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Orphan Black: Welcome to the Clone Club

BBC America Orphan Black Reviews

For a show on an obscure network like BBC America, Orphan Black has garnered both critical and commercial success. The series follows a group of clones who were born via in-vitro fertilization to different parents from all across the world. Science fiction is such a hard genre because if it’s not done just right, it can easily fall apart. Orphan Black however, is setting the bar for high quality sci-fi on television. Take a look at this amazing fan-made trailer for the series:

Science Fiction shows can be difficult to summarize and review because they tend to be very intricate and detail oriented. I remember trying to explain the premise of Fringe to people and just getting weird looks in return. I think it will probably be easier to grasp if we go through every member of the Orphan Black clone club.

Beth Childs

She is one of the first clones we see and she kills herself five minutes into the pilot. But her death drives the entire series into motion and we learn quite a bit about her as the story progresses. 

Sarah Manning

The series’ protagonist. She encounters Beth just moments before she kills herself. Sarah uses this opportunity to steal Beth’s identity to escape her own troubles. But oh no! Beth is a cop and Sarah is an ex-con artist with a troubled past (they probably would have made a good Odd Couple if Beth were still alive). This leads Sarah to the other clones Beth was in contact with and Sarah eventually outs herself as… well, herself. She has a seven year old biological daughter named Kira and so far is the only clone who has been able to conceive. 

Alison Hendrix

Okay guys. Seriously now, if Alison is not your favorite clone, you are watching this show wrong. She’s a soccer mom from the suburbs who is just the right amount of crazy. She is an excellent source of comic relief for the show. 

Katja Obinger 

Like Beth, she dies early on in the season. We see her for about a good minute or so, coughing up blood (this is important!) before she is shot in the head. But by who?!

Helena

… By this one! The religious assassin clone. We all have one in our family, right? She is led to believe by her zealous cult that she is the original. They see the clones as unholy and offensive in the eyes of the lord, so they take matters into their own hands and begin killing them off. That’s right; this show has CLONE ON CLONE MURDER. Intrigued yet?

Cosima Niehaus

Cosima is a PHD student who is researching the DNA of the clones. She discovers that there is an actual patent written within their DNA. They are “intellectual property” of the organization that cloned them. So they are essentially copyrighted human beings. She also researches Katja’s illness as another clone begins showing similar symptoms. 

Rachel Duncan

We meet her only two episodes before the season one finale. We don’t know much about this one except for the fact that she works for the organization that generated the clones. Could she be the original?

All of the clones are played by one actress – Tatiana Maslany. She portrays seven completely different and complex characters, all with different accents and mannerisms. Some scenes feature two or more of the clones interacting with one another. It’s incredible to see an actress have so much on-screen chemistry with herself. A large component of acting is reacting to your scene partners and that aspect is absent in scenes like those. However, Maslany makes it work and does it even better than most actresses on television at the moment.

Suffice to say, Tatianna Malsany has received universal critical praise for her roles on Orphan Black and went on to win the Critics Choice Award for Best Actress in a Drama Series in 2013. She also received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Television Series. The show itself follows suit and has been showered with praise by critics – it currently holds a 92% fresh rating on RottenTomatoes.

The second season promises to be just as intense or even more-so than the first. Creator Graeme Mason told reporters at the Television Critics Association last month that they “are going to take some risks with our premise and push what we did in the first season.” This could go either way but I have faith after an amazing first season that the writers know exactly what they’re doing. 

Season 2 of Orphan Black premieres April 19th on BBC America.