Orphan Black: Echoes - You don’t know who you are.

Orphan Black: Echoes: 1x08 The Paradox of Joyce.

I think a lot of this season of Echoes comes back to choices and responsibilities, especially what it means to care for another person and to, for one reason or another, hold a kind of power over their fate. Lucy has to literally decide between her beloved found family, Jack and Charlie, and the connection she has with Jules – and in her head, the decision seems to come down to the idea that Charlie at least has Jack to care for her, whereas Jules is entirely alone. Kira has to find a way to carry the responsibility of what she has created, both in terms of the people who have resulted from her technology, and the question of what Darros will do with that technology now that he has it. Even Emily has a glimpse of it: she has a brother who was injured in combat and Darros holds the technology that could fix his spine, so she is in his hands, and not free to make moral choices like helping Kira out. Craig summarises it with his “paradox of Joyce”: He once loved two women with the same name, couldn’t choose between them, and ended up losing them both. It’s a decision that Lucy has to make sooner rather than later, or else she could also lose both her families. 

This episode has vibes of Pretty Little Liars’ impossible long night, when Mona Vanderwaal and Alison DiLaurentis managed to pack an impossible amount of fiending and travelling into a short window. Kira is the most outrageous example. She ends up in a car with Emily, who has just revealed that Darros has blackmailed her into delivering Lucy to her. A gun goes off, and Kira is the one who drives away from it with blood on her shirt. We make the obvious assumption, especially when Darros tells Tom that Emily has died (they found a burnt-out wreck with a jawbone they’ve identified as belonging to Emily). It’s just as obvious that this isn’t the only conclusion, that Kira isn’t rattled enough to have killed a person when she completes the other chores on her tasklist. Next, she goes to Felix’ art opening (I quite love the massive scale of his art – a labyrinth that looks like a cave system that people can get lost in, like a representation of the original show) to reconnect with Lucas, who is still furious about what he has found out about his mother. Before that, Lucas tells his girlfriend about it, voicing his opinion that “only god creates” – I think his points against Kira hit harder than the religious argument, especially the one about robbing him of the chance to say goodbye to his mother before she died. Then Kira goes to the lab with Eleanor, who has come around to cooperating with her on a cure for her Alzheimer’s, even if that is the only concession she is willing to make. After a horrifying conversation with her mother Melissa, she is deeply fearful of losing herself like that, of what it will mean for her identity to lose her memories and to become a shell of herself. Then, Kira finds out that the lab is getting raided by the FDA, clearly because Darros is retaliating for what he thinks has happened to Emily. We find out that in fact, what Kira did was provide Emily with a way out of her Catch-22 – she’s helped fake her death to give her freedom. A very busy night indeed, that has now resulted in her life’s work being packed up in boxes, something she can’t do anything about if she wants to keep her freedom. 

Elsewhere, Lucy and Jules are also having a very long night. They are trying to figure out what the token that Jules has stolen is for, and Lucy enlists the help of ex-girlfriend and hacker PJ in the endeavour. PJ has fallen off the wagon and they find her drunk in a tent in a convenience store, but PJ can’t resist Lucy or the temptation of hacking technology. They find out that the token is not only eerily resistant to fire, but also traps hackers if they try to access it illegally. PJ says it’s so advanced that it must be part of a conspiracy that is way bigger than them. The episode maneuvres the characters around so that Jules ends up alone, and Lucy has to make a choice of whether to go to Jack and Charlie to have her body scanned for a new passport, or to save her from Xander – and of course, she chooses Jules. Xander ends up shooting Craig. 

Random notes: 

I hope we see Emily again. 

Note that the diner where they meet is called “Scotty’s” – aww. Another deep cut is Felix sharing that Colin died of an illness – sweet Colin, the pathologist who made it through all of the original show unharmed somehow, in spite of his kindness. Felix tells Kira that perhaps, given the choice, he would have done the same as her, that even if she did mess with other people’s lives in a way that she should have known better, she can find forgiveness and her responsibility now is for the people who have resulted from the technology being used, and to prevent Darros from misusing it even more. 

The conversation between Eleanor and Melissa is quite haunting. Melissa has a moment of perfect clarity where she explains the abyss of Alzheimer’s, the relief of losing memories she didn’t want to keep and the horror of not knowing who she is. It’s what prompts Eleanor to go back to Kira, because there’s still hope that they will develop a treatment somehow. 

It’s great to see the three print-outs connecting in this episode: they are clearly all three versions of the same person, they all sing along to a Peaches cover of Iggy Pop’s Search and Destroy, Eleanor finally shares the memory with Jules, and her wish that her mother had told her it wasn’t her fault that her dad committed suicide (it’s still not the full story). These moments make it clear why Lucy chooses the way she does in the end. Jack and Charlie are her found family, but the connection with Jules and Eleanor is undeniable, especially for someone who has lived without memories for so long. I also deeply loved how both Eleanor and Jules rib Lucy for having a “boyfriend”. 

I think this is the first episode in which we get the full scale of what the conspiracy may be. Lucas explains to his girlfriend that the print-outs are created from the kind of medical scans that you routinely get from your GP, which means, ominously, that there must be a database of everyone who has ever had such a scan somewhere. 

Tom is very clearly on the outs with Darros, who has taken over the search for the print-outs himself, and recommends Tom take some time off and a soundbath, considering he’s lost his ear. Tom is obviously obsessed with Lucy and Jules now, so it’s hard to see him back off from his mission. 

Xander says he’s returned because he wants more of Jules’ drugs, because his sole meaning is to become Darros, which he feels he can only do with more access to those buried memories. The show extends a lot of empathy towards both him and Jules, who feel adrift without any memories of their past. I do like how this sense of being lost is mirrored by the very real world fact of what happens to people who live with Alzheimer's.