You're wrong about Helena

As intrigued as I am by forensic analyses of elevator dings and walking styles, I still don't buy the popular theory that Helena is secretly pretending to be Helly this season. It feels like the root of this theory is the mere fact that she lied about what happened during the OTC. But if our moral framework is nuanced enough to allow for the possibility that good guys lie sometimes, then let's consider this hot take:

Lying to her fellow refiners was a smart choice — and one that's entirely consistent with Helly's character.

Here are two reasons why:

1. When S2E1 begins, Helly has no way of knowing if the other refiners' outties are ALSO Eagans or Lumon supporters. Until she knows whose outties are trustworthy, the safest course of action is to lie to everyone. Remember that Mark was the first member of the group to recount what he saw during the OTC, and he mentioned seeing Cobel at Ricken's book party. Helly also ran into Cobel that night, who tried to sabotage her escape, so Outtie Mark's acquaintance with Cobel should be an immediate red flag. Furthermore, Helly just learned about severed childbirth from the politician's wife, and that Mark's outtie's dead wife is actually Miss Casey. That odd combination of facts is enough to send Helly's mind racing. What if Mark's outtie wants to keep his innie trapped, just like Helena wants to trap Helly? What if HIS outtie is the one pretending to be an innie to find out what Helly knows? The most important lesson Helly learned in her 39 minutes upstairs was to never underestimate Lumon. This is the same woman whose first thought on the conference table was "am I livestock?" That's the level of distrust and pessimism she was BORN WITH. Now that she basically knows Darth Vader is her father, it makes sense for that distrust to morph into full-blown paranoia.

2. The shame of sharing a brain with a monster like Helena Eagan scares Helly. Lying to her friends lets her cling to her tenuous sense of identity, at least for a little while. Helly has only existed for a fraction of the time Helena has lived, but she's already a better person than Helena in the basic sense that she hasn't committed crimes against humanity. Season 1 was about Helly asking herself "who am I out there?", and I think season 2 is about her asking "who am I in here?" She must define her own identity as the anti-Helena, which is a problem the other refiners can't relate to. In a childish way, I can see how Helly might think she's protecting her fellow innies from harm by lying. She may reason that if her own brain is capable of producing someone like Helena, then maybe her brain has a critical flaw, a latent capacity for evil. Her instinct might be to quarantine that part of herself and erect a firewall around her own Helena-ness to stop it spreading to others like a cancer. (Will this backfire on her? Almost certainly. But protecting one's ego is a very human impulse.) But Helly's strong words to Mark in the hallway about how they don't owe their outties anything makes sense in this context. She's explicitly choosing sides in an innie vs. outtie war that the others don't realize she's fighting yet. Her allegiance is to the other innies, not their outties. Poetically, this is probably the kind of black and white thinking that led Helena down her evil path. Will Helly make the same mistakes as Helena? That's the mystery!

Anyway, I could be wrong, and maybe the elevator dings were what I should have been paying attention to all along. But if Helena really is the person we've been seeing on the severed floor these last three episodes and not Helly, then that's three whole episodes where we didn't get to see Helly evolve as a character. And that feels like a pretty big waste of a character to me.