Orphan Black: Echoes: 1x03 Pegasus Girl.
“I wanna go home. But there is no home.”
I felt deflated after the second episode of Echoes because it didn’t really work for me – it was an attempt at nostalgia for a character I used to love that didn’t hit the right emotional notes for me, and it made me worry about how the rest of the season would unfold. Pegasus Girl roped me back in – and so far, the story of Jules resonates the most with me out of the three main protagonists. Lucy started off as just as isolated as Jules, but by the time the story picks her up again, two years have passed and she has found a home and people that she loves enough to fight for. She is not isolated, and she has a certain, if limited, amount of knowledge about herself. She knows that there is a conspiracy, that she is being hunted. She knows she was printed, because Kira told her. I think it’s meaningful that Kira never tried to keep her in the dark, that she made the active decision for her to have knowledge of herself, even if the process was cut short when Lucy, out of panic, fled.
Jules is a whole different story. Her waking up mirrors that of Lucy, but instead of a comfortable if fake living room sofa, it’s a hospital bed, and ever single word she is told after her awakening by people who have the appearance of adults that she should be able to trust is a lie. Dr Pam Teller, her neuropsychologist, creates a very conscious veneer of harmlessness and care (the soup stain on her shirt, later, the smudged lipstick). Unmoored, Jules has to trust what she is being told, because there is nothing she can check it against. Her own memory is missing. Dr Teller tells her that she was injured in a car accident, that her parents are dead. I really want to command Amanda Fix’ acting here when she reacts – the horror isn’t in knowing that she has lost her parents, or that she is now entirely alone, but that the expected grief over the loss never arrives. She can’t grief someone she does not remember. That emotional horror becomes even more compelling when Pam Teller begins the process of “restoring” her memories that is blatantly just giving her a manufactured story to believe – Jules is just repeating facts to her that she was given, with no emotional resonance. The “friend” from her former life who visits her rubs her wrong and is obviously not the kind of person she feels she would now be friends with. The diary she is given doesn’t seem familiar, in fact paints the picture of a girl who is radically different from her. Pam Teller blames it on her amnesia, says she has “permission to change”, but the obvious conclusion is that whoever created Jules had limited access to who she actually was, and instead catered to a generic teenage girl – so generic that they hired a middle-aged man to write her diary. We already know that Kira Manning was not involved and knows nothing about this, but the question is – who is involved in this conspiracy? How did they end up creating Jules, with none of the motivation of loss that Kira had, and zero emotional connection to her previous self?
Jules is adopted (quickly and suspiciously) by a family that we know she won’t feel truly at home with, with the exception of Wes. They seem welcoming but the mother’s suggestion of her to pick a colour for her bedroom, remains that, and a year later, the room stays unfinished, as if Jules’ stay there is not permanent. Lucy’s revelations have opened the door just enough for Jules to question everything, and those obvious glaring discrepancies between who she knows she is and the person that was presented to her by Pam Teller drive her to do more research, especially after Teller visits her at school to try and find out where she went on the day she went missing. She types a particularly glaringly cliché line from her diary into the search bar and finds a YA novel that uses it, the author’s home address conveniently listed on the site (she does not, however, check when the book was published, which would have confirmed her suspicions straight away). Wes and her go to find the man, and he folds almost immediately under their questioning, revealing that he wrote the diary for what he was told was a research project, and that he still feels watched by “them” (there’s a “I want to believe” poster on his wall, an interesting relic for 2052). He reused the line for his own, very unfortunately covered book titled “Pegasus Girl” later.
Lucy’s research mirrors Jules’, in a way, and maybe there is a point of contention here with the writing of the investigation itself, which pans out much like a children’s treasure hunt. One clue leads to the next, in a way that, if this were a different show, I would find suspicious enough to expect a trap. Lucy found the name of the hospital where Jules woke up on a picture in Neva’s workplace, and at the hospital, after the receptionist proves unwilling to provide personal details of a patient, a kind nurse tells her about Dr Teller (who was, of course, hired externally). Before Lucy can follow up this clue, Jules reaches out to Craig and proposes a do-over: she’s seen enough now to believe Lucy’s story, and works with her to uncover their identity together – the big question is, of course, who the original is that they are both based on. Jules suggests that they try taking a study drug that she has been manufacturing because some of her customers have begun “dream-tripping”, and this may help them remember more from their shared dream about the bloody bathroom.
For now, the actual investigation – the neat way in which both Lucy and Jules move from one point to the next – doesn’t really work for me, but the emotional moments that show the impact of what is happening to them do. On the periphery, there’s still Charlie struggling with having killed someone, reminding us that these horrors are happening to people who have both in no way signed up for them and aren’t old enough to meaningfully process them. Charlie investigates Tina’s house and finds guns, she pushes a child on the playground, causing injury, she begs a cop in ASL to arrest her for committing a crime, even writing “I killed someone” on her phone to make herself understood – but frustratingly, especially considering her deafness, she cannot make the cop take her seriously, and instead Tina steps in to explain it all away. There is a very clear sense here that Charlie’s agency is taken away from her, even though this is done to protect her, but in a show that is all about agency, it still seems significant. In the end, they land on burying Charlie’s pet penguin in the yard to make up for having left Tom’s goon in the fields. It’s meant to provide closure, but it’s hard to see how this will be enough to assuage Charlie’s guilt.
The other horrifying moment plays out between Jules and her foster parents, once she returns home: they have heard from Dr Teller that she is running with the wrong crowd, that something is interrupting her recovery. They give her pills to swallow (the bottle says Fluoxetine, an anti-depressive, but who knows what’s in it), and force her to do it in front of them. It feels deeply wrong and controlling, like a boundary being violated. It makes it clear to Jules that the conspiracy she has learnt about extends well into what should have been a safe environment for her. Jules swallows but later throws up the pill in the toilet, making up her mind about how she can escape this prison.
Random notes:
I have to confess that for the first two episodes of the show, I was deeply convinced that Jules/Lucy were Sarah’s granddaughters, that Kira had resurrected her lost daughter. It’s now obvious that this is not the case, and that it is much more likely that Kira resurrected her partner, with whom she shared Lucas, her son. The first theory seemed compelling because both Jules and Lucy are so much like you would imagine a younger Sarah Manning to be – but I guess if the second theory holds, Kira just ended up with someone who reminded her of her mum? Much to consider (20 years of therapy!).
We learn that Jules is in a poly relationship in school (it’s pretty clear from the scene that this was very much her choice), and very adapt at chemistry, once again opening the question of who the original was.
Emily (Tattiawna Jones), Tom’s partner in trying to capture Lucy, is changing her mind slowly (like anyone exposed to Tom over a long time would – the man truly makes you question every decision you’ve ever made in your life that would have landed you on the same side as him). Kira picks up on it in a meeting with Paul Darros in which she pleads for Lucy’s protection. Emily’s only advice to her is to get to Lucy before they do, because it’s obvious that Tom wants to harm her, with or without Darros’ expressed approval (it’s also obvious that Paul Darros is eager to contain Lucy with whatever means necessary, but never gets his own hands dirty). I think it’s also becoming clear from their scenes together that this will be very much a thing, one way or another: Orphan Black has a proud history of employees of shady corporations finding their soul (through love).
We learn that Lucy assumed that name, but for now we don’t know what the original’s name was – but Kira suspiciously steals her son Lucas’ contribution to the blood drive, as if to keep his DNA make-up a secret from Additive, and his name-tag says Lucas Miller-Manning. The plot thickens.
Kira’s little meeting with former lab partner Josh made me miss Scott. Josh seems very eager to stay far away from Additive, and also mentions that Kira may regret the very fact of Lucy’s creation, like it was something she morally struggled with.
A side-note here, I was joyed to find out that Tina’s actress Eva Everett-Irving is John Irving’s daughter – reading The Hotel New Hampshire at fourteen (and watching the film) was pretty formative.
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