Orphan Black 2×10 Review: By Means Which Have Never Yet Been Tried

And that’s that folks. Orphan Black has wrapped up season 2. After weeks of balancing multiple plots and well over a dozen characters, they managed to fit everyone into this episode and wrap up many of the divergent plot lines. The struggle is still ongoing, however, and this episode left us with some bomb shells that I didn’t see coming.  I literally said, “Oh my God,” out loud at the end of the episode despite the fact that I was watching by myself. I just couldn’t contain my surprise.

Sarah “unconditionally” surrendered to DYAD, but there were actually several implied conditions when she gave herself up. She was doing it for her daughter, which is clearly the most important thing in her life. It might seem weird saying that now when at the beginning of season one she was coming back from a long period of absence from her daughter’s life. She’s a very different person now in regards to the role that she plays as a mother. As Kira put it: “She’s all grown up now.”  Sarah is not the same Sarah from the pilot episode, that’s for sure.

Kira is not only extremely important to Sarah, but to all of Clone Club. They view her as a niece, a central piece to their makeshift family. Despite Cosima’s deteriorating condition, she still puts her neck out on the line for Clone Club. She negotiates a deal to see Kira and uses her to get a message to Sarah to plan her escape. Kira is young, but she’s obviously inherited whatever part of their genetics that makes them intuitive, inventive, and ballsy as hell. She’s just a kid, but she somehow manages to outsmart the adults around her on behalf of her family on a fairly regular basis. And most importantly, she does consider them family and can tell the clones apart just by looking at them, which is a skill that not even the clones themselves appear to have.

With the dismissal of Delphine, Cosima’s story is causing me even more pain. If anyone ever had any doubt that these two women were in love, those doubts should have been firmly erased during this episode. While Delphine has made some questionable decisions, they were all made with Cosima in mind. As Cosima is slipping away from reality, she sees Delphine standing over her bed, glowing from the light behind her like an angel, and I was nearly moved to tears. Separating these two people is killing me and if Cosima dies next season, I’ll riot. If she dies without seeing Delphine again, I will not only riot, but burn the Internet to the ground (or maybe tweet angrily for a few hours, you know, same thing). The tragedy of their story is killing me inside.

Despite all the tragedy and danger, bringing Helena back into the story made me smile. I find it interesting that the first place she goes is Art’s home, and I kind of love that their interesting little dynamic got a bit more screen time. Felix and Helena also have a cute little moment. When Felix asks, “Did you burn down the fish people’s ranch?” and they exchanged those odd expressions, I just about died laughing. Helena is a blessing to this show.  She’s adorable in a frightening and dangerous way. Her coming back also led to one of the best scenes of the episode. The Clone Club dance party was by far the most amazing thing and Helena’s got some skills. These people definitely consider themselves family at this point and it’s incredibly beautiful.

Another awesome return was Cal. Kira, being the smart little kid that she is, used the phone number he gave her to bring him back into the plot. As I suspected, he does know a lot more than he was letting on, but it wasn’t because he was actually involved in anything. He just knows how to research things well and puts the puzzle pieces together himself. Welcome back Cal, King of my Heart. I’m glad you’re not a bad guy in disguise and you’re actually just a super smart, super caring dude.

My feelings for Rachel have always been conflicting. I feel about the same type of conflict over her as I do over Cersei from Game of Thrones. Both characters do bad things and can be classified as an antagonist, but if you look at their history, you can see what caused their feelings. It doesn’t excuse their behavior, but it helps explain it. For Rachel, she’s incredibly jealous of Sarah for being able to have a child and she is resentful that the chance for a normal childhood was taken away from her. This causes her to lash out and work against her sister clones. She was always self-aware and was raised within the organization, whereas all of her sisters, with the exception of Helena, got to lead somewhat normal lives. Her childhood was loving for a while, but that was brought to an abrupt halt due to Leekie. Rachel has some anger issues and so she’s doing very bad things as a way to work through it.

I feel like we should be cautious of Marion, but for some reason I trust her. She has a clone daughter of her own and seems willing to stick her neck out to help the clones. She outranks both Leekie and Rachel, but she’s still being cautious about her efforts to undermine DYAD. Despite her high ranking power, she’s being extremely covert. I don’t feel that she’s playing both sides here. I really do feel that she’s genuinely on the clones’ side and I could be proven wrong, but it’s a gut feeling. I want Marion to play a major part of next season. I also might be harboring a crush on actress Michelle Forbes, so my love of her character might be partially rooted there. But hey, regardless of my reasoning, I want more Marion.

The biggest shocker of the episode was that there’s a line of male clones as well. The code name for the project is Castor, which is related to the same Greek Mythology as Leda. Leda was the mother of twin brothers Castor and Pollux. This theme also pops up when Cal is communicating with his insider who goes by the name ‘Swan 7,’ which is related to Leda through the story of Leda and the Swan. If there is a season 3, I would not be surprised if this mythology pops up more and more. Time to brush up on your Greek mythology, guys.  The most shocking thing about this revelation was that we’ve already met one of the male clones. He was at the Prolethean compound and now has Gracie in his custody. It’s not clear if he’s self aware, working on his own, or working for someone else. I’m dying to know how this came to be.

If season 3 happens (it will, guys, this show is amazing), I feel like the next large arc is going to be about Castor. DYAD still hasn’t been toppled, so that can play a role next season as well but with this whole new branch and the extended network of DYAD coming to light, it won’t be as easy as it originally seemed. DYAD is far more reaching than we initially assumed. We’ve always known it was a shady, powerful organization, but it’s so much bigger than what we thought.

Author: Angel Wilson

Angel is the admin of The Geekiary and a geek culture commentator. They earned a BA in Film & Digital Media from UC Santa Cruz. They have contributed to various podcasts and webcasts including An Englishman in San Diego, Free to Be Radio, and Genre TV for All. They identify as queer.

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