Finally got to watch the episode from 5/25. Sure glad it got renewed, as there’s no way this can all be resolved in one episode. Good stuff.
The whole “omgosh the weird data in our DNA is a copyright notice” thing was laughably silly.
I have to say, I noticed the makeup on the lead actress when she was meeting the birth mother looked a little off. I thought they were just trying to indicate Sarah was worn out and tired, but it was actually a clue that it was Helena in disguise! Wow!
So… Mrs. S. is somehow involved in the conspiracy? Well, then why the hell did she bring birth mother around in the first place? Something isn’t right there.
What was the deal with calling the new clone “proclone” like it was some sort of huge insult? Is this something you have to be Canadian or British to get?
Holy crap soccer dad is the monitor. Won’t soccer mom’s head asplode when she finds out (and you know she will eventually) and that she let her best frenemy die for nothing? Speaking of soccer mom, nice eyecandy with her exercise routine there. Actress is really in good shape!
Here’s an explanation for proclone from another site that seems to based on the story.
Mrs. S: I’m guessing that she wouldn’t have realized that the birth mother would have known about here involvement since she wouldn’t have suspected her having knowledge of any scientists beyond those she’d met. However I’m going to guess that the couple involved must have had the photo she gave to Sarah and “found” it somehow.
I kind of liked the whole decoding DNA part of the story but yeah, that level of control in the 80’s does stretch my credulity.
Doesn’t really explain where they got the term from in the first place, though. Just because she works in a professional setting?
Well, when you’ve been secretly running an incredibly unethical, insanely illegal cloning operation, it’s always wise to make sure that you’re protected as far as rights and royalties and whatnot. I mean, what if some other incredibly unethical, insanely illegal cloning operation starts trying to horn in on your turf? You’d want to be able to file a lawsuit in whatever totally fucked-up court might handle this kind of dispute. Right now, I’m imagining the BEST episode of Law & Order that you could EVER hope to see.
I’d imagine it’s pro- as opposed to anti-. IDK
Is Tatiana Maslany eligible for an Emmy?
seriously. the special effects team deserve one too. this is the only show that comes to mind to feature multiple versions of the same actors without any hint of CGI.
i don’t know why, but Kira’s accident bothered me. is this the first time they’ve shown such an accident involving children on-screen?
Okay, I really enjoy the show.
Tatiana is excellent at playing different characters, and playing characters pretending to be each other. Yeah, she’s got people on set helping her keep them straight, just like she’s got people on set keeping the wardrode and props straight and the placement of her hands from scene to scene, etc. Still remarkable.
Funny that the actor playing Felix does not have that accent.
So far the plotting has been pretty tight, with the distractions and deviations all tying back in some way. I am much more satisfied than with numerous US shows that kept trying to have intricate plots but apparently didn’t actually know where they were going. Like 24. And Prison Break. And Lost.
ProClone is just that she works for the group doing the cloning, so she’s for cloning.
I was beginning to wonder about uberbitch and then when Alison let her die, I knew that was a misdirect. It really was Donny. Shows that Leakey isn’t to be trusted.
Though I was not convinced why having a copyright in their DNA somehow proves they weren’t being honest.
She should be, but I doubt a BBCA show is going to even show up on the radar of whoever does Emmy nominations.
someone offers you a dubious contract giving you apparent freedom provided something something fineprint and then you discover that they have already claimed you as property long ago. of course, the entire copyright thing is so bizzare that that alone is reason enough not to sign anything.
I think I may have gotten suckered by that whole business and I’m wondering if that wasn’t the point. There have been other situations where the audience, along with the characters have been mislead like with Allison’s monitor, but this is different if that’s what happening. It feels like someone calling a glass of spilled water, a dihydrogen monoxide spill and calling in a team from the EPA in bunny suits.
Sure, putting the coded tag on each clone seems about the same as stamping your books ‘ex libris’ or any similar chattel analogy, but aside from that being done over 20 years ago, so what? Are we worried about clones becoming slaves? There’s a lively slave trade in various parts of the world, including here in the US supposedly, and that seems to manage without any “legal” protection.
So is it just the fact that they haven’t said anything? Except wasn’t that one of the precondition - sign the contract and THEN we give you more answers. If there is a good reason here, I confess that I’m missing it.
There is the fact that the sequence was altered in the supposed exhaustive sequence Leakie gave Cosima, but if that was the only change, then that might be a good reason to start wondering about Delphine again. Neolution can’t be the only player in this game. If whatever it is about the clone program that has attracted what appears to be unlimited resource is really so valuable, you can be sure that there are going to be competitors that want to steal it and having someone infiltrate the organization to the level Delphine has would be one of the better options.
The idea that copyrighting your DNA somehow makes it so that they “own you” is pretty silly. Hopefully the show won’t go in that direction.
Here’s an article on a new cloning technique from Science News, which by the way, is only a couple of pages and very readable. There’s a little jargon, but it’s explained. Science News is probably the single best and consistently written lay science pub out there.
Anyway, while everybody knows about Dolly the sheep, I found out that the first animal to be cloned was a frog and that was in 1962. The magazine has a sidebar with a timeline that I don’t see online. Wikipedia says 1958, but I’ll go with SN on this.
Anyway, the article also talks about induced pluripotent stem cells (and explains) vs. embryonic stem cells and a few other things.
edit: never mind - the timeline is at the bottom.
I didn’t interpret that as the company having a legal right to owning the clones. It’s not something that would hold up in court. I saw that as showing what the company thinks of the clones: not as full human beings, but as the company’s property. If needed, they’ll kidnap the clones and consider it their right, since the clones are their property. It shows that the clones should not trust the company, and that the company will not leave them alone.
Maybe I’m overthinking it, or giving the show too much credit, but that’s how I saw it.
I guess, though it seems kind of a weird thing to be surprised about. If you know your DNA was created by a big company, chances are they’ve filed for some sort of IP on it (granted actually documenting that in the DNA itself is kinda creepy).
But it was just a few lines of purposely cryptic dialouge, so I can’t be too critical of it. No doubt all will be explained between gratuitous shots of peoples naked butts next season.
I just found out about this show and watched it in a marathon over the weekend. Really really impressed, mainly for the reasons others have already pointed out. A few random thoughts:
(1) I agree that it didn’t make much sense for the DNA revelation to be all that big a deal. They already knew they’d been cloned by an evil organization. At that point, finding out that the evil organization had, 28 years earlier, been dicks in a totally non-legally-binding-way shouldn’t really change anything. It seems totally clear that the smart move is still to at least pretend to play along and maybe keep digging on the sly rather than to tell a powerful and mysterious organization to blow off.
(2) That’s particularly true given that Sarah was just told that Mrs. S was not who she thought she was, and given a photo that supported that claim, and her daughter was still left with Mrs. S. No need to tell ProClone to blow off until after she has her daughter and is in a car driving away
(3) I was CERTAIN that the last shot of the season would be ProClone talking to her trusted associate… a clone of Felix. Now I am CERTAIN that will happen next season 
I recently watched some vids of the people that play Sarah & Felix. They were at ComiCon.
Felix is not only not gay but he’s not British! Cute