Friday Five: Goodbye, ‘Orphan Black’! Our Picks For Each Season’s Best Episode

Tomorrow night, one of the most passionate fandoms of the last decade will gather around the TV one final time to bid farewell to the sestras of Clone Club.  After five brain-melting, ground-breaking seasons, Orphan Black – and the tour-de-force performance(s) of Canadian national treasure Tatiana Maslany – is ending.

Nearly everyone was taken off-guard – in a good way! – in 2013 when this science fiction thriller about a conspiracy of cloning debuted, and word of mouth grew virtually overnight. Over the course of 50 episodes, Orphan Black has been one of the most fearless and breathless shows on the air, treating its fans with a rich, female-centric cast of characters and heaping doses of brain-candy, as it questioned the moral implications of cloning and what it means to each of us to be unique individuals. And SCIENCE! So much crazy science.

The show’s distribution– including BBC America, and Space in Canada – very early on embraced the enthusiasm for Orphan Black and have maintained a committed social presence between the creative team and the fans.  No other show in recent memory has been as blessed to have the perfect lead to make its premise work, either; Maslany, who finally won an Emmy in 2016 after years of praise from both fans and her peers, has played well over a dozen clones on the show to date, including no less than five who are principal characters.  If you haven’t seen any of it yet, trust us; it’s beyond just great accent work, you completely forget these women are all the same person. All hail T-Mas.

That said, if you haven’t seen the show you should also GO AWAY, NOW! (And start watching, of course; the first four seasons are available on Amazon Prime, by the way.)  But we’re about to give Orphan Black a Friday Five send-off by discussing a favorite episode from each of the five seasons so far; needless to say, SPOILERS ABOUND!  You have been warned. 

 

Season One: “Parts Developed In An Unusual Manner” (Episode 1×07)

By this point in the show’s debut season, Orphan Black fans were well acquainted with Sarah Manning, British-expat grifter and de-facto protagonist. Maslany had also wowed as Sarah’s genetic copies in Project Leda, most notably uptight soccer mom Alison Hendrix and laid-back lesbian biologist Cosima Niehaus. It’s from the seventh episode, though, that Helena – the most dazzlingly bananas clone, a Ukranian orphan-turned-psychologically abused assassin – truly joined the fold.  She’d be more of a nemesis before being welcomed by the others, but this first real meeting with Sarah (SPOILER!: Later revealed as her biological, identical twin) is one of the first season’s best moments. Also great in this episode: Sarah’s artist/club boy foster brother Felix (the amazing Jordan Gavaris) infiltrating the nightclub front of the sinister Neolutionist movement. Oh, and did we mention there’s a guy with a tail?!

 

Season Two: “By Means Which Have Never Yet Been Tried” (Episode 2×10)

At the close of Season One we were introduced to the “pro-clone” Rachel Duncan, as full of schemes as she was emotionally hollow, having been raised as a pawn among many players in the mysterious Dyad/Neolutionist cloning machine. She’s proved a formidable adversary ever since, especially fun to watch as Maslany contrasts her icy, proper English tones with Sarah’s ragey, rough-and-tumble Cockney ‘tude. It came to a head brilliantly in Season Two’s finale, when just as the other principal clones are finally coming together as a family, Sarah must escape Rachel’s experimentation. Who knew Cosima teaching Sarah’s daughter Kira about the physics of force with a pencil and piece of paper earlier on would pay off like this? Oh, except the pencil ends up in RACHEL’S EYE! *scream!!!* (Um, minor violence warning on this one…) And, footnote: Yep, this episode also featured the Clone Club Dance Party!

 

Season Three: “Ruthless in Purpose, and Insidious in Method” (Episode 3×08)

A moment of honesty: If asked, even most die-hards would probably peg Season Three as the weakest of what was overall a tremendous run. The ongoing side-plot of Project Castor, a newly discovered group of male clones – all played by Ari Millen, who is a good actor yet outmatched by Maslany’s incredible range with this premise – ended up feeling like a drag on momentum. There were definite wins though: Namely, Krystal freakin’ Goderitch! Outside of the main five clones (Sarah, Cosima, Alison, Helena, Rachel), secondary Ledas have sometimes been better in concept than execution. (Example: Tony, the transgender clone from Season Two who came and went without really getting a proper plotline.)  Oh, but Krystal; episode eight of the third year delivered our first real taste of the irrepressibly shallow, conspiracy-obssessed beautician and one of Maslany’s most genius transformations; her every appearance since has been as golden as that feathered hair.

 

Season Four: “The Collapse of Nature” (Episode 4×01)

Over the show’s run, we’ve grown to know the main clones – from Alison’s dark side under that perky, pastel exterior to normally-confident Cosima’s struggle with trusting her lover and colleague, Delphine (Evelyne Brochu). What we lacked for a long time, though, was really knowing Beth Childs, whose suicide-by-speeding train in the first moments of the pilot set this whole saga in motion. (Sarah, totally naive at the start and witnessing Beth’s death, tried to assume her identity as a scam before realizing the gravity of what she was a part of.) At long last, the satisfying fourth-season premiere truly introduced us via extended flashback to the Toronto police detective who was the erstwhile leader of Clone Club until she spiraled out of control; her partner Art Bell (Kevin Hanchard), out of the loop then, is very much an ally to the clones now.

 

**Current season SPOILERS extra-double-plus warning:
If you’re not caught up, turn back NOW!**

 

 

Season Five: “Guillotines Decide” (Episode 5×08)

No clip here, as it’s less than two weeks old so not many available… just a word. The one word that broke an entire fandom’s heart!  If you are of a certain age, you probably saw Maria Doyle Kennedy first as one of the backup singers in the musical-comedy classic The Commitments; since then, she’s continued to record and tour and acted pretty consistently, but Siobhan Sadler in Orphan Black is surely her finest work. As Sarah and Felix’s foster mother, “Mrs. S.” started as a stern but loving mum with words of wisdom and endless cups of tea at the ready. By the end of Season One, we learn that S knows a lot more about Project Leda than we imagined, and she’s pretty handy with a shotgun too (!!). How deep her connections go was so entertaining to discover as was Doyle Kennedy’s fierce performance, becoming a mother figure to all the clones really.
In this final season, most of us knew there would be casualties; there had to be.  But seeing S go head to head with vicious villain Ferdinand (James Frain) in the third-to-last episode, take a bullet to the heart and still deliver a fatal counter-shot, neutralizing the threat to her brood… it was a lot, man. Cradling a photograph of Sarah and Felix, the now-grown urchins she called her “chickens” – not since Jack Bristow in Alias have we bawled this hard watching a bad-ass parent make the ultimate sacrifice for their kids. Slán leat, S, you were one in a million.

 

BONUS!: Okay, we couldn’t resist. There was one other moment in Season Three…

…that stood out so we’re including it as a bonus. Remember when suburb-queen Alison and devoted hubby Donnie (Kristian Bruun) decided to make a buck on the side as drug dealers?  HOW COULD YOU FORGET THE MAKE-IT-RAIN TWERK? Complete with bewildered child. Oh, Hendrixes. <3

 

There’s so much more we could have praised, but it’s Friday Five, not Fifty. 😉 We hope you enjoyed this trip down Clone Club memory lane, and we’ll be right there with you when the Orphan Black series finale airs TOMORROW, August 12!

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