Orphan Black season 2 discussion thread

Cafe Society
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Just caught up last night. Haven’t gone thru the Season 1 thread so I’m starting off here.

I was interested in watching the show as our “semi-binge watch” series, especially with the second season starting. But I doubted Mrs. FtG would like it given the semi-SF feel. (She’s more into crime dramas.) Convinced her to give it a try and she loves it! Has a good women’s perspective to it.

What was the line a couple episodes ago from Felix? “I have to get back, Alison has dress rehearsals.”

It’s stuff like that that makes tolerating the body count bearable.

Donnie is a puzzle. Clearly in league with Leekie. Turned into a monitor of some sort at some point, but able to withstand torture. Those don’t usually go together.

My take on the overall situation.

[spoiler]The military wanted specialized soldiers. Super assassins or whatever. So they started up the clone program. One feature that is desired is the ability to withstand big trauma. So genes for that were added in. Kira inherited them.

But it’s not enough to genetically be a cold hearted killer. Environment is also needed to perfect a killer. So they were split up and raised differently.

Mrs. S seems to have passed on whatever made her a gun toting byiatch on to Sarah, for example. Helena may have been sent too far off the psychopath edge. Etc.

Rachel may have been the one selected for the “parents killed at a young age” trial.

Having babies would be bad for many reasons. E.g., can’t have scores of Kira out there outside the system. But something’s different about Sarah.

But there infiltrators, people with differences in agenda, etc. The program got fragmented.

And getting killed in a fire is a standard way to fake deaths.[/spoiler]

Note that Rosen in Rachel’s apartment slices Sarah in the same spot that Beth had a scar. That cannot be a coincidence.

Was this his “calling card”? Or is there something go on with that spot? An implanted device in the “standard” clones, etc. (But would the examiner have found it on Beth?)

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I’d forgotten Beth’s scar! Yes, you’re right.

Your other guesses seem quite plausible, though I have to admit I’ll be a bit annoyed if the “growing super-soldiers” trope is used in this show. Maybe I’ve seen too much direct-to-video sci-fi…

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Season 2, Episode 6. To Hound Nature in Her Wanderings (Not a fan of these episode titles, BTW.)

A lot of stuff is revealed for one episode. Seems too much at once. The previews for the next episode suggest a big showdown.

Gee, I wonder where they got the baby tooth of someone who is a neice or daughter of the clones? Hmm…

Helena was good in this episode. I mean, she wasn’t “good” good. But fun to watch.

What was the line? “I’d be a good mother.” Right …

Knew there were two options for rescuing her “babies”. She picked “A”. I’d have gone with “B”. Let the other girl carry them and then grab them.

Telling Helena to stay in the car was obviously a waste of breath.

Which does Helena have such trouble with English like saying “shistor” and such. But show knows idioms like “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.” and a lot of everyday expressions.

Was she really a former cop? Formerly married (not counting her recent betrothal), etc.? Too young to have done all that, I think.

Don’t these people know by now that they are somehow being tracked all the time by everyone???

I knew Vic was up to something. Buddha my foot.

If the theory is that the clones are highly resilient, then why hasn’t Alison ditched the sling yet? Is she keeping that as a surprise?

Paul wants Sarah too much for his own good.

My guess of the week. Concerning why Rachel has power over Leekie:

She inherited Dyad from her parents when they “died”. She owns the company. This may also somehow relate to how she became self aware. Leekie is trying to take things over via his Neolution thing.

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No, no - she was listing all of her sister-clones lives’ :). “I was a cop, I was a scientist, I was a housewife.” Consciously playing with all the different lives she never got to live, but could have.

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Apparently “seestra” (which is a positively adorable pronunciation) is either “sister” in Ukrainian, or at least related to that.

Another excellent episode. Sarah and Helena road tripping was as good as we’d expect it to be. My one complaint was the total laziness of the “con” that Sarah used to gain access to those archives. (And why does a church have the archives of a former mental institute/creepy experiment place anyhow?)

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Yeah, but how? Mrs. S doesn’t seem to be working for Dyad. They didn’t know about Kira until recently, right? Did she keep them for a gross childhood memento and they found them when her house was ransacked? (not too much of a stretch I guess. I had to convince my wife to throw away our firstborn’s first lost tooth, and it took her a week to be ready to do it.)

totally. I lovelovelove the old “bad guy and good guy must work together” shtick and this roadtrip was right up my alley. I was in tears laughing from Helena’s rendition of “sugar sugar” and Sarah’s reaction to it. Also, her shadow puppetry cracked me up too.

I dunno, he did say something to Angie like “this is getting in the way of my recovery.” Maybe he really is trying to change, but working the angles on the side.

good question. I don’t think she’s faking it. Seems out of character. She’s smart enough to know that would look weird though, to have it heal quickly. But if she’s keeping the sling to keep the fast healing secret, I’d expect a scene of her in private, stretching her arm or something, and then almost being caught and slipping it back into the sling just in time, or something like that.

yup, it’s “сестра” or sestra. I looked it up and was pleased to find out it’s real Ukrainian for sister. Why she says only that one word in Ukrainian and everything else in accented English, I dunno. But it’s endearing, in weird and creepy way.

I agree that Sarah’s ploy to get at those files was not one of her best. and yet it worked. weird.

the confrontation with Duncan was kinda weird. I feel like it was supposed to be a big revelation that Leekie killed his wife, but ho hum. We know Leekie’s a killer already (tail-boy!) and we have no emotional investment in Ms. Duncan, since we’ve never met her. I’m surprised Sarah didn’t ask him who the original donor was. I’d be curious if I were a clone, but maybe that’s just me.

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Season 2, Episode 7 *Knowledge of Causes, and Secret Motion of Things *

Well, it looks like Max Headroom has plenty of head room now. Ba-da-boom. Time to head over to Jimmie’s house and call Mr. Wolf. Does this mean that I’m going to actually start liking Donnie?

No Helena. Missed the crazy.

The mystery of how they got Kira’s tooth is semi-solved: It was knocked out during the accident and somehow retained and turned over to Dyad. The timeline of the accident and Leekie finding out about Sarah just barely works. But why would the hospital hold on to Kira’s tooth? Either they turn it over to Sarah or it’s medical waste. No regular ER worker would keep it and it’s too much to assume that Kira happened to end up at a place where Dyad had an insider who happened to be on the lookout for Kira.

These people were making clones decades ago. They can’t culture new cells from Kira’s tooth? They need a new supply?

I don’t think the data stored on 5" floppies without covers in a metal box in a dump of a house are going to be any good.

Why were Alison and Felix dragging Vic all over the place? All they needed to do was get them out of Alison’s room. Dump him one hallway over. Sheesh.

I could have sworn the rehab building exterior was the Ontario Science Centre, but checking Google maps shows I’m wrong. I know I’ve seen that pedestrian bridge somewhere before.

So, Leekie is gone. Looks like the clones including Rachel plus Paul and Mrs. S are forming an alliance of sorts. The new Big Bad is Miriam.

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Very “Pulp Fiction”. Incidentally, called it on Donnie having been recruited instead of being in from the start.

The metal box might be the life saver. A makeshift Faraday cage to protect the disks from EM.

I also like the idea of the evil corporation being stymied for two weeks trying to find a 5.25" floppy drive. :slight_smile:

It seemed familiar to me, too.

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Do we know exactly when Dyad found out about Kira? That’s at least part of what makes them so interested in Sarah, but I thought they didn’t even know Kira existed until quite recently.

Stem Cells are normally self-replicating… and this apparent error caused my wife to rage-quite watching the show. I know they have a genetics adviser (who the character Cosima is named after), I don’t know whether she was just absent that day, or whether there’s some subtle explanation we’re missing. I wish the dialog had been tweaked a bit to not seem so obviously ignorant.

In retrospect, it looks like they deliberately wanted to dump him somewhere public, so his “falling off the wagon” would be visible to everyone, in an effort to discredit him. Unclear whether that will result in Angie not believing his story about Alison and Ainsley, if he still goes through with that.

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Checking, I see that Delphine gave Leekie Sarah’s name quite late in S01E08. At the end of the episode, Kira gets hit. With her full name it’s possible they could have found out she had a daughter in a short period of time. But I’m not sure when they “officially” found out within the show. Realistically, some time had to have elapsed between the accident and obtaining the tooth. So the issue still revolves on “Who held onto the tooth and why?”.

Maybe Leekie isn’t really dead (despite the previews), just a glancing head blow rendering him unconscious. They take him back to Dyad’s Neuro lab where a teenage computer whiz downloads his brain into a computer, and the AI Leekie escapes over the net and roams around annoying people with stupid jokes. Ha-hap-happy ti-imes, aah.:slight_smile:

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I knew Donnie was just a dummy!

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So you mean that the shot didn’t damage any vital organs?:wink:

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Donnie, Donnie, Donnie! What a mess you have made of things, both figuratively and literally.

I love the line during the role playing at Family Day where Sarah responds, “So I’m being Allison being Donnie?” Oops! I thought someone was going to say, “What do you mean ‘being Allison’?”

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Oh no! I have to warn my dad! He’s got a bunch of them in his garage!

I too was pleased to see Donnie was just a dupe, and (relatively) recent addition to the monitor roster. I mean, yeah, this is a show that is all about the all-powerful corporate conspiracy, but there are limits to how powerful those can believably be.

Will miss Frewer hamming up the place (does he ever do anything else?). Not sure how to feel about this suddenly-appearing Marian. On the one hand: Michelle Forbes, yay! On the other: I suppose they can just keep on knocking off bad guys and bringing in new ones from “higher up” in the company. sigh… boring.

I will never tire of Sarah-as-Allison, though. goddamn, that’s amusing. Tatiana Maslany is such an amazing talent.

Oh, by the way… was Donnie just wandering the city with a gun, hoping to stumble on Leekie? because if so, the only thing stupider than that plan was that it worked.

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No, he was parked outside the Dyad institute, and then followed Leekie. You can see him pull away from the curb when Leekie leaves the building.

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In a perfect world, once this season’s run of new Orphan Black episodes comes to an end, we’d get a talk show hosted by Allison.

I want to see Allison grilling celebs. She’d be brutal! :stuck_out_tongue:

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Ah… that makes more sense, thanks.

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“I can’t go to jail, Felix. I don’t have the temperament. In the shower, if they touch me, I will cut them…”

And she surely would :D…

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Nice mullet on Tony:)

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I think at this point we can officially exclude this possibility. :slight_smile:

Although the whole situation seems to be saving Allison and Donnie’s marriage. They have something to bond over now.

And I didn’t really buy Tony as a transsexual. I understand the need not to cut the actress’s hair to enable her to keep doing the other parts, but it still looked a lot more like a woman’s hairstyle than a mullet.