TWAIN Acquire - the ORPHAN BLACK thread

i think it's kinda spiraling out of control and mr veg isn't really wrong, but

she's so good, and i like her various characters. actress-playing-sarah-playing-alison was a+++

yeah i loved that!

love alison the most, so perfectly type-A

Alison is my favorite clone.

Veg, I think you'll like S2 a lot. It's moderately less stupid with a lot more peeling of the onion.

alison's response to a "namaste" bow thrown her way is immaculate

i have to admit i'm starting to get a little overwhelmed with the backstory at this point

There's definitely a lot to process, but the brief conversation Sarah has with Swan Man cleared up a lot of it really quickly.

Did it? I came out of that more confused than ever.

But then I am a moron.

Project Leda was military cloning research but was secretly used to create a daughter for that scientist and his scientist wife, Dyad took over the project and then the neolutionists inside Dyad (Leekie and others) went wild with the technology until the lab caught on fire and all the original dna recipes were lost. Also, Leekie presumably killed the lady scientist and ran her husband into hiding at some point.

Rachel is the prototype, though. It's still not clear who she's a clone of, though.

though

The Prometheans are the more confusing half of the saga.

Thanks, JF. A few too many shadowy conspirators within cabals for me to track.

Anyone else bothered by how Metrosexual Cowboy is so outwardly Draperesque?

hey JF did you catch what Nerd Lackey was saying to Frenchie in the lab? i rewound it twice but still didn't grok the import

Basically that the stem cell donor was Kira.

I don't remember the exact wording, but I think the medicine Cosima is getting was created by harvesting stems from not one of the clones, but either Sarah's daughter or....dunh dunh dunh!...another clone's offspring.

I could be totally wrong.

and then Frenchie was like *gasp* NEVER MENTION THIS TO COSIMA and i was like, er, what is going on here :(

Leee i've never seen mad men but by metrosexual cowboy are you talking about Paul? i first thought of Felix (chaps, anyone?) but he doesn't bear any resemblance to how i've heard people describe don draper. Paul, on the other hand... well he's an asshole, basically. i'm glad that he's seemingly becoming a full-fledged baddie. more of that, please, so that we can have some delicious comeuppance. hopefully at the hands of Vic.

and then Frenchie was like *gasp* NEVER MENTION THIS TO COSIMA and i was like, er, what is going on here :(

I read that as "Don't tell Cosima that we have Kira's genetic material," though re-thinking things I'm not sure how Dyad would've gotten it in the first place.

Tracer, not Paul! I meant the Prolethean guy -- is his name Mark? For a farmhand, he sure has a lot of product styling his hair, was the gist of my remark.

As for Vic, I'm actually looking forward to the Vic/Alison coupling that's surely in the works.

Weren't the stem cells from skin on baby teeth? Maybe when they raided S's house they found some of Kira's baby teeth saved on a shelf or something.

!!!

Is all I have to say about that.

lol that donnie

no but seriously holy shit

Jeeeeesus! I love this show.

I love the way characters like Donnie and Vic linger around the edges and get pushed into the spotlight when you don't expect it.

Don't eff with Donnie!!!!

go now. don't get in your car. don't go home. and you might survive.

^^^

or then again, you might not! whoopsie

aaaahhhh i got into this recently and it's the best thing ever, finally caught up so i can click on this thread

tatiana maslany's acting acrobatics are extraordinary

the writing is so well-paced, like it throws ten times as much plot at you as most shows do in any given episode and thematically and plotwise throws so many balls in the air, but revelations seem to happen at just the right time, and it has so much left to give - it's secretly so stingy about letting characters interact with each other, so each new pairing seems so fresh. helps that the characters could so easily be cardboard clichés but most are fleshed out so fully. i NEED several alison/helena scenes in my life soon.

"i can't believe you let a cop into clone club" #acab

"i don't have the temperament for jail. if anyone touches me in the shower, i will cut them" <= alison, you have exactly the right temperament for jail

Helena singing in the car and not knowing all the words brought so much joy into my life.

also loved how, esp in serason 1, the show's genre seemed to shift depending on which clone was being focused on. police procedural with sarah/beth, suburban black comedy with alison, sci-fi with cosima, horror with helena.

you know what i really loved in the last episode, which was excellent imo, and a welcome present-tense antidote to the mountains of backstory, was vic unexpectedly pleading with sarah to give him another chance. he had been thinking about this moment for DAYS and he was so sincere and pathetic but he has zero inkling of the craziness he's just touching the edges of. it's so earnestly off-base in exactly the way that people so often are.

xpost yes! i feel like that's definitely continued. this season we had our horror ep, replete with psycho shower scene. and the last episode but one was a kind of spooky japanese searching the dusty archives of an abandoned lunatic asylum type ting, mixed with a road movie i guess?

uh yikes i hope i haven't gone one episode too far here.. i think us/torrents are one ep ahead of the UK? eek

lol at alison 'i will cut them'

i think my favorite line is still helena in s1, while pinning sarah to the ground: '. . . a copy cop'

I was already having trouble keeping the titles of Orphan Black and Orange is the New Black sorted in my head, when Alison said that my brain imploded a little.

So that happened. I imagine the introduction of a new clone will play into the story later, but right now it seemed pointless?

i'm all caught up wee

yeah idg the point of tony except oh hey here's a boy

that 'beard' was the worst. it looked like double sided tape along her jawline

like i'm into them playing with gender but it all felt very hamhanded & clumsy

Right? A definite low point in the series.

Mr Veg & I were all

"..."

yeah this didn't work for me either. i mostly fault the hair/makeup design for not selling us on the new character: the beard was awful, but it also got visually "lost" in the hair around his shoulders, so there were a lot of scenes where it didn't look like a new bearded character, it just looked like sarah with bedhead.

i did like that tatiana's dude voice had distinct canadian inflections, though

The one bright spot this week? Alison and Donnie are primed to team up as a killer power couple.

yeah at first i thought it was she was sweaty & her hair was stuck to her face

well. kinda horribly startling for a show that was juggling so many balls so well with so many engrossing storylines on the go to suddenly, for no reason, get everything so horrendously and needlessly wrong all of a sudden. missed opportunity to do a trans clone well, too. they gave tony an out to disappear again and as much as that would imply a backtracking, i wouldn't be sad if that happened

most of the season has been spent with sarah/keira/s on the run. then they returned, but only with the safeguard of having rachel's dad as a hostage. which they now have given up.

i dunno, feels like we're just wandering around even apart from the tony stuff. helena needs to start killing ppl again just so everyone's minds are appropriately focused

otm

Show needed to press the reset button and slow down the hundred layers of narrative, but Tony wasn't the way to go about it.

i don't really get why they seemed to go to huge lengths to make helena both a sympathetic character and a hugely enjoyable screen presence, give her a cliffhanger ending, and then...completely excise her for two episodes

latest one would've been much better if all tony's scenes had been replaced by helena's adventures with the religious freaks (hopefully culminating in her gutting them)

http://gs1.wac.edgecastcdn.net/8019B6/data.tumblr.com/04790310e06a28c1848e71ab8ecca75d/tumblr_n6lozmeZfE1qazp9mo2_500.png