Warning: Heavy spoilers for Season 1.
The camera centers in on the sleeping face of Sarah Manning, our streetwise antihero, who lies slumped over in the seat of a subway car. Sarah jolts awake as the train enters the station to a dimly lit platform. As the crowd thins, she catches sight of a woman pacing back and forth, visibly distressed. Sarah approaches the woman, who turns to face her. The two are completely identical. Without so much as a word, the second woman turns back and walks calmly into the path of an oncoming train. She dies instantly, and the scene explodes into disjointed chaos.
Thus begins BBC America’s critically acclaimed Orphan Black, hooking its viewers with a thunderous shock that it has managed to sustain throughout its first three seasons. The gritty sci-fi thriller follows the lives of a group of uncannily similar-looking women, including Sarah, who are eventually revealed to be genetic identicals, the products of illegal medical experiments. Through the eyes of these women and the bonds that they eventually form with each other, the show wrestles with complex questions of personal identity, agency, and utopian ideology.
In an early scene in Orphan Black’s first season, Sarah reveals her “clone status” to another character, informing him that she is aware of eight other women genetically identical to herself. Understandably perplexed, her companion asks:
“So, there’s nine of you?”
“No,” Sarah snaps in response, “there’s only one of me.”
There is no idea more integral to the show than this simple assertion of individuality. Despite all being played by the same actress (the incredibly talented Tatiana Maslany), these characters could not be more different. The clones are as nuanced and complex as they are numerous, and despite the fact that each occupies her own niche (the suburban housewife, the geeky grad student, the working-class hustler, etc.), each also manages to avoid falling into the same-old overused archetypes.
In fact, the show actively resists perpetuating these archetypes. Many of the clones’ identities are based on very typical, often one-dimensional female tropes—such as the suburb-dwelling soccer mom—but are also developed well beyond the parameters of these tropes. This reminds viewers that the “typical” woman does not exist, and seems to imply that the way much of the television and film industry handles female characterization is fundamentally flawed.
Despite the fact that science fiction is an historically male-dominated genre, the feminist elements of the show tie into the more technological side of its premise quite nicely. The constant reassertions that the clones have to make in their fight for autonomy from their creators, for things like individuality and ownership of their own bodies, is inherently feminist, but also digs deeply into scientific questions. Darwin’s essential nature vs. nurture question is grappled with heavily throughout the show’s arc, as are eugenic and utopian themes such as the morality of self-directed evolution. One of the most prominent examples of this are the subtle allusions and explicit references to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, a popular novel depicting a “utopian” society devised through strict control, brainwashing, and the genetic engineering of its population. Scattered throughout the first and second seasons, these references clearly indicate the influence that such ideas and, by extension, classic science fiction as a whole, have had on the show’s development.
In the show’s third season, many of the aforementioned themes are tossed to the side as the writers seek to provide their audience with a bigger picture of the universe they’ve created. This season digs deeper into the inner workings of the corporation responsible for developing human clones and introduces a whole new roster of male clones. While this does add some degree of depth to the Orphan Black universe, it doesn’t make up for what’s lost. Many of these new elements do nothing but add a layer of confusion to an already very complex plotline, and with a few exceptions the male clones are disappointingly similar characters, lacking the individuality that makes the female clones so alluring.
At the time of writing, Orphan Black’s fourth season is scheduled to begin in just under a week. Taking my qualms with the third season into account and considering that—unlike a fine wine—television shows rarely improve with age, its return makes me slightly apprehensive. That being said, I haven’t given up hope just yet. Thinning plots and increasingly confusing storylines aside, Orphan Black is still, in my view, one of the most well-orchestrated shows on television. Furthermore, Maslany’s performances are just as compelling and mind-boggling as ever, making the show still very much worth watching.
Ideally, we’ll see a shift back towards the show’s initial, narrower lens in Season Four. By centering back in on the individual issues the female clones face in their ongoing fight for survival, Orphan Black can revisit and expand upon the questions it first set out to explore before it got lost in a sea of conspiracies and one-dimensional boy clones. If the show fails to do this, however, I won’t be too broken up about it. Despite the harsher elements of my critique, Orphan Black remains an excellent show, and it has a decent amount of screwing up left to do before I’ll be able to consider it anything less.
Four iterations of Tatiana Maslany