I know that there's too much we don't know yet about Severance to actually eviscerate the subject, but - you're bored in isolation, I love your words, so, if you're so inclined, indulge me: would you care to elaborate on the gigantic nature vs nurture question that is embodied by Helly R. / Hellen Eagan?
[spoilers ahead, obviously, for anyone who hasn't finished season 1 of Severance...]
One of the many posts on this site that has unwittingly stuck with me is about "professional education" and what it teaches. OP explicitly mentions lawyers, engineers, and economists, but I doubt that's a bounded set; it could include anyone trained to fill a white collar or knowledge economy role, however you want to define that, however formal the training was or wasn't. The point is that the "professionalism" hammered into its alumni takes the same shape, regardless of industry or intent.
Professional education, the OP writes, teaches you to be okay with things.
It makes what might have otherwise been clear and immediate harm, obvious and certain violence, into hypotheticals. You end up installing software in your head and it watches you, measures you against The Market or The Law or The Math, some other bloodless god whose worship conveniently does not require changing anything in the more temporal sphere. (The plural of anecdote is not data, but still---I never cared about contract law until I showed up at law school. It had no bearing on my life until I was inculcated into believing it did.)
All this to say: I really don’t think Helly and Helena are that different. Obviously we’ve only had one episode to really know them, know them in tandem, but still---are they different people? After all, Mark and Mark S. aren’t so dissimilar. Mark S. might lack details about his Outie’s life, but they react with the same blend of hesitancy and hospitality when new people crash into their lives (e.g., Helly vs. Petey.) They bite back with similar jokes when Devon or Dylan tease; they protect their people (whichever side) and their mutual first instinct is to hide, whether it’s an illicit cell phone or a bad self-help book. Mark’s Innie and Outie are very similar people, just...missing some details about each others’ experiences.
I think you could say the same of Helly/Helena. Except the details Helly's missing are crucial---unlike Mark/Mark S. or Helena, Helly hasn’t been civilized or professionalized. She’s new, brand new, has received no professional education. Nothing has tempered her, no one has taught her---month after month, year after year, cheap, empty prize after prize---to be okay with things.
And so she’s not. She hangs herself. She runs. She snarls and sneers and fights and is not okay, is not okay about any of it, at all.
Maybe that’s nature vs. nurture, but I think of it more as the essence of horror looked at without flinching. In Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera, the Phantom genteelly dines at the managers’ supper-table as others murmur around him; Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has Kurtz whisper of horrors on his deathbed; Frankenstein’s monster promises that as long as it haunts Victor’s footsteps, his creator will never know joy. The tell-tale heart beats, the ghosts abide. And Helly---who is both ghost of Helena and more real than Helena---exists. Exists inexorably, and demands recognition of the particular horror of her existence.
I don’t care for Ian Duncan as a writer, but I can’t help but think of that line:
Except sometimes, the horror won’t be accommodated. Sometimes it’s the horror appears on its own terms, refusing to budge, screaming at the top of its lungs and dying, suffering immovably---such that it is not okay. Such that you cannot pretend it’s okay, make it okay, ignore it into being okay.
Sometimes it’s better that way.
