Orphan Black: Echoes - Whoever made me, made her.

Orphan Black: Echoes: 1x02 Jules

What if the terrible things we lived through didn’t make me better?

I’ve been thinking about what made Orphan Black work so well, right from the start. It wasn’t just Tatiana Maslany’s incredible acting, which again I am glad that Echoes isn’t even trying to replicate: I think one of the biggest draws was how it took its idea and ran with it and always fully embraced the weirdness that came with it. “Weirdness”, as in the over-the-topness of Aldous Leekie’s neolution-obsessed followers, Helena’s whole deal, even when she was the villain of the first season, the incredible dynamics between both Sarah’s made family (her often complicated sisterhood with Felix, her relationship with Siobhan, her attempts to be a mum to Kira) and the clone club, as Sarah found her place in it and began to commit to their common cause. Something vibed and came together perfectly, and as much as the second episode of a new television show is too early to say that something isn’t coming together, Jules mostly made me think about how this magical ingredient is missing from Echoes for now. It is hard to bring back a beloved character from the original show – Jordan Gavaris returns as Felix, now apparently a feted artist who still has the same habits as he did back then, even if the accent has now moved towards a settled poshness that was definitely not there originally – and not make the audience remember the past. 

All of that is to say that I have a hard time figuring out how Kira Manning turned out so square! Kira, in the original Orphan Black, went through a lot of hardship, probably got one of the roughest deals out of anyone (remember how she spent a whole season on an island with a child version of her mother, and was experimented on by Rachel, who was very very bad at dealing with kids!), but she was also deeply, profoundly, weird, in a compelling way. She could feel all of her mother’s sisters and had premonitions about the future! She was raised by Felix, Cosima, Alison, Helena and Sarah! Her sometimes mother S had a long and storied history as an Irish resistance fighter and had guns hidden all over the house! Keeley Hawes’ Kira says that she’s gone through twenty years of therapy, but I don’t think that’s quite enough to explain how she ended up being so painfully regular (she’s holding on to her copy of The Island of Doctor Moreau but tells Felix, in an episode laden with such expositions, that she never really connected to her mum again after everything they went through – a grim blow that I think negates a lot of what actually happened on the show). In short, how did the daughter of Sarah Manning end up being so bad at buying cocaine at a bar? 

The other question is how Kira Manning ended up in the same compromised position that her Auntie Delphine could tell her stories about. It’s obvious that her arm of whatever conglomerate is at work here does good deeds – it appears as if its major business is printing organs, not whole people, and that the technology has been haphazardly adapted to make Lucy, presumably before it was entirely finished. She is the first in her part of the family to finish school, to apply her degree for cutting-edge research, but she would have grown up with a deep sense of the dangers if that research ends up in the wrong hands, and the knowledge that even the most benign-looking company often has skeletons in the closet. She is in way over her head – her son, Lucas, who is now a Quaker (religion has consistently gotten a bed rep on this show, but surely Quakerism can’t parallel the evils of Proletheans!) says as much to Felix, even if he doesn’t know the particulars. She must have not shared any of what she was doing for Additive with her Aunts Cosima and Delphine, out of the knowledge that they would have been horrified to hear about it. After what Tom said about something perhaps being fundamentally wrong with Lucy, she is concerned enough to ask her colleague to recalibrate “the machine” and to undergo a fairly horrific cocaine-based experiment on one of her lab rats, which unceremoniously drowns in a moment of inattention. She shares with Felix her concern that she has tried to be good, but perhaps, in resurrecting Lucy (which she doesn’t mention), has acted selfishly, but if there is one thing that we’ve learned from the original Orphan Black it’s that the worst idea of all is to try and face obstacles entirely on your own, instead of building a solid base of support. Kira Manning is missing what Echoes is missing – a clone club, a sounding board, a family, in spite of the fact that she seems to be surrounded by people. She’s isolated herself, and it’s a kind of isolation that permeates the show. 

Lucy seems significantly less disconnected, in spite of the fact that she seems much better equipped to deal with going at it alone. She takes her kidnapping victim (Jules, it turns out – whoever she is, she doesn’t share Lucy’s name) to her friend Craig, who quickly comes around to the idea of interrogating a sixteen-year-old teen about her involvement in a conspiracy. It becomes clear that Jules has absolutely no idea what Lucy is talking about, and I’d take some sympathy points off Lucy for proceeding blindly into sharing what she knows with her, not considering how insane it must sound to an absolute stranger that they were both “printed”. Like Lucy, Jules has lost her memory, a fact that was explained to her as a car accident that killed her parents. It’s obvious to Lucy that this is proof of her theory (their shared scar is another), but “amnesia” is still a much more reasonable explanation for Jules than being at the centre of a conspiracy. She is also missing the identification code that Lucy has, and from this episode it is obvious that whoever created Jules (if she was created) went a different route from Kira. I assumed from the first episode that Kira repeated the experiment, but it looks like someone else took over and left her out of the equation entirely. Jules is being raised by adoptive parents – a mother, Neva Lee, who clearly loves her and tries to connect to her, but also ominously works for Currentsy, a Darros logistics subsidiary (Darros owns Additive as well), and a father, who would like to return her to sender because he isn’t connecting with her. Her adoptive sibling loves her dearly, and is a pretty cool minor character that I hope gets roped into the investigation of her identity. 

Another hint that Jules may share DNA with Lucy is her resilience – her ability to escape from captivity neatly mirrors Lucy’s actions at the warehouse, and she stabs Lucy before escaping, keeping her ordeal secret from everyone except Wes, her sibling (she is also running what looks like a minor drug operation from her bedroom – as much as Kira is an outlier in the Manning family tree, it looks like Lucy and Jules fit in perfectly). 

So far, the emotional connection points for me have been Charlie’s attempts to deal with the trauma of having killed someone – Zariella Langford does some compelling acting – but Jules phone call at the end with a grandfather that the audience can easily predict is a paid actor is heart-rendering. He seems genuine enough, losing his memory, a bit confused, but of course, it’s all an act – and he is led off the soundstage by Jules’ handler, complaining that Jules is asking too many questions. One of the little addressed aspects of the final season of Orphan Black was the fact that the clones decided to keep Krystal Goderitch in the dark about herself, to keep her naïve, which never helped to protect her from horrible things happening to her. Jules’ life is a lie, but she has little reason to trust the person who could help her find out the truth. 

Random notes: 

It is a tiny bit fun though to watch Canadian Jordan Gavaris put on a fake British accent while Londoner Keeley Hawes does an American one for Kira.  

Dear lord, that beard and hair though. 

I felt that the pacing of the episode was off – for example, the moment when Lucy revealed her secret to Jack in the warehouse should have been a much more emotional moment instead of just being brushed over. Considering that Jack and Charlie are Lucy’s motivations, the people she wants to protect by going after those conspiring against her, the scenes feel too short, even when they’re acted well. 

There is also a greater plot-hole-question here about why there aren’t more cameras everywhere, and why Additive never bothered with implanting a tracker-chip into Lucy – presumably because Kira was heading the project, but they certainly wouldn’t have hesitated to do it to Jules. 

Tom – and hats off to Reed Diamond, who is doing the most to make him into more than a corporate goon (the dental flosser!) and FBI-trained colleague Emily meet the big man – a shipping and logistics billionaire who has built a nature sanctuary in which he is rehabilitating a rare tortoise species (a bit of a wink to P.T. Westmorland, the creepiest old man). Mr Darros seems to know about everything – Lucy and Jules – but also has the certain aloofness of a man who can afford to delegate the less tasteful aspects of his business to others. I hope we get to see more of the world of 2052 to really understand his place in it and how he got there, and how it connects back to Leda, Dyad and Neolution. 

If I were to bet on a red herring in this first season it's Jules' identity. Based on how her adoptive dad talks about her as if she's disposable because he can't seem to "connect" to her, I bet we're in for some heartbreak.