Lumon's basement floor, or retaining work memories outside the basement. Helly feels effectively trapped at work, wanting to quit but unable to do so due to her outie, the version of her who opted for the procedure and lives a life outside Lumon's walls. Helly hates working at Lumon, and will do literally anything she can to get out – but if her 'outie' quits, the version of Helly that has only known Lumon will cease to exist. This matters little to Helly, who is determined to get out at absolutely any cost.

FULL HISTORY — SPOILERS FOR SEASON ONE OF SEVERANCE

When we meet Helly, she’s a new employee on the severed floor of a company called Lumon. Severance is a medical procedure which permanently and irrevocably separates a person’s memories – outside of the severed floor, the person is who they’ve always been with the memories they’ve always had (the ‘outie’), but at work the person is a blank slate who only exists at work (the ‘innie’). All the innies ever experience is being at work; their memories are switched between outie and innie on the elevator which leads to the severed floor.

Helly is awoken by her colleague Mark S., who introduces her to the world of Lumon and specifically the department she’s working in – Macrodata Refinement, or MDR. She has two other colleagues, Dylan G. and Irving B., who are both severed, as well as a non-severed supervisor, Mr Milchick, and a demanding and strict boss, Mrs Cobel. Helly immediately tries to leave several times, convinced that the company is keeping her here against her will even after video confirmation that her ‘outie’ agreed to the procedure of her own free will. Her official request for resignation is, apparently, denied by her outie, so Helly tries a number of increasingly desperate ways to communicate to her outie that she wants to leave, even when Mark points out that the ‘innie’ version of her only exists on the severed floor, and so resignation would mean that this version of her would effectively die.

The work done by MDR is obscure, and none of Helly’s coworkers actually know what they’re doing. They are told to sort numbers based on emotions that the numbers make them feel, but they don’t know what the numbers are, or what sorting them does. Helly is uninterested in doing the work, especially after her denied resignation requests and failed attempts to smuggle messages to her outie. Irving suggests that their department goes on a trip to the Perpetuity Wing of the severed floor, a museum of sorts which documents the history of Lumon’s founder, Kier Eagan, and his dynasty. Helly slips away from the group and tries to make another escape, and this time she’s caught and sent to the ‘break room’, where she is made to read a 55-word-long ‘compunction statement’ apologising for her transgression over and over again, while Mr Milchick tells her repeatedly that she doesn’t mean it, and to read it again. In total she reads it over a thousand times before she’s let out of the break room.

Undeterred by the experience in the break room, Helly grabs a paper cutter and threatens to cut off her fingers unless she is given permission to record a message to her outie. She successfully records her message, but is returned to the office a little while later with a recorded response from her outie, who tells her, ‘I am a person, you are not.’ Her outie categorically refuses to let her quit the job, and says that if Helly threatens harm on their body again, she will regret it. Helly seemingly starts to settle into her job at MDR, but that evening she smuggles out an extension cord and hangs herself in the elevator. Her outie briefly wakes up mid-hanging, but the elevator descends back down in time for Mark to save Helly.

Helly survives the suicide attempt with minor injuries, and returns to work three days later. Her return is supervised by the odd and slightly robotic but nonetheless earnest Ms Casey, who usually delivers wellness sessions for the innies where she tells them very vague facts about their outies, to which they must respond neutrally. Mark and Helly slip Ms Casey’s surveillance and explore the severed floor together in an attempt to map it out, stumbling on a strange department that consists of a single man raising baby goats. They are eventually found by Ms Casey, who is sent to the break room for having failed to supervise them properly.

When Helly reaches 75% on her refining numbers, Milchick hosts a party and tries to get Dylan to take part, but Dylan loses his cool and attacks Milchick, biting him, until Helly and the others have to pull him off Milchick. Dylan reveals that the night before, he had been woken up in his outie’s home so that Milchick could ask him a question. With the knowledge that they can become their innie selves outside of the severed floor of the Lumon building, they hatch a plan: Dylan will stay in the building and trigger the Overtime Contingency while the others have left, so they can each find someone they trust and tell them the truth about what’s happening at Lumon. Before they leave work on the day they’re going to hatch their plan, Helly impulsively kisses Mark, in case they never see each other again.

When Dylan triggers the overtime procedure, Helly wakes up at a Lumon gala, where she finds out her real name is Helena Eagan, and that she is the daughter of Lumon’s current CEO, Jame Eagan. The gala is themed around Helly, and it becomes clear that Helena opted to have the severance procedure as a PR stunt, with the whole gala presenting a glossed ideal of severance and working as a severed employee, which obscures the truth of the situation and also does not acknowledge that Helly injured herself and attempted suicide. Helly manages to get on stage and tell the audience that all of the severed employees are miserable and being tortured, before Dylan is overpowered by Milchick, ending the Overtime Contingency and reverting all of the escapees to their outie selves.

> PERSONALITY

What impression does your character give when meeting someone for the first time? How does the first impression differ from your character’s true nature?

On the surface, Helly is definitely capable of giving the impression of someone who holds herself together very well. But once she is in a situation that demands action, Helly quickly reveals herself to be determined to the point of feral wildness, if she has to be. Violence, even directed at herself, is not far from her mind, and that veneer of professionalism on the surface is barely even skin-deep. She’s capable of being mean and even outright cruel – when Mark suggests that everyone in the MDR department is family, she tells him flatly that even with a razor to her throat, she couldn’t be less interested in being his family. She’s often rude and dismissive, mostly as a defence mechanism to protect herself from getting too close to people. In many ways, it’s this abrasive rudeness she’s putting out for everyone to see, and it’s sort of a defence mechanism for her. It’s easier for her to reject any sense of warmth towards people she might later have to fuck over – but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible for her to care about others, just that she tends to see caring about others as a weakness before unity with others becomes a strength.

How does your character handle stress? What do they do in an emergency?

Helly’s first instinct in an emergency is to fight back. She panics, sure, but she’s quick to mask it, or at the very least she doesn’t let panic freeze her. She’s a quick and creative thinker – her attempts to smuggle messages out to her outtie include writing a broken message on her forearms that is only readable when she holds her forearms together, wrapping a message in plastic and swallowing it, and literally smashing through a glass window in a door to throw out a message that she would be able to read as her outie when she stepped out of the door. When she first wakes up with no memories and no idea of even the most basic facts about herself – including her name, where she was born, and what colour her mother’s eyes were – she’s upset, but she funnels that into action. She throws a speaker at Mark hard enough to break the skin, wrestles his binder full of PR-speak from him, and slams on the locked door so hard that she knocks herself over. She’s scrappy and determined, and when something feels off to her she’ll do everything she can possibly think of to get out of it. She takes this to extremes when she threatens to mutilate herself in order to be able to record a message to her outie. For Helly, an emergency is a motivator to action. She is never going to be the ‘sit on the sidelines and wait’ type, and will dive headfirst into danger if she has to.

What are your character’s fears? How do they hinder or challenge your character?

Like her response to any emergency she finds herself in, Helly is very good at covering up her fears, but they still influence her actions, making her lash out. Helly’s biggest fear is something that’s only become knowledge to her very recently: the truth about her outie. It’s fair to say that Helly is her own worst enemy, in the sense that her outie Helena is directly opposed to everything Helly wants for herself in life. They are polar opposites in what they want, though they approach these wants with the same determination. It’s a horrifying thought to know that a part of herself not only gladly agreed to the severance procedure, but also that she did it to try to convince others to get the procedure too. Helly’s biggest boon is that she’s self-confident: she knows herself and what she wants, and knows it with enough clarity to threaten to hurt or even kill herself to get it. Knowing the truth about her outie is a destabilising and frightening thing to her, because it is proof that there is a part of her that will always be working against her. A part of her will always be a traitor. It remains to be seen how Helly will address this reveal of who she really is, but it’s fair to say that it will, at the very least, make her more prone to self-destruction and self-sabotage, traits she’s already clearly demonstrated in her attempts to get out of working at Lumon.

CODE