ORPHAN BLACK Introduces Daddy Issues

Episode 2.03 “Mingling Its Own Nature With It”

[photos: Steve Wilkie & George Kraychyk for BBC AMERICA]

Well… what an interesting twist, yeah?

When last we saw Sarah, Kira, and Felix they were taking off in a truck for parts unknown. Mrs. S had confronted her past confederate to learn that they didn’t know anything about Project LEDA, and shot said confederate to keep it that way. Helena continues to recover on Henrik’s farm after they nailed Tomas in the head. Delphine and Cosima continue the dance of deception. And Allison spirals downward in the wake of confirming Donnie’s her monitor.

And onward!

Now, let’s put this out here first: we knew, at some point, the show would introduce Kira’s father. And it makes sense to use that event to amp things up a bit for the second season. So when it happens, it’s a little bit anticlimactic.

Sarah and Company are still in the vicinity of the Birdwatchers house, and Sarah gets them to another cabin in the remote area — turns out she’s been here before. And Felix is none too pleased to learn that Cal, the home owner, is actually one of Sarah’s past marks — a victim of one of her scams because he’s super-wealthy. And Cal’s none too happy to see Sarah, remembering how she fleeced him eight years ago.

But of course there were real feelings there. For both of them.

And then intuitive Kira just pops out, “Are you my dad?” without any context or clues or anything to indicate there was any kind of previous relationship. For all anyone knew, this was just some random house Sarah picked because they had to dump the stolen truck and find a bed for the little girl. To have Cal be one of Sarah’s past scam victims turned lover seems a little too cute, but the writers — and the performances — make it work. Cal seems like a nice guy, on the surface, but I’m sure we’re going to get a lot of depth to him, and some of that won’t be pretty.

Felix, of course, is now having displacement issues. With Kira’s father back in the picture, and since Cosima has Delphine, Fee really doesn’t feel like he has anyplace to fit in, except for being Allison’s acting coach. So he makes his way back to Allison in time for opening night. Except Allison, in the meantime, is convinced that Angie the Undercover Cop is another monitor sent to double-team her now that Donnie’s been compromised. On top of that, she’s fallen under the guilt weight of Aynsley’s death so much that she’s drinking and pill-popping before the curtain rises. And Cosima’s “Break a leg” is almost prophetic in hindsight, as Allison takes a header off the proscenium during the first musical number.

Cosima, still having to force herself to remember that her girlfriend is also her monitor, gets a new batch of data from Delphine. This includes a video diary from Jennifer, another clone, who displayed symptoms of the lung disease before Katja did. Jennifer died from the disease, and her body now rests in the Dyad labs, giving Cosima not only a glimpse at her possible future, but also a chance to maybe do something about it.

But it’s got to be eerie cutting into a corpse that looks just like you.

Helena continues to recover at the farm, and she’s apparently happy to know Tomas is gone. Of course, she doesn’t know they killed him, just that he left. And in what is sure to be one of the creepiest scenes so far, is that a wedding between Helena and Henrik at the end? Sure looks like it. And does this make Henrik a polygamist? Doesn’t he already have a wife? Given that the show introduced Henrik working on artificial insemination with cows, and given his apparent obsession with the clones’ fertility, one must wonder what plans he has for Helena. And just how badly that’s going to go once Helena figures it all out. She’s got to be smarter than she acts, right? The feral act has got to let up at some point, because it’s starting to wear a little thin.

The Art & Angie Show now seems a little out-of-synch with the rest of the show. After so long being one of the main threads, now Art especially is relegated to background? His thread seems to have gone off the rails since his tangle with Daniel at the hotel.

And that gets us to the one major flaw in this picture. Just how in the name of Sir Isaac H. Newton did Daniel even find the Birdwatchers compound? We have nothing to indicate how he got out there. No follow-up at all on his run-in with Art. He just suddenly shows up in the woods and starts looking for Sarah and the gang like he knew exactly where to find them. Does this suggest that he’s playing on both teams — Dyad and the Proletheans?

Maybe we get some answers when he and Sarah recover from the truck that just hit them…

[Show web site on BBC]     [Previous recap: “Governed By Sound Reason and True Religion”]