With Tatiana Maslany’s recent Emmy nomination and all ten new episodes on BBC iPlayer this month, it’s never been a better time to dive into the award-winning series that is Orphan Black.
After binge watching the first two seasons on Netflix in the space of three days, I can officially say the show is amazing. The lead actress Tatiana Maslany plays all five of the show’s main characters and at least half a dozen side characters. Amazing, right? Mastering accents far from her native Canadian, including German, English, and Ukrainian, she’s been known as one of the most understated actresses in today’s TV.
The show starts with Sarah, a British woman with a troubled past, who has come to reclaim her child and life in the US. Seeing a woman who looks just like her commit suicide sets the events of series one into motion – she’s a clone. Being troubled for money at this point, she sees the woman as a healthy source of income and decides to steal her handbag and claim her life.
Sarah’s life starts to get more dangerous after the dead doppelgänger turns out to be a police officer on trial for murder. From then on she’s introduced to other clones. Notably, Alison the suburban housewife with a drinking problem, Cosima the scientist who fittingly studies experimental evolution, and Helena the killer clone raised by religious nuts.
Of course, the whole cloning scenario isn’t the only thing on the clone club’s minds. Who made them? For what purpose? And most importantly, don’t they want to see how their experiments are doing?
It quickly becomes a fight for knowledge, over their genetic identity and right to freedom. Everyone becomes a suspect and with each episode a cliffhanger occurs, through the involvement of new characters, kidnappings and the inevitable killing off of other characters.
The characters develop rapidly through the series’. Helena the ‘killer clone’ grows to show her innocent side, despite never quite stopping the actual killing and Alison the seemingly uptight housewife has several breakdowns, all of which gives the show a comical value.
Through their many toils, a shadowy organisation is revealed, which in turns thrusts all the things they thought they knew into light, and all the people around them. After all, someone went to the trouble of planning their existence, and now they want their future.
On top of the explosive mystery and the comedy, the science behind it is enough to make you want to binge watch the whole damn thing. It’s also a unique factor of the show that has wrangled sci-fi geeks from all around to tune in. In fact, each episode is named after a chapter in Darwin’s’ On the Origin of Species, which is scientific proof that the show is great. Seriously, Google it (or watch it).
Despite not winning an Emmy, fans have expressed their delight at Tatiana Maslany’s and the show’s recognition. And it’s about time you did too!
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