Orphan Black 1.9: Where Yet More Mysteries Arise

[Full episode recap with a side of review!]

Is Kira going to be okay? What will Allison do after street brawling with her neighbor? Cosima is still playing with monitor fire.  Will Paul double-cross Sarah? And Sarah. How on earth is she going to juggle Beth’s personality and Art?  What will Kira’s accident mean to her and insane Helena? And what’s Leekie going to do to our beloved clones? So many questions, so very little time. “Unconscious Selection” beautifully describes the actions of all these clones, how their very person-hood is differentiated, not just from birth, but from their life experiences, and how it’s all led them here, to this point.

The episode opens with Kira in the E.R.  Felix, Sarah, Alison, and Mrs. S are all in attendance, with Sarah, understandably, in that deep, soul-searing freak out stage. Felix sends Alison back to his loft while the rest of them wait it out. When one of the nurses is shown doing an ultrasound with the “Doctor, you need to see this,” statement, everyone thinks  it has got to be bad news. Surprise! Kira is fine. What?  Nothing is broken, no internal bleeding, no head trauma. This is one of those things That Must Be Clone Related. I sigh internally with the ramifications of this development.

Nestled back at home, Kira is being watched over by a very protective mother. Felix and Mrs. S talk over the happenings with Sarah, but there’s pretty much one thing on her mind. Revenge.

Helena, meanwhile, is being driven more mad by her part in Kira’s accident. Thomas, her keeper, could care less about her guilt, angry that Sarah and the other clones still breath. Angered more that Helena claims Sarah is the mother of Kira, because as we know, that shouldn’t be possible; clones are sterile.  Helena protests his anger, did she not remove Olivier’s tail for Thomas? But for Thomas, that was to get Leekie’s attention, something he hasn’t gotten yet.  When Sarah calls and Helena doesn’t do as he demands, Thomas goes berserk and begins beating her. End result: tossing Helena into a locked cage. Want to know who is more insane than Helena? Thomas.

At the precinct, Art and Angela are working their way through the “impossible-ness” of Sarah, Beth, and Katja being the same person. How does that happen? How could the look and/or be the same person? Poor detectives. Not being a part of Clone Club makes for some very problematic guess work.  Art wants to protect his partner and find the truth. Angela wants to nail Sarah to the wall.

Paul, with Leekie at his and Beth/Sarah’s apartment, proves that Leekie knows the video footage at Neolutions was tampered with, and that Olivier was lying. Leekie also knows about Helena, who he has been searching for for years.  What doesn’t this guy know? Because he also knows that Helena couldn’t fool Paul. But Sarah could.

Alison, at Felix’s loft, hasn’t slept. She has, true to form, cleaned the hell out of his place. When Felix returns from Mrs. S, the look on his face at his entire home having been disinfected is delightful.  An exhausted Felix is full of disbelief when Alison asks him to come with her to her  home to get her things. When Alison bats her clone eyes and pulls out a pleading “Please?”-Felix is a goner. In one of the best Felix one-liners, he resignedly tells her, “Fine. Fetch me something gay.”

An unsuspecting Alison and highly bemused Felix, walk into a neighborhood, Donnie, and Reverend-filled intervention. In the second best Felix interchange of the night, while not integral to the story at all, bares quoting for its sheer, “subtle-esque” hilarity:

Alison: Oh my god. What is this?

Reverend: We’re gathered in the spirit of love and understanding. Please. Join us.

Alison: An intervention? This is bullshit.
Felix: Hello! Felix, gay friend.

Alison: Acting coach.

Reverend: Oh… That’s perfectly … fine here.

Felix: Which one?

Confronted with what she did to Donnie, and to Aynesley (and her husband!), alongside the best way to appeal to Alison, Donnie pleads for Alison to talk and not hurt their marriage, or their kids. With Alison, manipulating her with children will just about always win. Not having it, Alison locks herself in the bathroom and refuses to speak with anyone except Felix. Alison still believes Aynesley is the monitor. I’m not convinced. Felix’s advice to Alison is to go suck it up. Alison, at her tether’s absolute end, makes a stand for herself, telling everyone to sod off. I am proud.

Sarah checks in with Cosima who confirms the possibility that Sarah might have passed something down to Kira, but without her genetic material, she can’t tell for sure. Guess how Sarah feels about handing over some of Kira’s DNA? Right. Cosima’s lab partner brings in the results of her and Katja’s genetic makeup, to see if Katja respiratory disease is something they may all have. Or not – their sciency genetic makeups do not all match, which should be an impossibility. While trying to decipher what this means, Delphine comes in for a visit. Cos is so clearly not giving up on Delphine, and for more than Clone Club reasons.  I mean, if it worked for Sarah and Paul…

Paul heads over to Mrs. S’s and drops the bombshell that Leekie knows who Sarah is, encouraging Sarah to meet with him. Everyone knows about everyone now, right? As she gets ready to go, Art calls. He wants to talk. On her way to meet with Leekie, she and Art meet at an abandoned quarry, Art starting to connect the dots back to the Maggie Chen shooting. Sarah, with bigger fish to fry, gives him nothing, telling him to do what he’s got to do before she drives off.  Guess where Art goes? That’s right. The subway. Where it all began. Where he watches previously unviewed subway footage of Beth and Sarah that shows him everything. Art’s on a mission now.

A blindfolded Leekie is ushered into an empty construction office by Paul to meet Sarah. Sarah, who’s just had the most perplexing phone conversation with Cosima, has learned that the clones are not genetically identical, Cos calling them barcodes for lack of a better word. When she informs Cos that she’s about to meet with Leekie, a worried Cos tells her to give him a chance because the guy cares about them. Show of hands who believes this? Right. Anyway, Cos gets her secret clone data out of its secret hiding place, and finds it has been tampered with.

Sarah, nonplussed with Leekie, is completely unbelieving when he explains he doesn’t know much, only his part, which is data collections and quantifying their well being. Quantify. A living person’s well being. Right. But, what is surprising is his… we’ll call it forthrightness, about Helena. And Helena was found by Thomas, who is part of a group called Prolitheans. These folks oppose science and, most obviously, oppose Neolutions. Maggie Chen was an agent of the Prolitheans who infiltrated Neolutions; they found Helena in a convent and trained her, a clone, to kill clones. Look, viewers, the double-headed snake of evil. Fantastic.  Leekie wants Sarah to bring Helena in. Oh, and promises Sarah – all clones – a shot at a free and normal life. This smacks not of duplicity, but of something far, far worse.

At the same time the Leekie meetup is happening, when Delphine comes to visit an angry and hurt Cos who has just realized the depth of the lies she’s been told by her lover. Delphine pleads for understanding. She believes the clones are in danger, a la Leekie’s insistence. She’s also honestly fallen for Cosima. And, it would seem, she’s not going to tell Leekie anything about the anomaly that is Kira. Small consolation at this juncture.

While trying to track down Helena, Sarah is at Mrs. S’s, who has spoken with folks back home overseas. Those folks are scared, too. Helena, still caged and filled with rage, gets a hold of her phone and calls Sarah, telling her where she is. The strangest of things is that Kira believes in whatever goodness Helena has left. Sarah, sneaking out behind Paul and Mrs. S’s backs, isn’t convinced. Clearly. To the boat Sarah goes. And releases Helena. Because she cannot bare to murder her. The connection that Helena  yammers on about? Sarah feels it too, allowing Helena to hug her while she awkwardly and fearfully tells Sarah “I love you.” Thomas walks in on this and tries to regain control of Helena. After all of this, guess who has had enough? Helena attacks Thomas in a horrible, horrible rage. Instead of letting Helena kill Thomas, Sarah locks Helena up and locks Thomas in Sarah’s cage (I totally cheered this ), tossing Helena in the trunk to turn her over to Leekie. A call to Mrs. S telling her to not do this thing stops Sarah.

And herein lies the end of the episode, revealing not one, not two, but three new things of mind blowing mystery.

Paul and Leekie arrive at the meetup point where Sarah and Helena aren’t. Leekie calls a mysterious woman in a suit, someone we don’t yet know, but someone who I wholly suspect to either be another clone or the original. When Sarah gets back to Mrs. S’s, there’s a woman who claims to be Sarah’s mother, a woman of color named Amelia who had signed up for in vitro, to carry a child to term for pay. But the rigid medical checkups and Neolutions talk led her to run and give the twins, yes, twins up. One she gave to the state. The other she gave to the church. You can guess what happened from there.

Next week, we’ve got Sarah meeting the new business suit woman, Leekie visits Alison and Cosima, Art visits Sarah. Oy vey.

What the what?
1.  Out of all of this, the clones are the sane ones. Yes. Even Helena. It’s Thomas and Leekie and their ilk that are terrifying nutsacks.
2. Okay. Donnie or Aynesley, or? Who the heck is Alison’s monitor? No matter what, at this point, I’m going with Donnie. There’s still that moment where he’s burning documents in a field.
3. Felix or Mrs. S as Sarah’s monitor? That’s a curious question. One I shudder to think about the answer to.
4. If Sarah really does have a monitor, then that monitor knows about Kira. Who’s monitoring Kira? That’s probably the worst question I’ve held off asking for fear of an answer for far too long.
5. I’d like to know more about the Prolitheans (though I’m not sure I’ve the spelling right). How’d they even find out about Neolutionists and what they were working on? Besides Maggie Chen, because that’s just too pat an answer.

Orphan Black airs on BBC America on Saturdays, 9/8C

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