Orphan Black: 3x02 Transitory Sacrifices of Crisis.
We face a hostile ideology - global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger is poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle - with liberty the stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961
Crisis, conflict, sacrifices. This is an episode of sacrifices, of weighing options and then seeing no other way out but choosing something terrible. Sarah and Kira see an opportunity to settle down, lead the closest thing to a normal life either of them have ever had, when Cal buys a house, but it isn’t just a question of whether settling down is too much against Cal’s and Sarah’s nature to be possible at that point in their lives – that would be a luxury, to only have to make a personal consideration – but the overwhelming truth that Sarah’s fight is far from over, and until it is, Kira is in constant danger of several unseen and seen foes. She sacrifices the ability to be with her daughter, because Sarah’s very existence makes Kira unsafe. So Cal runs with Kira to Iceland, with the help of Mrs S powerful and scheming friends, and the beautiful scenes of them leading a normal life of a family suddenly turn into something very similar to Helena’s dream sequence in the first episode – utterly unattainable and fleeting.
The idea of sacrifice also ties in with the Castor clones, especially considering what the context of the speech is that is quoted in the episode title. An ideological conflict, one without a foreseeable end, can easily become absolute: Absolute in its ability to destroy, in the existential dangers it evokes, but also absolute in the kind of methods that the fighting of that conflict suddenly justifies. If the threat to a society is, or at least is made to be, existential, then moral boundaries suddenly become easy to cross. Perhaps this is how Castor originally came into existence – during the Cold War, the ultimate edge against the “empire of evil”, shadow soldiers, now recontextualized after the end of that war, and maybe even more effective in asymmetric warfare. This idea becomes interesting if we keep in mind how Dyad approaches its line of Leda clones: They are a product, the purpose will be provided by whoever makes use of them, their purpose at the moment is giving Dyad, and Topside, a commercial edge, and power. Consequently, the clones aren’t considered to be human, they are a good to be traded, and only valued as that. Castor, on the other hand, has a mysterious figure operating very differently. Whoever “Mother” is – Ethan Duncan’s wife, someone else – she functions as a protective mechanism and her approach to the males clones is different even on a semantic level. They are “her boys”, worthy of protection not necessarily for their military value, but because her responsibility for them is coded as a family relationship. The other side of this – apparent – human approach to clones is that it creates a very clear outside, in which the female clones, especially Helena (and Sarah) are only functional, and valuable, for whatever they may be able to provide to heal whatever went wrong with Castor.
Sacrifice: the male clones were raised as brothers, because Castor functions as a family, and they look out for each other like brothers, to the extent that the military aspect is sometimes in direct conflict with their instincts. Rudy and Seth are meant to follow Paul’s orders but Rudy’s love for his brother, who is starting to suffer from whatever disease is decimating the Castor clones, overrides the military hierarchy (and how deeply ingrained following orders is becomes visible in Seth’s whole body language when Major Paul enters the room – this is how they have been raised). He is looking for Ethan Duncan’s research to save his brothers, and in the end, loving his brother means sacrificing him, sparing him pain.
For now, it seems as if Helena is important to Dr Virginia Cody because she, or the pregnancy, hold the key to the well-being of her boys: it’s why she disagrees with the approach the military originally takes with her, waterboarding her to see how much stress she can take, subjecting her to the same logic tests that the males clones have to sit through to prove they’re not glitching (they’re useless on Helena anyway – “I want to see these mangoes”). It’s still unclear what the scientists on either sides need, or are missing, precisely for finding a cure – the original DNA (does that mean – the first clone’s DNA, or the original donors DNA?), the tissue samples that Ethan Duncan must have hidden somewhere, the notes he took in the book that Rudy overlooks in Felix’ apartment.
Virginia: They decided you were expendable.
Helena: I don’t believe you.
Virginia: Let me assure you, you’re not expendable to me, or my boys. You overcame so much. Your upbringing, biology, your fate… we’re gonna find out how.
Virginia instinctually knows how important family is to Helena, so she knows how to hook her, or at least attempts to: she tries to tell Helena that she has been betrayed by Sarah, and that she does have a purpose here, with her and her boys – but it isn’t an invitation into a family, she is not expendable because she may benefit the male clones. Which brings us back to the original quote: always be wary of who calls for sacrifices, and for what purpose, and what kind of boundaries are suddenly no longer observed.
Random notes:
Brilliant idea to use a sort of Voight-Kampff machine to determine if the Castor clones are “glitching” (and also the use of that term – their sickness is coded as a malfunction, something that happens to machines, not humans).
Toughest moment this episode: “I consented to the first guy, so it wasn’t rape”. The woman's plight gets lost in the episode but considering how inherently the show is about agency and consent, that opening scene is very hard to watch (and maybe a sign of things to come once the idea of the male clones' interests being in conflict with the female clones' interests emerges - they are both struggling, but in very different ways, and there is always a gendered aspect to their struggle).
Felix: My god, you must be Scott.
The new clone phones are “blue as the skies of lesbos”. Also, Delphine doesn’t have the number.
Alison is off doing her own thing this episode, which is specifically: purchasing Ramone’s business (he’s off to college), which also means a client list of other soccer mum, which also means a very dependable voter base for the school trustee election. Donnie’s uselessly failing to keep throughout the whole thing (“Fist me”).
Alison: And what would we do with the corpse in the garage? What will we do, will we give it to the next family or take it with us?
It’s not really a surprise that Cal actually did sell his inventions to the military and actually did get paid and then got out, even though Paul points out that he wouldn’t want Sarah to know. Everyone on this show has dodgy pasts and secrets and shortcomings, let’s measure them by how hard they try to improve though.
Theories:
Cosima: I’m just open to perspectives on the void, like before it opens up and swallows me.
Cosima’s miraculous recovery is suspect, especially in light of the idea that the illness in the Castor clones might have been originally intended to be a sort of switch to control them better – it raises questions of whether it can be controlled, from the outside, if her recovery is in connection with the fact that she and Sarah are currently in compliance with Dyad, or at least more so than before.
Mrs S tells Sarah that “You don’t fight in these conditions. You run” – which is what she did, back in the day, she gathered her children and left. There might be an implied connection to what originally happened at Leda, with the Duncans gathering “their children” and leaving – or perhaps it applies even more so to Virginia, even though she seems to state that the clones fell into her hands unexpectedly. “I did what any mother would do”.
When Sarah realizes that Seth is sick she says “They tempered with you”, which is a very specific wording: she is very likely right that this is not an unintended glitch (because she heard from Ethan that they did intend for the female clones to be barren) – but she makes a very clear assumptions that the male clones were designed to get sick (which opens up the question if the sickness was really an unintended outcome for the female clones to have).
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