Orphan Black is an exciting show at its core. The acting capabilities of Tatiana Maslany are incredible, but after two seasons, I started to wonder, “Can they keep this up?” Turns out, they can but they don’t have to settle for just one versatile actor: they can have two.
“Transitory Sacrifices of Crisis” begins with a drawn out intimate scene between a woman and Rudy (the clone with the scar), when suddenly Seth (the clone with the mustache) joins in and the woman declares that “this isn’t what [she] signed up for.” Already, we can see that the Castor clones are very different from the Leda clones.
Paul shows up to give the Castor clones a lie detector test, and Seth is visibly nervous. We learn later in the episode that the Castor clones have a tendency to ‘glitch,’ and he needs someone to help him get better. I began to wonder if this ‘glitch’ was a parallel illness to the one that has made Cosima and some of the other Leda clones sick.
Meanwhile, Sarah, Cal, and Kira play floor hockey in Cal’s new house, and they are simultaneously the cutest family I have ever seen. Sarah gets a call from Detective Bell (welcome back, dude!) regarding the woman from the episode’s opening scene, and she leaves early to talk to her. Before Sarah leaves, though, Cal calms her worries and tells her that Kira is his daughter, too; he would do anything for her.
Sarah learns that Rudy and Seth took the woman’s information and a single hair, adding more mystery to the Castor clones. While all of this is going on with Detective Bell, Rudy breaks into Felix’s apartment and waits for Sarah and Kira to come home. They do, and Kira finds Rudy waiting for her in their blanket fort. He threatens Kira’s life, and Sarah insists she knows nothing about the original genome. Cal faces off with Seth downstairs, because Paul tipped him off that they were going to find Sarah and Kira. Seth begins to scream loudly, and Sarah figures out that Rudy is only acting out to protect his sick brother. Rudy releases Kira and runs down to Seth only to shoot him twice in the chest and watch him die. I should not be surprised that Rudy killed his brother after he was ‘glitching’ so bad, but now I am more curious than ever to learn what the glitching does when it progresses further.
Sarah decides it is too dangerous for Kira to stay with her, so she sends her to Iceland with Cal. I am disappointed because we probably will not see them until later in the season, and Kira is one of my favorite characters.
Meanwhile, while Sarah is dealing with Rudy and Seth, the other clones are very preoccupied. This episode of Orphan Black gave more time to Helena and Alison, despite their situations being vastly different in severity. Alison negotiates with her former drug dealer, a high school senior named Ramon, to buy his business and sell drugs to fellow soccer moms in an attempt to win their vote.
As Alison finds herself starting up a “new business,” the army (or is it Marines?) tortures Helena until a woman tells them to stop because she is pregnant. They apply the same truth test to Helena that Rudy and Seth were forced to undergo, but she doesn’t concentrate on it and instead hallucinates the talking scorpion from the last week’s premiere. The scorpion is strange to me because we have never seen Helena hallucinate it before, and I don’t necessarily understand the context in which it appears. The woman who stopped Helena’s torture tells her that Sarah sold her out to Castor, and Helena doesn’t believe her. I can only hope that Helena always has faith in Sarah and does not give into the Castor mind tricks.
The last scene we see is Mark (the first Castor clone we ever met) burning off his horse tattoo. I’m excited to see more of him in particular this season, because he was the wild card of the last season. Overall, this was a very solid second episode.
[Photo via BBC America]
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