Orphan Black: Echoes - You have always been so afraid of losing things.

Orphan Black: Echoes: 1x07 The Dog's Honest Truth.

Eleanor: You have always been so afraid of losing things. Of losing people. That’s what makes life life. That’s what makes it beautiful. We were lucky, we found each other and I loved you. We had a good life, but those things, those kinds of things, only come around once. That’s what makes them mean something. They’re delicate. 

Echoes is about unprocessed grief. The promise of printing people is an imaginary loophole for death: even when people retain their memories, and continue living the lives that their “prime” lived before them, they are still made new by the process: there is no true continuity with the person they replace, it does not transfer consciousness to a new body. Whatever makes a person individual, a self, cannot be replicated. Instead, the printing process creates new selves. This is a harrowing proposition for Jules, who feels she has nothing to fall back on, but in this episode, it becomes even more difficult to grapple with for Eleanor, because Kira never told her the truth. 

Finding yourself face to face with a younger version of yourself is a particularly brutal way to find out that you are the product of an experimental scientific process – and Lucy reveals it accidentally to Eleanor, when she comes to see Kira and instead finds the person that Kira has kept secret from her at home. Eleanor feels deeply betrayed, in part because at no point has Kira tried to get her consent, and she has never been able to find the words to explain what she did. Eleanor immediately jumps into connecting that decision with the traumatic way in which Kira grew up (of course she is afraid of losing people – Siobhan’s horrible death must weigh heavily on her mind). But it’s almost clinically precise when Eleanor tells her that the person she was trying to keep in her life is irretrievably lost, died two years ago: it’s a much clearer message that the relationship between them is over than Eleanor packing her bags and leaving is. Kira extends the promise of her transplants, the idea that she is working on a way to save Eleanor from early-onset Alzheimer’s, as a way to bind her to their shared life, but the attempt fails. Eleanor is unmoored now, and has to find a way to deal with the fact that she is, essentially, only a year old, and must now forge her own path and find her own meaning. 

It's ironic that the one thing that does still bind them together is their shared sense of responsibility for Jules’ fate. Kira is responsible because she is the person who created them, even if Jules was made without her knowledge and permission. Eleanor is responsible because how could she not feel a connection to a girl that looks like her at sixteen and a woman who is her, twenty years ago. As much as Echoes makes it clear that these are three very different people, very much shaped by their individual experiences of life, they do have an immediate connection. Lucy feels the same way about both Jules and now Eleanor, and she is the one who witnesses one of the most brutal moments of the episode. Eleanor goes to talk to Lucas, because her first instinct is to tell the truth to her son (whatever she feels, that is one connection that she cannot severe, even if these memories aren’t truly hers). Lucas rejects her utterly, horribly, based on some kind of conception of a soul and creation that is bound to his religious beliefs, a kind of dogmatism that feels like it will cost both Eleanor and himself dearly. 

It's interesting to think about how Xander fits into the mix. He has been raised knowing that he is a print-out, even though he thought he was the only one. Knowing Jules almost gives him a sense of belonging, of being less alone, that I don’t think Paul Darros has taken into consideration when he tasked him with tempting Jules to stay. It makes him easily manipulated (it also helps that he is a teenage boy). It’s clear that a lot is at stake for Xander, that there will be consequences if he fails in the mission to bring Jules on board. But Jules only wants to escape, and she tricks Xander (who thinks he will be kissed), dosing him with the nasal spray containing the drug that triggers deeply buried memories. While Jules uses the opportunity to shut down the compound (she also steals the mysterious token in Paul’s office), Xander has a vivid memory of Paul at his age, caring for a very sick sister, with the implication that they both grew up with a violent father who abused Paul. Paul hasn’t told any of this to Xander, as if he is trying to create a version of himself that never went through a trauma that presumably shaped him considerably. Xander is a terribly tragic character: a boy who was raised to believe he was the only one of his kind, with the singular purpose of shaping himself into a different person, and now access to the outer world (Jules is right – any place that you can’t leave is a prison). 

Jules runs, with Tom on her heels. She picks up a stray dog in the process, makes it to a service station, calls Craig because he is the only person she can contact who doesn’t seem involved with Darros. Craig picks her up, but Tom is smart enough to track them through the dog collar. There’s a lovely scene in the car between Craig (who is so great!) and Jules, in which Jules expresses her struggle with identity and Craig tells her about a girl who was raised as a Mormon, who Craig always perceived as an unindividual, indistinctive, not quite real, and ran away to become a singer in Reno (“it’s where you’re going that counts”). Instead of continuing to run, Jules decides to lure Tom to a dockyard, where Lucy and Eleanor hit his car with their truck. And then the dog, made an unwilling accomplice in the hunt, eats his severed ear, only to run away into the night. It’s the first shots fired in a long battle ahead. 

Random notes: 

The moment when Eleanor tells Kira she should have known better because of how she grew up is pretty damning. I do very much agree, but I think Eleanor can’t really imagine the utter devastation on Kira when she lost her partner. 

I like that the episode, in a subtle way, contains two religious reactions to the idea of print-outs: Xander explains the concept of “bardo” in Buddhism, the period of time when one soul wanders before reincarnating into something new. This concept of course allows for print-outs to have souls. Whatever goes on in Lucas’ head when he finds out about his mum’s death doesn’t – to him, print-outs are abominations who can’t be in his church, literally (which isn’t very far away ideologically from the horrible fanatic who raised Helena as a weapon against her sisters). 

I like that the nasal spray came back into play. I knew it had to come in that form for some reason, since that sequence of events was otherwise utterly bewildering. 

Lucy knocking out Pam Teller with a gun after finding out that Jules has been taken to Darros’ compound was very satisfying – she is exactly the kind of character that would have met an even more violent end in the original show. 

Dr Teller also confirms that all the faked memories they planted in Jules were created for a reason. 

Eleanor and Lucy become close pretty quickly, but Eleanor doesn’t seem to be sharing the full story of Lucy’s traumatic bathroom memory: she tells her that their dad committed suicide, but there’s definitely more to this that she is leaving out. 

I love the scene in which the camera slowly pans over a coffee table of misery, covered in a bottle of liquor, chips, cigarette stubs, until it lands on Kira passed out on the couch. She’s just witnessed Josh kill himself! Her wife has left her! She’s buried her partner in an anonymous grave that only she knows about! It’s impossible to think that she’s gone through all of this alone. 

Kira looks at Josh’s laptop and finds a series of increasingly more desperate and frantic video diaries (poor Josh!) and an ominous diary entry about a BIG LAUNCH! that’s happening soon. 

Kira calls Emily for help, but in the tense scene in the diner, it becomes obvious that something must have changed for Emily, because she’s brought a gun to the meeting. 

Dark days ahead for Xander, who Darros makes clear will face the consequences for Jules’ escape: it’s a thinly veiled threat, since the machine that printed him is literally in the backyard – he can easily be replaced. In the end, he has packed his little backpack, which reminded me of one of the greatest tumblr posts of all time: “Father is…evil? Father is unyielding? Father is incapable of love? I am running away. I am packing my little rucksack and going out to explore the world as a lone vagabond. I can no longer thrive in this household.”

Full neo-Clone-Club assembled! It’s Me, Me and Me! 

Here’s a toast to a very good boy! I really hope we’ll get a reunion one day.