Orphan Black Recap: Effects Of External Conditions
I was certain the ending of the previous Orphan Black — depicting the scarred, bottle-blonde clone murderer — wouldn’t carry over into the beginning of this episode, but I was wrong.
I was also mistaken in thinking she was stitching closed her rebar-through-the-stomach wound in her own house. No, a scared little boy lets us and the police know that she just randomly wandered into somebody’s home. She also left behind a bloody paper fortune teller, which Sarah is unable to hide from her cop partner, Art.
Like it or not, in Orphan Black, Sarah is invested in her policewoman role, and she’s becoming more accustomed to the ways in which she has to handle herself, but stealing evidence is far from beneath her. I mean, the scared little boy fingers Sarah as looking like the “angry angel” that bled all over his house.
Incidentally, she’s an angel because she self-flagellates, cutting into her own back to form the winged scars. Nobody ever said a little religion doesn’t hurt.
But it turns out children’s origami is far from the worst thing the clone killer — whose name is revealed to be Helena — is capable of.
She calls Sarah at work, requesting a meeting, and when Sarah and Art later go out in the field, Helena waltzes into the station, looking like death barely warmed over.
Orphan Black makes these cops look like even bigger idiots by not realizing that this woman is neither Beth nor the person who they’ve been fooled into thinking is Beth. So Helena not only gets a good look at all of the evidence the cops have against her, she even assembles it all to represent a doll figure.
Oh, and then there’s the small Orphan Black detail of Helena recording a confession video, claiming Maggie Chen’s death to be a pre-determined murder. That’s a threat you always want hanging over your head. And finally, Helena does the unthinkable: she calls dumb-as-bricks boyfriend Paul and tells him to come and pick her up immediately. But that one just turns into Sarah telling Paul to go away, similar to most of Paul’s scenes.
With most of her problems at risk of being revealed, Sarah tracks Helena down, and we get a few juicy plot details going. Remember that ornate knife Helena dropped? The symbol on it is the same as the one scarred on the back of Maggie Chen’s neck, and it turns out Chen was one of those responsible for creating the clones. (It doesn’t seem like she’d have been old enough for that to happen, but we’ll see.)
But Chen then went against her work, joining the Clone Killer club with whoever started. Beth killed her to protect herself and the others. That was to be expected, but the way it was handled is interesting enough.
Though Sarah holds Helena at gunpoint and has the chance to end it all, she probably didn’t have the guts to do it, and Art shows up anyway, wondering what in the hell is going on. Previously, Sarah left a voicemail with Art relaying the entire situation, just in case her meeting with Helena went awry.
I can’t imagine where that’s going to go in Orphan Black. So yeah, Helena crawls out of a window and her dying body is eventually picked up by some people in a van. Part of the evil faction, or just a band of good Samaritans? Considering one of them was wearing a ring with the symbol on it, it all smells evil to me. We’ll probably be following that van as soon as next week’s episode starts, so its occupants are allowed to be secretive for now.
Due to all things Helena, Sarah is unable to make her play date with her daughter Kira, but since that would ruin her chances of motherhood, she and foster brother Fe rope Allison into pretending to be Sarah for the play date.
This Orphan Black sitcom-ish idea goes about as well as you’d expect, and Kira sees through it immediately, probably because Allison is terrible at portraying anyone from an alternative British lifestyle. It all goes smoothly, though, as Kira lies, and foster mom, Mrs. S., will allow more play dates in the future.
I guess it’s worth mentioning that, just before the end of the episode, Sarah decides to quit being a cop, turning in her badge and gun. This is something I expected her to have done already, and you just know it won’t last, but it’s a nice moment anyway.
It’ll probably just make her look more suspicious, but I’m sure everything will get better once she just explains the whole clone angle. Nobody has a problem with clones, right?
So, another week of Orphan Black, and another week of interestingly crafted answers and questions. It appears our villain Helena thought that she was the original clone or something, and that finding out she wasn’t is a real kick in her ass. But I’m not sure how that is going to affect how things go in the future. And why is only one of them a religious masochist, while the rest appear to lead vaguely normal lives? Luckily, this is a series where the mysteries are more fun than frustrating, and I actually don’t mind being kept in the dark, assuming the eventual payoff is respectable.
