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Orphan Black - spoiler post!
Okay, this is the post for talking about the show with ALL THE SPOILERS.
If you prefer watching things unspoiled, this is a show that will benefit, I think, from knowing as little as possible going into it. This post contains spoilers for the first season as well as speculation for the future. (I don't actually know anything about season two and would prefer to remain unspoiled for anything solid that anyone knows about it!)
Various points in no particular order:
Tatiana Maslany is a CHAMELEON. She's AMAZING. Visual aids:
(Screencaps from this post on Tumblr.)
And she's completely different YET AGAIN when she's herself. We watched some of the making-of features on the DVD and the interviews with Tatiana are even more disconcerting than the show itself, because her body language and the way she holds her face and everything are nothing like ANY of her characters.
In short, where did they find this woman and can she be in everything from now on.
And then there is Felix, the other best thing about the show.
Like I was saying to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
veleda_k on Tumblr earlier today, I’m not sure if I’ve seen a character like Felix on TV before. On any other show, if he was there at all, he might be a joke or a serial killer’s next victim. Obviously campy gay characters are not that rare -- but they’re sanitized, designed to be funny but nonthreatening. The thing about Felix, though, is that he's not sanitized at all. He's no gay Hollywood hairdresser. He’s femme, he’s punk, he’s into the club scene, he does drugs and lives upstairs from a gay bathhouse and does sex work for money; he's openly and unabashedly sexual. At the same time, he's also loyal and kind and brave and great with kids, and he gets to have relationships and friends and be happy most of the time. He's not a cautionary tale or a victim, he's not the "before" of a redemption storyline, and he doesn't exist just to be funny and supportive to his straight female friends.
... Although I do think the show might be trending a bit in the latter direction towards the end of season one. It's mostly a side effect of the plot, because there are so many characters and it was largely focused on Sarah, Alison, and Cosima by that point. Still, I really hope they develop Felix a bit more in season two and give him more of a life outside the girls' lives. I'd love to see one of the other three come to him for help and Felix not be available because he's got problems of his own, dammit! (And I'd love to see Sarah or Alison return the favor and help him out for a change.)
But, in short, ♥ FELIX ♥. Basically any scene with Felix is golden just for having Felix in it, but my favorite thing in the entire first season (well, at least my favorite thing involving Felix) is probably Alison stress-cleaning Felix's apartment -- and then politely pointing him to the drawers where she put his (no doubt very well-organized) drugs and sex toys.
And basically every scene with Felix and kids is wonderful. Felix and Alison's kids! Felix and Kira! And also, Felix and Sarah ... Felix and Alison ... the only thing we haven't gotten yet is much interaction between Felix and Cosima, but his respective relationships with Sarah (bickering siblings!) and Alison (odd-couple buddies!) are a beautiful thing to watch.
Talking about Felix leads naturally into the next thing I wanted to talk about: the way the show handles adopted family vs. blood relatives. Like I said in the non-spoiler post, this is one of the only shows I've ever seen (certainly the only one I can think of off the top of my head) that treats adoptive family as family in every way. In fact, my other favorite scene in the first season is Sarah's "I already have a family!" to Helena before she shoots her. There is so much fascinating stuff going on with family and relationships in the latter half of the season, but that really nails, I think, something about this show which I think few other shows would be willing to do. All of the clones are technically Sarah's sisters, genetically speaking, but Helena is her sister in every biological sense: like any identical twins, they split from the same zygote and gestated in the same womb. But it's Helena, the religious fanatic, who obsesses on their "special connection". Sarah is much more pragmatic about it -- Helena is a murderer who has killed without remorse, repeatedly proven herself untrustworthy, and threatened Sarah's real family (her daughter, foster brother and adoptive mom) as well as killing Sarah's birth mother (who is not biologically related to either of them). She'd be willing to give Helena a chance if Helena would prove herself capable of redemption, I think, but Sarah clearly doesn't think of Helena as a sister and isn't going to risk her family to fulfill Helena's dreams of sisterhood.
One possibility I can foresee for season two -- I hope they don't go there, but they might -- is that Mrs. S might turn out to be one of the parental donors of the genetic material that produced the clones. I hope it doesn't work out that way because I prefer her relationship with Sarah as a genetically unrelated but devoted mother (I am maintaining firmly that Mrs. S didn't betray them at the end of season one, you'll notice). However, if she does turn out to be the girls' biological mother, that would make the show even MORE of a poke in the eye at both the "biological family trumps all!" ideal AND the general TV concept of mothers whose overriding goal is to protect their (biological) children -- because it is very clear that Mrs. S feels no maternal urges whatsoever towards Sarah's clones. She explicitly tells Sarah, after Helena comes to the house, not to allow her biological relationship with Helena to cloud her awareness of what Helena is capable of. She feels maternal toward Sarah, Felix, and Kira because she raised them, but this plainly does not extend to Sarah's biological sisters, who she doesn't know.
Talking about Helena ... one of my regrets about season one is that Helena ended up dying. I was really hoping to see Helena fight back from her programming, at least to the point where she was capable of having relationships with other people without trying to kill them. (And I just typed that in perfect seriousness. Poor Helena.) She never had a chance, really, and I'm not sure whether to be glad that the show is willing to go that far toward the "biology is not destiny" ideal -- Helena is not salvageable just because she is Sarah's twin; she's too far gone for that -- or frustrated because Helena did, in the end, turn out to be unredeemable, and that's not where I wanted that plot to go.
Of course, Sarah is not the ultimate arbiter of justice either. She made a decision and killed Helena to protect her loved ones. It's a justifiable decision but that doesn't make it the right decision. It is quite possible that Helena actually could have turned her life around and Sarah took that opportunity out of her hands. On the other hand, given that Helena killed her birth mother and several of the other clones, nearly got her daughter killed, and threatened to kill her on multiple occasions, it's not hard to sympathize with Sarah's choice.
Other miscellaneous stuff:
- Like I mentioned in the non-spoiler post, I love how funny this show is. I love well-done black humor and this show brings it. I was not expecting, when I started watching this show, to laugh myself breathless multiple times per episode. And yet it works beautifully with the darkness and tragedy. Stellar writing!
- I also feel that the show portrays Sarah, Felix and Victor's life at the bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum very accurately -- well, aside from being more funny than tragic, but I'd frankly rather watch funny. I grew up poor, with family friends and relatives involved with drug dealing, and aside from being more over-the-top and funny than the reality, the whole gestalt of their lives rings very true to my experiences, from Felix's casual reference at the beginning to Sarah's daughter being taken care of by "Mrs. S" (random friends/relatives watching kids whose parents are absent or in jail; it's a thing) to the unremarkable presence of alcohol, drugs and debts.
- Let's talk about Paul! As his storyline unfolds, I realized that Paul, the only straight white male in the main cast (aside from unrepentantly evil bad guys) is a femme fatale. He is the absolute straight-up femme fatale archetype, a genderflipped Natasha Romanoff: the sexy spy with the dark/tragic past who infiltrates the bed of the hero(ine) and then finds himself torn between his old life and his growing feelings for his target. As an extra bonus delight, Sarah has to rescue him from Team Bad Guy! (I am also slightly amused at how little narrative time is spent on Paul's ~tragic past~. It's clear from the middle of the season that he has one, but everyone else is too busy with their own lives to really care, and even when he tells Sarah about it, her reaction is more along the lines of "Yup, everyone's got problems" than "You poor thing!")
- Cosima and Delphine also play out the femme fatale storyline, with a more traditional sexy spy in Delphine (she's even French!) except in this case, it's the target who is genderflipped. I loved that Delphine starts out faking bisexuality to get close to Cosima but that, too, turns out to be real. (Like Cosima says, sexuality is a spectrum -- she herself is living proof of that!)
- I think it says a lot about this show's approach to sexuality and gender that today I ran across a reaction post, maybe on Tumblr, suggesting that it would be lovely to see a clone with a gender identity other than female (genderqueer or a trans man) -- and my first thought wasn't "Yeah, never happen" but rather that the show might actually do that ... and I could see Tatiana playing it wonderfully, too.
- So Donnie is the real spy ... which makes Alison's torture of him more supportable (FUNNIEST TORTURE SCENE EVER, I still maintain) but also means that she ruined the life of, and then killed, an admittedly shallow but innocent woman. Dark, show. DARK. (I do wonder how on Earth they suborned Donnie as a teenager and then got him to spend the next 10-15 years married to a woman he can't stand. Paul's general character and motivation make sense; Donnie, I'm not so sure about. But perhaps season two will have a better explanation than just ~SPIES~.)
- And of course there is the mystery illness that Katya and now Cosima seem to have developed! A built-in termination device? A natural consequence of the cloning process? Something deliberately introduced by their monitors? At least we don't know for certain that it's fatal, since Katya took a bullet to the head before her illness was able to develop to its conclusion. I don't know where this is going, and this is a show that could easily kill characters. Kira's implied healing ability is another wildcard, because the adult clones ... well, I was going to say "don't have this" (thinking of the scar behind Beth's ear) but then I remembered Helena surviving her impalement on a piece of rebar, so maybe they actually do. I'm appreciative that the show, so far, seems to have steered clear of the "super-enhanced battle clone!" trope -- it seems to be a more straightforward experiment to see how environmental factors and genetic factors interact. But Kira's healing might imply that there is more to it than that.
Okay, so I just wrote 2000 words about this show, and I'm sure there is stuff I haven't gotten to yet, but -- what are your thoughts? Come talk about it with me! Anything is fair game except actual season two spoilers, should you have any.
If you prefer watching things unspoiled, this is a show that will benefit, I think, from knowing as little as possible going into it. This post contains spoilers for the first season as well as speculation for the future. (I don't actually know anything about season two and would prefer to remain unspoiled for anything solid that anyone knows about it!)
Various points in no particular order:
Tatiana Maslany is a CHAMELEON. She's AMAZING. Visual aids:
(Screencaps from this post on Tumblr.)
And she's completely different YET AGAIN when she's herself. We watched some of the making-of features on the DVD and the interviews with Tatiana are even more disconcerting than the show itself, because her body language and the way she holds her face and everything are nothing like ANY of her characters.
In short, where did they find this woman and can she be in everything from now on.
And then there is Felix, the other best thing about the show.
Like I was saying to
veleda_k on Tumblr earlier today, I’m not sure if I’ve seen a character like Felix on TV before. On any other show, if he was there at all, he might be a joke or a serial killer’s next victim. Obviously campy gay characters are not that rare -- but they’re sanitized, designed to be funny but nonthreatening. The thing about Felix, though, is that he's not sanitized at all. He's no gay Hollywood hairdresser. He’s femme, he’s punk, he’s into the club scene, he does drugs and lives upstairs from a gay bathhouse and does sex work for money; he's openly and unabashedly sexual. At the same time, he's also loyal and kind and brave and great with kids, and he gets to have relationships and friends and be happy most of the time. He's not a cautionary tale or a victim, he's not the "before" of a redemption storyline, and he doesn't exist just to be funny and supportive to his straight female friends. ... Although I do think the show might be trending a bit in the latter direction towards the end of season one. It's mostly a side effect of the plot, because there are so many characters and it was largely focused on Sarah, Alison, and Cosima by that point. Still, I really hope they develop Felix a bit more in season two and give him more of a life outside the girls' lives. I'd love to see one of the other three come to him for help and Felix not be available because he's got problems of his own, dammit! (And I'd love to see Sarah or Alison return the favor and help him out for a change.)
But, in short, ♥ FELIX ♥. Basically any scene with Felix is golden just for having Felix in it, but my favorite thing in the entire first season (well, at least my favorite thing involving Felix) is probably Alison stress-cleaning Felix's apartment -- and then politely pointing him to the drawers where she put his (no doubt very well-organized) drugs and sex toys.
And basically every scene with Felix and kids is wonderful. Felix and Alison's kids! Felix and Kira! And also, Felix and Sarah ... Felix and Alison ... the only thing we haven't gotten yet is much interaction between Felix and Cosima, but his respective relationships with Sarah (bickering siblings!) and Alison (odd-couple buddies!) are a beautiful thing to watch.
Talking about Felix leads naturally into the next thing I wanted to talk about: the way the show handles adopted family vs. blood relatives. Like I said in the non-spoiler post, this is one of the only shows I've ever seen (certainly the only one I can think of off the top of my head) that treats adoptive family as family in every way. In fact, my other favorite scene in the first season is Sarah's "I already have a family!" to Helena before she shoots her. There is so much fascinating stuff going on with family and relationships in the latter half of the season, but that really nails, I think, something about this show which I think few other shows would be willing to do. All of the clones are technically Sarah's sisters, genetically speaking, but Helena is her sister in every biological sense: like any identical twins, they split from the same zygote and gestated in the same womb. But it's Helena, the religious fanatic, who obsesses on their "special connection". Sarah is much more pragmatic about it -- Helena is a murderer who has killed without remorse, repeatedly proven herself untrustworthy, and threatened Sarah's real family (her daughter, foster brother and adoptive mom) as well as killing Sarah's birth mother (who is not biologically related to either of them). She'd be willing to give Helena a chance if Helena would prove herself capable of redemption, I think, but Sarah clearly doesn't think of Helena as a sister and isn't going to risk her family to fulfill Helena's dreams of sisterhood.
One possibility I can foresee for season two -- I hope they don't go there, but they might -- is that Mrs. S might turn out to be one of the parental donors of the genetic material that produced the clones. I hope it doesn't work out that way because I prefer her relationship with Sarah as a genetically unrelated but devoted mother (I am maintaining firmly that Mrs. S didn't betray them at the end of season one, you'll notice). However, if she does turn out to be the girls' biological mother, that would make the show even MORE of a poke in the eye at both the "biological family trumps all!" ideal AND the general TV concept of mothers whose overriding goal is to protect their (biological) children -- because it is very clear that Mrs. S feels no maternal urges whatsoever towards Sarah's clones. She explicitly tells Sarah, after Helena comes to the house, not to allow her biological relationship with Helena to cloud her awareness of what Helena is capable of. She feels maternal toward Sarah, Felix, and Kira because she raised them, but this plainly does not extend to Sarah's biological sisters, who she doesn't know.
Talking about Helena ... one of my regrets about season one is that Helena ended up dying. I was really hoping to see Helena fight back from her programming, at least to the point where she was capable of having relationships with other people without trying to kill them. (And I just typed that in perfect seriousness. Poor Helena.) She never had a chance, really, and I'm not sure whether to be glad that the show is willing to go that far toward the "biology is not destiny" ideal -- Helena is not salvageable just because she is Sarah's twin; she's too far gone for that -- or frustrated because Helena did, in the end, turn out to be unredeemable, and that's not where I wanted that plot to go.
Of course, Sarah is not the ultimate arbiter of justice either. She made a decision and killed Helena to protect her loved ones. It's a justifiable decision but that doesn't make it the right decision. It is quite possible that Helena actually could have turned her life around and Sarah took that opportunity out of her hands. On the other hand, given that Helena killed her birth mother and several of the other clones, nearly got her daughter killed, and threatened to kill her on multiple occasions, it's not hard to sympathize with Sarah's choice.
Other miscellaneous stuff:
- Like I mentioned in the non-spoiler post, I love how funny this show is. I love well-done black humor and this show brings it. I was not expecting, when I started watching this show, to laugh myself breathless multiple times per episode. And yet it works beautifully with the darkness and tragedy. Stellar writing!
- I also feel that the show portrays Sarah, Felix and Victor's life at the bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum very accurately -- well, aside from being more funny than tragic, but I'd frankly rather watch funny. I grew up poor, with family friends and relatives involved with drug dealing, and aside from being more over-the-top and funny than the reality, the whole gestalt of their lives rings very true to my experiences, from Felix's casual reference at the beginning to Sarah's daughter being taken care of by "Mrs. S" (random friends/relatives watching kids whose parents are absent or in jail; it's a thing) to the unremarkable presence of alcohol, drugs and debts.
- Let's talk about Paul! As his storyline unfolds, I realized that Paul, the only straight white male in the main cast (aside from unrepentantly evil bad guys) is a femme fatale. He is the absolute straight-up femme fatale archetype, a genderflipped Natasha Romanoff: the sexy spy with the dark/tragic past who infiltrates the bed of the hero(ine) and then finds himself torn between his old life and his growing feelings for his target. As an extra bonus delight, Sarah has to rescue him from Team Bad Guy! (I am also slightly amused at how little narrative time is spent on Paul's ~tragic past~. It's clear from the middle of the season that he has one, but everyone else is too busy with their own lives to really care, and even when he tells Sarah about it, her reaction is more along the lines of "Yup, everyone's got problems" than "You poor thing!")
- Cosima and Delphine also play out the femme fatale storyline, with a more traditional sexy spy in Delphine (she's even French!) except in this case, it's the target who is genderflipped. I loved that Delphine starts out faking bisexuality to get close to Cosima but that, too, turns out to be real. (Like Cosima says, sexuality is a spectrum -- she herself is living proof of that!)
- I think it says a lot about this show's approach to sexuality and gender that today I ran across a reaction post, maybe on Tumblr, suggesting that it would be lovely to see a clone with a gender identity other than female (genderqueer or a trans man) -- and my first thought wasn't "Yeah, never happen" but rather that the show might actually do that ... and I could see Tatiana playing it wonderfully, too.
- So Donnie is the real spy ... which makes Alison's torture of him more supportable (FUNNIEST TORTURE SCENE EVER, I still maintain) but also means that she ruined the life of, and then killed, an admittedly shallow but innocent woman. Dark, show. DARK. (I do wonder how on Earth they suborned Donnie as a teenager and then got him to spend the next 10-15 years married to a woman he can't stand. Paul's general character and motivation make sense; Donnie, I'm not so sure about. But perhaps season two will have a better explanation than just ~SPIES~.)
- And of course there is the mystery illness that Katya and now Cosima seem to have developed! A built-in termination device? A natural consequence of the cloning process? Something deliberately introduced by their monitors? At least we don't know for certain that it's fatal, since Katya took a bullet to the head before her illness was able to develop to its conclusion. I don't know where this is going, and this is a show that could easily kill characters. Kira's implied healing ability is another wildcard, because the adult clones ... well, I was going to say "don't have this" (thinking of the scar behind Beth's ear) but then I remembered Helena surviving her impalement on a piece of rebar, so maybe they actually do. I'm appreciative that the show, so far, seems to have steered clear of the "super-enhanced battle clone!" trope -- it seems to be a more straightforward experiment to see how environmental factors and genetic factors interact. But Kira's healing might imply that there is more to it than that.
Okay, so I just wrote 2000 words about this show, and I'm sure there is stuff I haven't gotten to yet, but -- what are your thoughts? Come talk about it with me! Anything is fair game except actual season two spoilers, should you have any.
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And yes, to your thoughts about what the show is doing with family, whether found/adopted/biological, etc. I like that the writers don't seem to accept that there are any givens one way or another, and that they're willing to dig into some tangled knots of need and obligation and distance and rejection. Skeeviness re: adoption was one of the reasons I gave up on OUaT, and I'm so glad to see Orphan Black doing a better job of addressing the issue.
Fingers crossed that S2 will keep up the momentum!
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Well said! Your take on Paul is spot-on, and his character's purpose makes more sense to me now.
April is going to rock. I ordered the bluray of season one to watch again; can't wait for it to arrive so I can get started.
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My theory on Donnie is that he was suborned after he got into a relationship with Alison; the money was too good. But if the clones are all 28 or so (that's how old Maslany is, although I think she looks younger, and you don't make Detective at 25), then setting up Donnie 12 years ago doesn't seem quite as unlikely given the time-frame of the project as a whole...
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I can't WAIT for season two! :D
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Wonderful post, and yes I am so loving this show. Especially Sarah, Felix, Kira, and Mrs. S as a family unit. !!! I am so with you on Mrs. S, by the way -- no way did she betray Sarah! Well, except to the extent that Sarah would view taking off with Kira like that as a betrayal no matter what the reason. But I definitely think Mrs. S is on the same side as them. I think she just trusts herself to successfully keep Kira safe from Leekie et al more than she trusts Sarah. I can't say I totally blame her, heartbroken as I am for Sarah.
I also agree with you about -- well, OK, I agree with pretty much everything you wrote! -- Felix. I love him so hard, and I also really want to see him get a bit more of his own time and his own drama next season. I adore his relationship with Sarah, though. I love how fiercely protective they are of each other.
His relationship with Allison is great and provides a lot of fantastic comedy, but I do occasionally tilt my head and say, "really -- why is he helping her so much?" I heard one theory that he just can't help but care for someone who looks so much like his beloved sister. That helps, but it doesn't totally satisfy me.
I love your take on Paul as a femme fatale. I never realized that! Speaking of (the other) femme fatale, one of the few things I disliked about Orphan Black was Delphine's relationship with Leekie. It was just gross.
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Felix is wonderful, although I do kind of agree with you about his relationship with Alison -- as much as I love it, I think that might be one of the factors that's making me feel like they're treading dangerously close to the "sassy gay friend" role with him toward the end of season one. With Sarah, he has a strong motivation for dropping everything to help her, even when he's putting his whole life on hold to do it. With Alison the motivation is more tenuous -- sometimes it's there, but sometimes it feels like Felix is basically being put on display for Alison's suburban world and it's rather discomfort-inducing. I do think he genuinely likes her and vice versa, but I'd like to see Alison reciprocate the care and help that Felix has shown for her, rather than it always being Felix dropping what he's doing to go help Alison out of her latest crisis.
I also agree with
Anyway, the above aside, I really can't wait to have Sarah and Felix and Alison and Cosima and EVERYONE back on my screen again. :D
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On the other hand, the show had a huge amount of plot and character development to stuff into 10 episodes, and it's possible that season two will be able to take the time to develop them to an extent that there just wasn't time for in season one.
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