Orphan Black (complete series)

 2013-2017 - Crave

As the pandemmy raged and lockdowns persisted, and the flood of new entertainment was but a trickle, I decided it was time to invest in binge watching a multi-season series that had been sitting on my "to watch" list for a very long time.

Orphan Black was always a kind of cult hit that never truly broke out large probably because it was a Canadian series co-produced with (and airing on) BBC America.  Only a few aspects of the show penetrated beyond its niche market bubble: it was a show about clones; its fans were called "#CloneClub", and Tatiana Maslany netted a surprise Emmy as best actress in a Drama for her work after its final season (a surprise only in that it was a genre show with a concentrated audience).

I put the first episode on "just to give it a shot", not really sure if this would be another episodic show that would take a season, or seasons to reveal its larger story. My wife kind of rolled her eyes and buried her nose in her social media / book rather certain this show would hold no interest for her. 

The series opens with darkly made-up Sarah Manning, mid-20's, having just gotten off a train. She makes a heated call from a payphone on the platform, noting in her English accent that she's back in town and wants to see her daughter, but she's hung up on.  A woman emerges onto the nearly empty platform sobbing loudly.  Sarah moves towards the woman who has put down her bag, taken off her shoes and folds her jacket.  The woman turns and she has Sarah's face. Sarah is stunned, the other woman seems somehow unsurprised to see her, and she calmly takes a couple paces in front of a train.  Sarah is stunned at first, but amid the commotion she picks up the other woman's purse and leaves the platform towards a new, twisted reality.

It's a bold opening that sets up the series operating pattern of surprising and shocking moments but grounded with a real sense of humanity. We get in this three minute opening stretch the revelation that Sarah is a clone as well as the death of that clone.  As well, Sarah has a British accent but the train platform announces the next train to New York City (the establishing skyline is definitely Toronto, and the train platform is definitely Union Station...there is no train service from Toronto to New York), so Sarah is not native to the country.  Sarah's make-up, hair and wardrobe indicate a rough lifestyle, rebellious at the very least.  She has loose change in her pocket, and no cel phone, so it indicates she doesn't really have any money. As well, she has a daughter whom she's not allowed to see, although we don't know yet who is not allowing her to see her.  

Rarely, I think, are costuming and make-up choices as deliberate as they are here at signalling a character's identity.  Over the run of the series, Maslany plays over a dozen different clones, each with strikingly unique identities.  Maslany gives each of them - the main ones, the ancillary ones, and even the one-offs - their own speech, their own physicality, their own mannerisms but not in a way that screams "ACTING!".  It's subtle, nuanced performances that breathe life into each of them.  Of course, each identity is aided with their own style - clothing, makeup and hair - with some of the best wig work.  These aesthetic choices are labored over for movies and TV shows, used to help define the character, but they're so rarely needed to distinguish the character from other similar characters, being performed by the same actor.  Within 5 episodes Maslany earned the Emmy it would take another 5 years for her to win, but likewise the hair, makeup and wardrobe teams should have been given such commendation.

Following her encounter on the platform, Sarah, we learn, is a con artist with a troubled past.  She's an orphan who was raised by Siobhan (the amazing Maria Doyle Kennedy) alongside her orphan foster brother Felix (Jordan Gavaris). Siobhan is now raising Sarah's daughter, Kira, and has forbidden Sarah from seeing her until she cleans up her life.  Both confused by what happened and rejected by Siobhan, Sarah adopts her doppleganger's life, and stretches to the limit her conning ability.  In becoming Beth Childs, Sarah stumbles her way through being a police detective, learning that her alternate had her own secrets, substance abuse and a wrongful death incident looming over her.  Beth's partner Art is frustrated with her, but gives her a lot of latitude. 

Throughout the first episode one can't help but get the feeling it's going to be a slow burn, Sarah's journey into #CloneClub...but at the end of that first episode Beth/Sarah is approached by yet another doppleganger who is assassinated in Sarah/Beth's car as they are talking.  At the start of episode 2, she gets a mysterious phone call, helping her dispose of the body, and Sarah then poses as the dead woman to gain more info, learning about even more look-a-likes.  By the end of the episode she meets suburban housewife Allison, and Cosima, an evolutionary biology student and learns she is a clone.  

There's no slow burn here, it's pretty much momentum from the get go.
I was sucked in.
My wife, well, she put her phone/book down.

Much of season one revolves around Sarah messing around in Beth's life while also working with the clones to unravel the mystery of their origins.  It ties them into the "Neolutionists", a subculture of people who believe that they can use technology to advance human evolution (but it's also a fetish culture that sees people getting, like, webbed fingers, or tails surgically grafted onto them), but also the Prolethians, the Neolution's opposites, who believe they can advance humanity through gene manipulation.

Season one introduces Helena, another clone (and the show's most engaging character, in a show rather full of enjoyable characters), who was raised by the Prolethians as a fanatic, hating the other clones as abominations against god that must be destroyed.  She's a brutal assassin but also in her limited education and secluded upbringing, rather naive to the world.  At first a frightening adversary, she is slowly indoctrinated into the sisterhood of the #CloneClub.

While Sarah is the central character, each of the key clones - Allison, Cosima, Helena and Rachel - all have their own full arcs over the five seasons.  Likewise, Kira, being the daughter of a clone, has an important role to play, and the kindly "Mrs. S", Siobhan, has her own secrets that are revealed.  But Siobhan sees all the clones as she sees Sarah, as orphaned daughters that need her tough love.  Felix is also an integral part of #CloneClub, and he finds his own special dynamic with each of them.

Cosima finds love with her handler Delphine (the only meaningful romantic subplot of the series) but both are under the thumb of the Dyad Group who have ties to either the Neolutionists or the Prolethians or both, and given that sinister clone Rachel is sitting near the head of the Group, it's clear that they have ties to the clones' origins, a mystery that takes all five seasons to fully unfold.  As well, Cosima is trying to find a cure for the fatal illness that seems to be striking the clones, including herself.

The suburban adventures of Allison and her bumbling husband Donnie are often a point of comic relief, as their adventures seem so trivial compared to the higher stakes of Sarah and Cosima's arcs, but still they're adventures that wind up with literal bodies buried in the garage, and always tend to criss-cross with the regular shenanigans.

Seasons one and two are effortlessly breezy binge consumption, pulling you through with a lot of wild, often outrageous twists and turns.  Season three introduces a captivating additional wrinkle of a breed of rival male clones, and the mythology of the series gets fairly dense from that point in.  

Each season is a rather taut 10 episodes, and while the story is constantly evolving there's some repeating patterns in the show that become frustrating in binge watching, mostly involving Sarah and some of her behaviors or the situations she finds herself in (often as a result of her behavior).  Some of these "not again" moments the show seems oblivious to.  It's usually smart and self aware enough to call such things out, but it seems to have a few blind spots.  

Within that, even when the show ebbs (which rarely lasts more than a single episode) it's completely uplifted by Maslany's performances.  When a particular subplot isn't hitting, the viewer's attention can become even more attuned to the complex ballet Maslany has to perform, and it's always superb. (It's also to easy to forget to credit Maslany's double, Kathryn Alexandre, as the show did its first seasons.  She was no doubt was integral to every scene with more than one clone in it).

Despite being Orphan Black's most interesting character, there are long stretches without Helena, and it's baffling why that is.  It's not always like Cosima or Allison's storylines fit seamlessly into the larger narrative, and it's a palpable absence whenever the show goes more than two episodes without her. If I'm going to be drawn to rewatching the series, it will be to get my fill of Helena no doubt.

Similarly the Cosima/Delphine love story is very unevenly handled, a lot of trust issues make it compelling initially, but once they get past it and commit to each other, they resume their mistrust with tiring results.  And then Delphine disappears for much of season 3 and 4, returning only sporadically for the final one, but in a somewhat satisfactory fashion.

One factor that thrilled me was Orphan Black being a show that used Toronto as Toronto (as well as using Toronto as all sorts of international locales).  Early on the show wouldn't blatantly state it was Toronto, or Canada even, but they regularly use Toronto street names and land marks and never attempted to hide it as a participant in the show.  Eventually (I think in Season 4) the defining line that it is indeed Toronto becomes clearer, but it's almost a Toronto that lives in a world where Canada and the US exist as a "Generca" (as co-creator Graeme Manson dubbed it), where the border doesn't exist.

As much as I enjoyed the ride, the grand arc of the series, and the overall conspiracy within it got a little lost in the mythology for me.  The fifth season's "Island of Dr. Moreau" vibe was an unexpected path, and it works double time to weave all the disparate threads from prior seasons together to some success but still not without muddying the waters. 

But even still, the conspiracy of clones isn't truly what the show is about, it's really more about finding family, and the connections that bind, and the things that make them human.  The character arcs of all the characters in the show do wind up being very satisfying and worth the venture.

We consumed all five seasons of Orphan Black over a single month, with a few interruptions for some of our ongoing series.  By the time we hit season five I felt a little exhausted (again, it's pretty briskly paced and densely structured), and I was ready to reach the end... but once I did, I felt very sad to not see the Clone Club anymore.  But, there is a next phase: podcasts.  Orphan Black: The Next Chapter is a multi-episode prose podcast that picks up a new story involving our characters over half a decade from where the show left off, with Kira and Charlotte now both teenagers, Cosima and Delphine married, and a new clone in the FBI gets inaugurated into the Club, among other highlights. It's read by Maslany, making it feel extremely authentic to the tv show, and it highlights her amazing talent as she embodies some of the non-clone characters like Delphine, Felix and Art pitch-perfectly, as if she spent her time on the show studying them and aping their speaking styles. It's a really satisfying way to catch up but also experience something new, and in a new way.  A second series is coming later this year