Orphan Black - Table of Contents

Season One. 

Season Two: 

Nature Under Constraint and Vexed.
Governed by Sound Reason and True Religion.
Mingling Its Own Nature With It.
Governed as It Were by Chance.
Ipsa Scientia Potestas.
To Hound Nature in Her Wanderings.
Knowledge of Causes, and Secret Motion of Things.
Variable and Full of Perturbation.
Things Which Have Never Yet Been Done.
By Means Which Have Never Yet Been Tried.

Season Three: 

The Weight of This Combination.
Transitory Sacrifices of Crisis.
Formalized, Complex, and Costly.
Newer Elements of Our Defense.
Scarred By Many Past Frustrations.
Certain Agony of the Battlefield. 
Community of Dreadful Fear and Hate. 
Ruthless in Purpose, and Insidious in Method. 
Insolvent Phantom of Tomorrow. 
History Yet to Be Written. 

Season Four: 

The Collapse of Nature.
Transgressive Border Crossing.
The Stigmata of Progress.
From Instinct to Rational Control.
Human Raw Material.
The Scandal of Altruism.
The Antisocialism of Sex.
The Redesign of Natural Objects. 
The Mitigation of Competition. 
From Dancing Mice to Psychopaths.

Season Five: 

The Few Who Dare.
Clutch of Greed.
Beneath Her Heart.
Let the Children and Childbearers Toil.
Ease for Idle Millionaires.
Manacled Slim Wrists.
Gag or Throttle.
Guillotines Decide.
One Fettered Slave.
To Right the Wrongs of Many.

Orphan Black: Echoes

Season One: 

Pilot.

Jules.

Pegasus Girl.

It's All Coming Back.

Do I Know You?

Unless You Trusted Someone.

The Dog's Honest Truth.

The Paradox of Joyce.

Attracting Awful Things.

We Will Come Again.

Orphan Black: Echoes - The best thing that we can do is just let go.

Orphan Black: Echoes: 1x10 We Will Come Again.

I’ll be okay. 

Oh Jules! The conclusion of the first season of Orphan Black: Echoes, which has not even aired yet in the United States and is therefore in limbo when it comes to renewal, genuinely made me sad, and I did not quite see it coming either. Amanda Fix’ performance has been a stand-out, and she captures Jules’ bravery and sadness perfectly. Especially in the last two episodes, she has been vocal about the family she has found when she discovered Eleanor and Lucy – how it feels like a homecoming, after feeling alien in her foster family (remember, the walls were never fully painted), and uncomfortable in her life with all of those fake planted memories that were clearly incongruous with her as a person. Lucy makes a great sacrifice in this episode, choosing not go with Jack and Charlie to keep them safe from the consequences of being around her, but it’s Jules who truly stands out as someone who is bravely facing what fighting against Darros requires, even though she is only sixteen and would have every right to stand aside and let the grown-ups do the fighting. 

First of, Lucy learns from Tom that he wants to exchange Charlie for Jules because it’s what Darros wants. Tom would prefer getting to kill Lucy, but it looks like for now he is still under the control of the man whose approval he desperately seeks. Lucy is hesitant to sacrifice Jules, because it would be deeply immoral to ask that sacrifice of a child, even though Jack seems willing to (he is forgiven as a desperate father, but I think it reveals why he ultimately has to leave in the end – his priorities don’t align with the fight). Jules overhears and makes the choice herself, willingly giving herself up to keep Charlie safe. The episode doesn’t dwell much on Charlie and this additional trauma, because unfortunately it doesn’t have enough time to investigate further, but it must have been horrifying for her to be held by Tom, without the ability to communicate with him, and then to lose another mother-figure when Lucy stays behind. Being abandoned is one of her greatest fears, and now it is happening again, not due to any shortcomings on Lucy’s part (which Charlie seems to understand – she only requests that Lucy promise to save Jules), but because of the circumstances they’ve found themselves in. Lucy is giving up her found family that has propelled her forward and given her reason, but she has also found a new reason, and her protectiveness of Jules stems from the genuine connection she has with her that goes beyond their shared biology. 

Luckily for them, Xander’s memories (memories that reveal what kind of person Darros is, but also ask bigger question about whether the technology has advanced further than even Kira knows) have now put him firmly in the anti-Darros camp. He can get them into the compound to free Jules, and Darros will be gone with most of his security team for the big launch that is just ahead. This is essentially a heist – Xander will grovel to Darros, biting his tongue when he weaves a smartly constructed tale that fits in perfectly with how Paul sees himself (thanking him for being the strong one, offering the opportunity not to have to carry that burden by himself). Darros will reinstate him on the groundskeeping team, even if it’s just for a trial period, giving Xander the chance to smuggle in Lucy. Meanwhile, Kira will attend the launch and distract Paul with questions about his sister. In the background of the plan is the question of what the launch is, exactly, and the discovery runs alongside the planning and Darros’ final reveal. Eleanor and Kira break back into the closed down lab to print the faces of the scans they’ve found in the vault (this reveals that they are eleven teenagers, and one more scan that they can’t decrypt). Someone Eleanor knows (I think maybe the woman she’s been having an affair with?) can get them access to the census database to identify who exactly Darros has printed. It’s not something the show addresses explicitly, but what that turn of events reveals about data security and privacy in the 2050s is pretty harrowing, especially in conjunction with Paul’s access to the entirety of the US’ medical data. The future is truly dystopian, even if for now that realisation only plays out on such a small scale. 

Eleanor realisation that all of the scans she can identify belong to the greatest minds of the previous generation (some of whom have passed away) comes just before Paul reveals his “Genius Project”. He claims to have identified highly intelligent youths in the foster care system whom he has placed with loving families to harness their intelligence and find solutions for the world’s greatest problems. The truth is deeply cynical: he is a man who wants “pure potential” without the baggage of having to deal with actual people. Surely there are actually many kids in the foster care system that would be suitable, and in profound need of that help, but instead he has harnessed the minds of the previous generation (what I would call a boomer move), and therefore stripped the risk of any unforeseen developments. He has created a completely controlled situation – obviously these kids have not been placed in families, instead, the claim unrolls just as Lucy and the newly freed Jules discover grim pods in the basement of the compound, outfitted with restraints and pictures of fake family members. They have been printed without any memories and raised like lab rats, a tabula rasa for Paul to project his ideas on, without the risk of the kind of opposition and rebelliousness that Jules has. When Kira confronts him with questions about Zora, his sister, to stall him, he replies that she “can’t let go of the past, I only think about the future” – but it’s a future that he fully controls, that negates individuality and the ability to meaningfully make choices. He claims that the ends justify the means, and that he is beyond questions of ethics because he doesn’t do it for personal gain, while Kira used the technology to try and reverse the death of her wife. 

Instead of trying to leave quickly, Lucy and Jules once again do the responsible thing and collect as much information as they can to try and reveal the truth about Darros. Meanwhile, Xander has been tasked with disabling the printer, although it is unclear if he actually does. They run out of time: Darros returns early, and delivers a whole speech about how his project is meant to prevent “corruption” – like how Lucy, with her opposition to him, has corrupted Jules. He shoots Jules in the head, and then reveals to a grieving and outraged Lucy that he has already created another, more pliant version of her (suitably blonde, because we know who Darros wanted Jules to be based on the memories he tried to give her). And: Eleanor successfully identifies the final print-out, and discovers that it’s a young version of Kira Manning herself. 

Random notes: 

The only person who ends this season with a shred of happiness, at least for now, before she finds out what happened to Jules, is Kira: Eleanor has been thinking about what to do, and has decided to follow Lucas’ advice that if Kira gives her meaning, she should keep her in her life. She pulls out the garden to start afresh, “here, with me”, as Kira asks, disbelieving her luck. 

There is a little last-moment side-story here about Rhona trying to blackmail Kira into printing her father that just hangs there, maybe to be picked up again next season – in an episode that feels like it doesn’t really have enough time in the first place, it feels a bit sudden and rushed, even if it reveals Kira’s deep regrets over what she has done and her conclusion that printing the person she loved wasn’t the right way to deal with her grief. 

Jack: You’ve been looking for who you are for a long time and maybe you didn’t think you would find people who are actually you, but you did. It’s okay for it to mean something. 

I like how Xander knew exactly what to say to Paul: he has, after all, studied him, and knows him in and out.

I really hope we get a second season, and I feel like that in spite of the definiteness of the headshot (deliberate, presumably, because they’ve successfully revived a gunshot victim before…), there is still a bit of wiggle room with the reveal that the technology does new and unexpected things that make Xander’s memory possible. 

Orphan Black: Echoes – I finally feel like I belong somewhere.

Orphan Black: Echoes: 1x09 Attracting Awful Things.

Who am I? Who are we?

I like how Echoes, although shaky at times in terms of general consistency, has combined the idea of a greater power struggle against technology being misused by a powerful billionaire with questions about identity and belonging. The show would be emotionally empty if the viewers weren’t so invested in Jules, Lucy, and Eleanor’s struggle to find meaning in how they were created, knowing that they’ve either come into the world without memories or that those memories belong to someone who has died. Lucy, who is age-wise right in the middle, has had the most time to create a life for herself that she finds grounding in – she wants a future with Jack and Charlie, her found family. It’s much harder for Jules and Eleanor, who have both spent the last year being told lies by people they thought they could trust and now have to find an entirely new way to exist. Having seen the final episode of the season, Jules telling the others that she has found belonging with her “selflings” (a great word coined by Craig) is deeply heartbreaking. It’s meaningful that her foster mother Neva is involved in the episode when she helps Kira and Delphine dig up financial dirt on Darros, but has no interaction with Jules – it’s like all that’s left for Jules are these new people deeply involved in the conspiracy, and her fate is bound to them – even though she’s so young, her way to claim agency is to fight Paul Darros. 

The other thread in the episode is about characters trying to create a meaningful life after having done something horrible. Again, it’s interesting that this comes from Craig, who has been characterised as the most selflessly helpful, non-judgemental character – someone who immediately came to Jules’ help, in spite of not really knowing her well, someone who believed Lucy when she told him about the complex and fairly unbelievable conspiracy. After Xander’s accidentally shot him, he refuses to go to the hospital, and explains to Lucy that he was involved in a death in his youth – an idealistic man, he was part of a group that burned down the office of a pharmaceutical company, believing it to be empty. His guilt has haunted him (hence the drinking, which he continues to do), but he has tried to create meaning by helping others and by getting Lucy back on her feet. Like both Felix and Delphine have been telling Kira, the way to move forward from guilt is to prevent worse things from happening and to take responsibility. Eleanor’s guilt is of a different kind, since she has now learned that her memories aren’t really her own: a flashback completes the memory that Jules and Lucy share with her, and we find out that her father was still alive when she found him, but asked her not to call an ambulance. It has been implied that his depression weighed heavily on the whole family, that it, along with her mother’s early-onset Alzheimer’s, has determined how Eleanor proceeded in her life from then on. Eleanor wanted to spare Jules and Lucy from the truth of what happened (or felt ashamed), but both of them have always felt a sense of guilt over the memory, and Lucy, after seeing Craig shot, has put the pieces together, and is now struggling with the question of what it means that she is based on a person who would have made that decision. 

The way to resolve the dilemma is to cling to the idea that they are still individuals with control over their own lives, that even though they have been created from the same base information, they can develop and change into their own, unique lives. It’s a greater struggle for Xander, who, having consumed the rest of Jules’ drug, now has even more memories at his disposal to learn about who Paul Darros is. He’s been raised with the idea that he is meant to be the perfect spitting image of Darros, but what he finds in those memories deeply disturbs him. He learns that there was a previous version of a print-out, who was no viable without medical intervention, and so Paul let him die, telling him a line about how hard it is to be the strong one that shines a horrifying light on the previous memory with his sick sister. Has he done this before? 

This memory is triggered when Xander helps the others to unlock Darros’ vault. It’s a new piece of technology that only works if the person using the token associates the symbol with the correct thought pattern, so Xander’s availability is truly fortuitous. The servers contain medical files for everyone in the United States, including the full-body-scans that patients receive regularly at their doctor’s appointments – meaning that Darros, in theory, has the ability to print anyone he chooses to. They find that he has accessed the files of twelve anonymised patients, a fact that is certainly connected to the big launch that is just ahead. 

Random notes: 

The corporate logo for Darros is the pendant he took from his sister, the same pendant he put on a dying first version of Xander. 

Also – if we ever do get a second season, which I very much hope we do: Xander shouldn’t be able to remember the fate of his predecessor. At first I thought that maybe his memories are based on a more recent scan of Darros, but then, that shouldn’t really be possible because of his age! And someone like Paul Darros would be deeply unhappy about not being able to transfer full consciousness, because he would love to live forever. I feel like maybe he’s managed to alter the technology somehow to create some kind of continuity, which would have interesting implications if any of the characters ever should die…

Delphine Cormier is back! And Évelyne Brochu still has the perfect grasp on the character, who is pitch-perfect, as if we’ve never left 2017. My favourite moments were when she ribbed Cosima’s dreadlocks (a stylistic choice already widely considered problematic way back when) and talked her way into the bank’s basement by connecting with a fellow French-speaker. It was a nice reminder that Delphine, in the later parts of the seasons, fought back against Neolution by digging into its finances. 

“I’ll tell you what I told Cosima a hundred times. It doesn’t matter how you came to be. What matters is your passion. That’s who you are.”

“If anyone understands making mistakes out of scientific curiosity, it’s me.”

Tom! I’ve mentioned before how perfectly Dominic Reed has played a slightly unhinged villain (he even has a little board on his wall, with strings and everything!), very much in the tradition of the original Orphan Black, and his truly sinister nature comes to the foreground in this episode. He exchanges tickets for a Celine Dion concert for some info on Jack’s unit, tracking down Tina’s house, and then proceeds to kidnap Charlie, whose been left alone with Tina because Jack was needed to help with Craig’s gunshot wound.

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. 

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. 

Orphan Black: Echoes - I made you, and I’m responsible for you.

Orphan Black: Echoes: 1x06 Unless You Trusted Someone.

It’s me. I changed. 

I think it’s very interesting how Echoes delineates the morals around printing people, especially without the consent of the “prime” and while keeping the resulting human being ignorant of how they have been created. Paul Darros is emerging as the clear villain in the story: he is a ruthless billionaire, the kind that is (boringly) interested in the same things that most others of his ilk are. He wants some kind of extended, if not eternal, life. I’m sure as we follow the rabbit hole down further, some kind of dystopian idea about how he thinks he will mitigate the climate catastrophe for himself will emerge (just mentioning here on a side-note that many of the technologies that Jules is shown in this episode seem perfectly adapt to make it on a spaceship, and graphene as a material for a rocket is explicitly mentioned). It’s very much a timely portrait (this year alone, in terms of novels, there have been Birnam Wood, Camp Zero, the great Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang), that would be trite if it weren’t so rooted in the reality that we live in. These obscenely rich people are terrified of death – and perhaps even more so, of not living long enough to witness the for many harrowing societal changes they have an active role in creating. 

Contrast that with Kira, who spends a significant part of the episode both horrified by the moral implications of what she has done to Lucy (and, as we find out, Eleanor) and eager to drive the point home that she created out of love, not greed. It’s perhaps an argument that is undermined by the fact that she did it twice, and there is a certain perfection to how casually the episode surprises us with Eleanor’s presence in her life: after the love story that we witnessed last episode, and the deep regret she voiced to Lucy about what she has done, it’s shocking to realise that all this time, she’s lived with an Eleanor who is utterly ignorant of how she was made, or that anything more serious than a concussion occurred. Eleanor strides in from a work trip but the realisation is momentous, and gives a keener sense of how deeply mentally distraught Kira was after finding her partner dead. 

Josh is the one who convinces her in the end – a scientist who adores Kira for her talent, but who also based his entire moral conception of their work on hers. When she went off course, he did too. When she lost her compass, he lost his along with her. They’ve already crossed the line with Lucy, an experiment that went horribly wrong, so they might as well do it again with more recent scans of Eleanor that are detailed enough to restore her full memory. This time, Kira has no reason to explain what has happened, because from Eleanor’s point of view, she has just woken up in the same life she has always known. There is no break in there for her, no caesura, but the break in Kira’s life, the traumatising experience of finding Eleanor dead, remains ever present in her mind. Yes, there is a sense here that she simply could not go on (the episode shows her dejectedly smoking in a dead garden, now with nobody to tend to it, the sheer emptiness and bleakness of her life without Eleanor), but at the same time, Eleanor’s creation has not removed the memory of once having lost her. From the glimpses we get, Kira is hyper-vigilant now – she wakes up before Eleanor, anxiously waiting for the moment she opens her eyes, in case she doesn’t. She doses her with medication for Alzheimer’s without her knowledge, without her consent, because she fears what will happen if the previous history repeats. Their intimacy was so clear in the previous episode: they were in this life together, both as partners and as fellow scientists – but that intimacy is lost now in the rift of Kira’s lies, all the things she cannot tell Eleanor, all the burdens she carries alone. 

And Kira now has a whole different project – atonement for her sins against Lucy, with the added responsibility of Jules, who she knows must have been created by Darros with Josh’s help. The episode sends Kira and Lucy off to find Josh, who is now living a horrifyingly gaudy life in a huge McMansion with sports cars parked in front of it. He is alone, with the exception of his cats. The money he thought would make him happy has only made him deeply sad and regretful. They track him down with the help of Jack (better not to question how his history in the military has given him access to “military grade” information, such as the address of someone who’s hired a PO Box), and when Kira arrives, he has packed his bags, ready to leave, ever conscious that having sold the technology to Darros, he will never be free of his grasp. Kira confronts him with the reality of having created a teenager without a memory, a person who has no idea who she is, the ethical horrors of that transgression. Josh tries to explain how Kira’s decision to bring back Eleanor unmoored him. “I really thought we were gonna be together forever. Partners. Friends. I loved working with you so much.” Then he shoots himself. It’s difficult not to hold Kira partially responsible for his death. 

In the meantime, Jules returns with her mother, who has made it very clear that she is not in on the conspiracy. She is told that Darros placed her with this family to simulate a normal life, but it’s also very obvious that Neva is a mother to her, that Neva loves her. James, on the other hand, proves to be a horrible person yet again: he’s called Darros, and Jules is removed and kidnapped to his personal compound. It feels like whatever his plans for her were, they did not include Jules having any knowledge of her own creation, and now that she knows the truth, the plan has changed. In the compound, she is given the illusion of freedom but runs into its limit very soon (a sonic barrier). A young man named Alex gives her a tour of the facilities that seems specifically geared to convince her to stay. Darros knows that she has a scientific mind, that she is interested in cutting-edge research. Xander shows her plants resurrected from extinction, self-sustaining biomes, a dome powered with the mycelia of mushrooms. None of it convinces her to stay, but her escape attempt fails. She sees Xander in front of a screen, learning to copy Paul Darros’ pattern of speech perfectly, and just as Josh tells Kira that Darros’ goal is to extend his life, Jules puts the pieces together that Xander is a younger version of Paul, a boy who was told he was the only one of his kind, created to give Darros another generation to pursue his goals. He is another deeply sad creation, but what was the goal behind Jules’?

Random notes: 

Oh Josh! We see so little of him, and yet I found his speech before he committed suicide deeply affecting. 

I’m assuming that Jules was creating to harness Eleanor’s scientific ability without her focus on dementia research – Jules doesn’t have the personal motivation to pursue this goal, and I think that Darros wants to use her genius for something else. He collects geniuses, as Xander’s tour shows, and like so many other current billionaires, it appears as if Darros himself has never really created anything of value, he just buys it. 

There is a clear sense of Kira’s continuing breakdown in this episode: the way she speaks to the religious girl that Lucas brings home (“I just hate God!” A great unhinged performance by Keeley Hawes throughout the dinner party), the way she is lost for words when she finds out about Eleanor’s affair, and then reacts with a simple “okay”, even though Eleanor seems to do everything in her power to elicit a strong emotional reaction from her. It’s a very ironic twist that in not being able to share the truth with Eleanor, Kira has unwittingly created a (likely unmendable) rift in their relationship – but then I would argue that Kira’s goal wasn’t necessarily to bind Eleanor to her forever, that she just couldn’t imagine living in a world without her in it, regardless of whether Eleanor would stay with her forever or not. 

Fucking James. 

Kira didn’t tell Lucas that his mum had died even a month after Lucy’s creation! What was the plan here? Even if Lucy had worked out, how would she have explained that to him? How did she secretly bury the body of her dead partner? 

Kira: I wanted to make sure that you knew who you were supposed to be. Now I wanna make sure that it never happens to anyone else. 

Orphan Black: Echoes - I lost her, and then I lost my way.

Orphan Black: Echoes: 1x05 Do I Know You?

I have to believe that a world with her in it, even if it’s complicated, is better than a world without her. 

One of the questions behind the mystery of Echoes is how Kira Manning, daughter of Sarah, the result of a secretive and illegal science experiment that was entangled with a deeply conspiratorial corporate power structure, ended up creating Lucy. Nobody should have been better equipped to comprehend the dangers of allowing a billionaire so much control over her research, and nobody should have been better equipped to consider the ethics of printing an entire human being. 

Do I Know You?, so far the best episode of the show, proposes a compelling backstory to comprehend how Kira was pushed to the decision. This is a heartbreaking love story, told gently from beginning to what would have conventionally been the end, had it not been for Kira’s scientific ability to manoeuvre around death. It makes it clear that Echoes, more than the original show ever was, has an ambition beyond telling a story about agency and breaking free from control: it’s about grief and death, and the meaning that both provide to those left behind, and what happens when the survivors find it impossible to move on, or are provided with a loophole. And I think it is fair to state this from the beginning: it’s not really a loophole, because if following Lucy (and Jules) has taught us anything, it’s that they are individuals with their own paths in life. They are not bound by the identity of their original, and have lived distinctive lives (again, the role of nurture). They are not a copy in the sense of perfect replication of identity – if anything, the blueprint provides them with a range of potential that could spin off into a wide variety of different lives. 

A young Kira Manning, maybe in her mid-twenties at that stage (and portrayed fantastically by August Winter, who gives her a shyness and tenderness in this episode that makes me wish they had gotten more opportunities to play her), is falling in love with Eleanor Miller, a researcher who is leading a trial to utilise an existing muscle-spasm drug to stall Alzheimer’s. We’ll later learn that Eleanor has dedicated herself to that research because her mother developed early-onset Alzheimer’s, that after a difficult childhood (of which we’ve seen hints through Lucy and Jules’ shared memory and their mother’s vague statements), she is now living through the trauma of slowly losing her mother. It’s clear that Kira’s feelings are reciprocated – Eleanor is subtle about it, but the episode conveys perfectly how aware they are of each other whenever they’re in the same room. For professional reasons (because she always wanted to get into bio-engineering) and to get away from the distraction, Kira changes to a different programme, but they meet again later, at a function, and without the constrictions of a student-teacher relationship, their love blossoms. Kira says that “she’s hiding most of the time, with most of the people in her life”, but she doesn’t have to with Eleanor, who seems to get her in a way that nobody else does. It’s such a compelling and true portrayal of the serendipity of finding someone, with such an immediate clarity that it is serious and life-changing. Echoes gives us glimpses of their shared life together, especially the profound sense of pride Eleanor feels whenever Kira’s project of printing organs makes progress. They are both brilliant, and devoted to each other, as they move through moving in with each other and discussing children. In fact, it’s Eleanor who encourages Kira to accept funding for her project from Paul Darros – she’s cynical about his motives, but thinks that if his money can affect positive change, she should take it. 

Time passes. Kira, who didn’t seem to be sure about having children before, carries Lucas because Eleanor can’t – the repeating phrase of “Do I know you? / I thought you might.”, with different meaning each time, also reminds us that people in relationship grow and change with each other, that their shared life and shared experiences affect them as a unit. Suddenly, it’s 2050 (Eleanor is now played by Rya Kihlstedt, Kira by Keeley Hawes). Kira has moved from her success of printing a human heart to running the Additive Foundation, with Darros’ funding. Ominously, he asks her where her research will go next and enquires about the possibility of printing a whole person, just for the purpose of “unfettered research”, what they’ll “discover along the way”. Deeply disturbed, Kira reminds Paul of how immoral it would be. Her reaction is still in line with what we would expect of Sarah Manning’s daughter, of Cosima’s niece. 

The turning point comes when Eleanor begins experiencing the first symptoms of early-onset Alzheimer’s, now at the same age as her mother was when she did. She leaves to go to the pool, the one activity that has consistently provided her solace, and immediately gets lost in a neighbourhood she should know like the back of her hand. Desperate, she tries to find her way but keeps returning to the same point, increasingly distressed and confused. It’s a harrowing depiction of the experience, especially with the knowledge that Eleanor is aware of what will happen next, and what it will do to the people she loves. Kira jumps to hopeful ideas about possible treatments, but Eleanor knows that the drug she developed won’t help. She decides to keep Lucas in the dark because she doesn’t want to interrupt his life the way hers was. It’s a kind of isolation that she imposes on Kira, who is not only losing the one person who understands her, that she’s shared her life with, but is also robbed of the chance to share this burden with their son. Kira asks Josh, her assistant, to help her develop neuron printing, which could help, but the surgery is risky. When Eleanor forgets their son – a whole person, erased from her memory – she decides to go ahead, a decision she has to make alone because Eleanor can no longer meaningfully consent to her own treatment. 

I’ve been a fan of Keeley Hawes for a long time (not so much just from Tipping the Velvet, but her performance in Spooks, Ashes to Ashes, and Line of Duty, both radically different characters from Kira), and the way she portrays Kira’s loneliness and desperation is stunning. The episode has taken such immense care with their relationship, to make it clear what’s at stake, and what it means for Kira to lose that anchor, a life partner that she has shared everything with. The surgery is successfully and Eleanor returns to her own self, as if nothing ever happened – like a deus ex machina, an act of god, a miracle too great to be believed. It reverses the particular cruelty of the ambiguous loss that Alzheimer’s causes, having to grief the loss of a person when they’re still alive, losing bits and pieces over time without any real hope of reversing it. They are “them” again, for a night at least, but when Kira wakes up the next morning, Eleanor is dead. 

This whole show hinges on Kira’s motivation, on the moment she wakes up and finds the love of her life dead beside her. It’s palpable, sheer, impossible grief. It overrides any ethical concern she previously held about Darros’ suggestion, because life without Eleanor is impossible. Later, talking about it with Lucy, who doesn’t quite understand, she says that she “lost her, and then lost my way” – but there is a sense here that Kira lost her mind, not just her way – she keeps his mother’s death secret from Lucas, she somehow disposes of the body without a funeral, secretly, she prints Lucy, making a less-than foolproof plan to keep the precise specs of her machine secret from Darros, because she already knows what kind of Pandora’s box she opening. Her only connection to reality is Josh, who adores her enough that he says yes to everything she asks of him, in spite of his own concerns. She tells Lucy that she has to believe in a world with Eleanor in it is better, even if it’s complicated, but Lucy reminds her that she isn’t Eleanor: that the entire venture was foolish because the printing process did not truly capture whatever it is that animates an individual person (I guess for the purpose of simplicity, we could call it a “soul” or “spark”). Lucy is her own person, who has fallen in love with someone else and has had a whole different life. It’s such a compelling moment between these two characters. Lucy is arguing for her own autonomy, to a creator she thinks has acted irresponsibly but without whom she would not exist. Kira is sitting opposite someone who looks exactly like the love of her life 20 years ago, but who is a complete stranger that she is also existentially responsible for. Kira understands that Lucy is not Eleanor, but she is also not telling Lucy the most damning part of the story, because she knows that it is beyond understanding. 

Random notes: 

I’ve recapped most of this season so far having not watched ahead, but I’ve seen the next episode already – and I feel that Kira’s omission here is very important, it’s sort of a turning point for her character, but it was probably a good idea not to have that included in this episode yet, because it would have taken away some of the emotional impact of the love story itself, or cheapened it somehow as a self-contained thing that exists. 

Lucy finds out that the tattoo number is in fact not a copyright or patent, but a replication of a tattoo that Eleanor and Kira got together, the first line of a poem by W.S. Merwin: “Let me imagine that we will come again / when we want to and it will be spring”.

The more important revelation is that Kira has no idea who Jules is, or that she exists. Clearly her plan of keeping Darros from using the machine for his own purposes has failed, and we all know who the weakest link in that equation was. 

It’s so interesting to pick up on all the ways in which Eleanor differs from Lucy (the equivalent in terms of different life experiences between these two would be Sarah and Cosima) – in a way, Krysten Ritter’s performance is more subtle. Eleanor is very stable and confident through her career, an anchor that Lucy doesn’t have. 

Do we think that Lucy chose her own name based on a vague memory of Lucas?

Very effective music choices in this episode, especially Big Thief’s Change. 

I think it’s also very interesting that all three of them – Eleanor, Lucy, and Jules – have the same access to a kind of charisma that seems to create a gravity well of impact on people around them. Eleanor’s flirting with Kira was… something. 

Orphan Black: Echoes - Do you think we’re happy?

Orphan Black: Echoes: 1x04 It's All Coming Back.

First you should know, you were made out of love.

The mystery is unravelling fast in Echoes’ fourth episode. After the horrible experience of her foster parents forcing her to take medication she hasn’t consented to, Jules runs away from home, smart enough to exchange her phone (which Tom and Myung, her handler, monitor) and her clothes with Wes. She takes the study drugs she’s been making to Lucy’s house, where the two of them put them into a nasal spray (I’m just wildly assuming this will be relevant later, because why else bother?) and get high so they can experience their shared nightmare of the blood-covered bathroom together. Jack monitors, mildly amused by their antics. They end up drawing the individual elements of the bathroom they can both remember on some butcher’s paper and end up with a complete view that includes, as identified by Tina (who is great in this episode – Charlie knows about what’s happening now, but Tina is still in the dark, but would rather not know), a window view of Jamaica Plain, the former “lesbian capital of Boston”. It leads them straight to a sorority house, where they find that same bathroom, cheaply renovated, and realise that whoever lived there before the sorority will be the next clue in the puzzle. Conveniently, two of the girls remember an old lady from an assisted living community that wandered off because she remembered the house. Again, this is all very treasure-huntey and neatly arranged. I find both their struggles with identity, which surfaces during their trip, more compelling: does the same thing make both of them happy, since they are technically the same person? Do they have a soul in spite of being a “print-out” (I’m beginning to wish they had gone with the more pedestrian “copy”). Lucy seems more settled, since she has found happiness with Jack and Charlie, but Jules appears like she needs these answers because her life is in the balance and she has nothing to hold on to. 

In the meantime, Tom and Myung are working together to recapture their respective charges, and find they have much more in common with each other (also a distinctive lack of morals) than Tom has with Emily, who seems eager to help Kira save Lucy. They’re bonding over their shared love for Celine Dion, they have the same appreciation for feline comedy, Myung lets Tom know that Wes’ comedy is pretty good for a teenager, and available to view online. In summary, this is Emily’s worst nightmare: not only is she going behind Tom’s back when she shows Kira Lucy’s caravan which they’ve towed to a warehouse, to give her the opportunity to look for clues they may have missed, but also Tom has found an ally who is just as willing to go to extremes to tie up loose ends. It’s all fun and games when she’s sitting in the back of the car, suffering through a live performance of Dion’s dark ballad It’s All Coming Back to Me Now, but not so much when she has to ask Lucy to push her down some stairs so she can escape before Tom lays hands on her (surely there was a better option here that would have been easier on her collarbone). Emily’s gone rogue, and it’s obvious that part of the reason is her sympathy for Kira Manning. 

Kira: Why are you helping me? 

Emily: I guess I know what it’s like to be the only one looking out for someone. Weighs on you. 

Kira: You know, I made her. I put her into the world. And I’m not a religious person but hoping she’s okay, wanting her to be safe, it’s the closest I’ve ever come to praying.

At the nursing home, Melissa calls both Lucy and Jules “Eleanor”. Her behaviour is concerning enough that the receptionist calls Kira’s phone to let her know about it, a phone that is unfortunately monitored by Tom, which means that everyone is now heading there for an inevitable showdown. Before they arrive, Lucy and Jules find a pillow that shows a younger Melissa with a slightly older version of Jules: it was her high school graduation. Melissa is their mother, but she doesn’t want to talk about what exactly happened in the house in Jamaica Plain, something that must have been traumatic and troubling (as are several references to the character flaws of their dad). Lucy spots Tom and Myung and they run – Lucy escapes with Emily’s help, and after some prompting (specifically, a picture she’s drawn of the as-yet unidentified baby that must be Lucas), and Myung fires some shots after them, making it clear that Kira’s pleas to spare her have remained unheard. Jules escapes too – because Neva turns out to maybe not be in on everything. She ends up pepperspraying Tom before he can lay hands on her. 

In the end, Kira and Lucy are on a park bench, and Kira promises to tell her everything. She was made out of love…

Random notes: 

Jules ribbing Lucy for her choice of partner is hilarious: she calls Jack a “cis-het snoozer” (aww) and sees a “quaint normie picket-fence scenario” in their future. 

Charlie is very cool about finding out about Lucy’s identity, and takes no time at all to identify Jules as another “print-out”. 

Kira rips the drawing of the baby from a “The Philosophy of Identity” book in Lucy’s trailer – it’ll work later as bait for Lucy, but it also seems to be an attempt to hide Lucas’ identity from Tom and Darros, as if they don’t know how Lucy is connected to her. 

Kira tries to appeal to Paul Darros again at some kind of rewards ceremony at his compound, but he is almost threatening when he replies that whatever blood ends up on his hands regarding Lucy’s fate will be on hers as well. Corporate evil hasn’t changed much since 2017!

The scene of Tom and Myung singing in the car is hilarious, and played with gusto, and I did spend a solid hour trying to figure out if the man on the motorcycle in the original music video for the song is in fact Reed Diamond… results inconclusive. 

Regarding next steps, the pillow of the graduation ceremony conveniently has the name of the high school on it. 

“Frosé pong” is truly a fresh kind of horror. 

Orphan Black: Echoes – I’m sad because I feel nothing.

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. 

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.