”The Good News About Hell” (S1/E1)
“The path to paradise begins in hell.” Dante Alighieri
The episode’s title name checks hell. Hell-y is an obvious call out to it. But this segment most explicitly raises the question of whether the Severed floor of Lumon is a form of hell. All of which raises an interesting philosophical question: if hell actually exists, wouldn’t it be better to exist is a place of torment than to not exist at all? A question to keep in mind throughout the series.
As Mark leads Helly down through the white hallways towards her “exit,” he no longer seems the least bit interested in connecting with Helly. This feels a bit odd in retrospect, since he must know how the trick door will turn out for her. He does make one nod to her continuation, pointing out the empty office and mentioning how expansion is coming soon.
This leads Helly to ask Mark if she’s part of that expansion, to which he replies, no, you’re a replacement. Helly picks up on Mark’s new tone and asks him why he said that as if he hates it. I guess being hit in the head and abused as his first task as a manager isn’t sitting well with him. It’s also probably just hitting him that Petey is now gone and in his best friend’s place he now has to deal with this—perhaps Mark’s perceived version of hell.
Writing about the exit door scene now in context of having seen all of the first two seasons of “Severance,” I have a different view of it, because I know the same door will play a critical role in the season 2 finale and these same two characters will be involved. But watching the original scene again, it strikes me as cruel that Mark knows she is not going to be successful, but walks her through this. I suppose the caveat of not watching preserves some deniability for him.
The first time she tries the trick door, she ends up back in the hallway and exclaims “what … the hell …” She tries it the second time, same result. Then she tries to run at the door and falls down in the stairwell in the process, but still ends up back on the SVRD floor. Mark looks at his watch, obviously aware of her failure and the fact that he will be escorting her back to the office momentarily.
When Helly walks back to Mark and talks to him from around the corner, she asks “am I dead,” to which he gives a quick, clipped no. “This isn’t, like, hell or something?” she asks. Mark says no, leading to a Kafkaesque conversation about why she can or cannot leave, Mark insisting that she did leave, but came back. It feels strange. He needed the manual for walking her through the orientation, but seems intimately aware of this process and the messaging.
We’re now in Ms. Cobel’s office, where she says to Helly “weaponizing office equipment on your first day … you are gonna be fun. Look, I do sympathize, I’ve wanted to pummel Mark myself, but I am his employer. And he is your department chief. So we’ll both have to be strong.” There’s an element of flirtation in Cobel’s sadism, the subtext being that she wanted to do bad things with Mark herself, so she understands the desire to lash out physically. Even without the subtext, it’s interesting to me that while Cobel is lashing out, she’s clearly more unprofessional than anyone.
The next line from Cobel is that the “good news” is there’s only one part of her orientation left and Mark cannot possibly derail it — and that’s a video. She does like the good news/bad news trope. She takes out a disk from her desk drawer with Helly R’s name on it and hands it to her. She then exclaims, with far too much cheerfulness “welcome to Lumon, Helly!”
Mark, with a hilarious blue Lumen branded bandaid on his forehead from where Helly hit him with the speaker, now knocks on the door of Cobel’s office. She tells him to “have a seat” and he slinks in. There’s a 10 second beat before Mark asks “are you mad at me?” She responds “for the incompetence … or the disobedience?” Mark tries to respond “well …” and then Cobel barks “yes!”
Now Cobel tells a story about her mother. (Who also, we find out in season 2, has a central place in severance lore.) Cobel begins by saying that her mother was an atheist. Later in this same episode, Cobel will describe her mother as deeply religious. Cobel, who is not severed, is the most divided personality on the show in season 1 and has to maintain a deep reservoir of conflicting narratives throughout. It’s quite impressive that she can keep them divided without the technological help, and a little odd that she has no such division in season 2.
”She used to say that there was good news and bad news about hell. The good news is, hell is just the product of a morbid human imagination. The bad news is, whatever human beings can imagine, they can usually create.” It’s far too vivid an example (and Mark admits that he doesn’t know what it means) leading to the rather banal thought that the success of an office depends on the people.
But we are now halfway through the first episode and despite Mark’s fail and Helly’s insistence on leaving, everyone is nicely settling into their hellscape.