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Orphan Black: The Antisocialism of Sex

“It’s nothing insurmountable.”

As Clone Club reels from their latest loss, we get to see how differently each member deals with grief.

Siobhan lashes out, Alison turns to religion and party planning, Art to violence, and Felix goes into full-on caretaker mode. All totally within character. There are times I get frustrated with this show, the direction its heading, recent retconny-type revelations, but episodes like this one remind me why I really love this show. Aside from the human cloning craziness and rampant conspiracies, each character has been crafted precisely and every little action they take is well within that their personality and history.

Sarah, who previously abandoned Kira with her adopted mum and took off with her shady boyfriend for a crime and party spree, has come a very long way since her introduction in the pilot. Here we see her revert to that pre-season one form and…oh my god. Drinking, drugs, hooking up with strangers in club bathrooms, all to chase away the ghost of sestra past. The specter of Beth follows Sarah in appropriately haunting fashion. Sarah, like Beth, has had all hope ripped away. Like Beth, she is feeling very isolated, assuming (correctly) that Siobhan blames her for Kendall’s death. While she could do the healthy thing and reach out to the people who care about her, she self destructs, falling back to the person she was before she saw Beth and the craziness began.

The scene between her and halluci-Beth on the bridge or overpass or whatever that was was just beautiful. I got to the point I was actually thinking “oh my god, they’re going to kill Sarah.” Especially after Kira’s intensely creepy pronouncement that Sarah was “following Beth.” What is this thing that Kira has where she can sense her mother and aunties’ emotions? And I was also struck by the mural on her wall, the fire coming out of the dragon’s mouth. Remember her vision of Sarah being burned by “all the aunties?” Kira was wrong about Sarah killing herself so maybe she’ll be wrong about this, too.

Cosima also self destructs, after a fashion. having decided that Sarah’s worm bot is an on/off switch for the disease and not just an on switch, attempts to implant it in herself and because, like Sarah, she is totally desperate and blaming herself. So, probable suicide it is. Again, this is super in character for Cosima who, for all her intelligence and education, is as prone to taking risks as Sarah. That she picked up the phone when Felix called is something of a miracle.

So now we know what Krystal saw: Delphine get shot and be picked up by someone else, alive. Although that doesn’t mean she’s not dead now, it does mean that everyone who was pissed off about her death after she was shot once in the stomach were wrong. Told you so. Just a random thought, however: should we trust Krystal? What if the ditz thing is a total act and she’s really the one who shot Delphine and/or the one who picked her up afterwards? Could she be a very well camouflaged plant?

Rachel is now allowed out of her very fancy prison and walks around a very stair-heavy house. I mean, Susan, c’mon. It was nice of you to let her out but that place doesn’t have an elevator or something? Your daughter needs crutches to walk, have some decency and at least help her up the stairs. We got some Neolution background (apparently it originated in the 1800s) and Rachel hallucinated a swan. Sort of. The way it pixelated when it disappeared makes me believe that it wasn’t a hallucination but some sort of image implanted in Rachel’s prosthetic eye. Why? The swan was walking away from her at the end, was she meant to follow it?

Keeping Up with Clone Club

Donnie’s been arrested for trafficking drugs. Not sure why they had enough on him and not Alison, but whatever. Maybe Duko and Evie wanted to keep her out of the system because it would’ve drawn too much attention, her fingerprints matching Sarah’s. Helena went unseen and unmentioned by anyone. MK appeared at the very end of the episode contacting Kira.

Neolutionist Bits and Prolethean Pieces

Ira called his lover “Mother” and I almost died of grossness.

The cut between Sarah doing cocaine and Beth doing cocaine actually made me gasp.

The older Charlotte gets, the more she looks like her sisters. Excellent casting.

Clone Quotes

Donnie: “Ali, Gemma will still love you even if the decorations aren’t symmetrical.”

Kira: “This time, she’s following Beth.”

Felix: “You gotta be stronger than her, Sarah.”

four out of four symmetrical decorations
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sunbunny, who is probably not played by Tatiana Maslany

6 comments:

  1. If only threesomes went as well in real life...

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  2. and identical twins and clones do not have identical fingerprints. Genotype does not equal phenotype.

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  3. Thanks, Docnaz. I was going from what Cosima said in season one, that their fingerprints might be close enough to flag a match.

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  4. Oops, I forget it is a TV show and not a medical documentary😂 I suspect we may have a case of Chekov's fingerprints!

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  5. Ira reminds me of Norman on Bates Motel. Pretty creepy. This was a sad episode and a hard one to watch.

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  6. This is the episode that got Tatiana her Emmy! :D So happy for her.

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