Orphan Black Season 2 (1 Viewer)

Orphan Black returns Saturday, April 19th on BBC America.

Looking forward to it. Hope they do a "marathon" showing of season one a week or two before. I was so confused at times, it would be nice to see it again now that I understand the story much better.

I'm already there. Especially if Matthew Bennett gets a juicy role this season.

Can't wait.

Returns tomorrow."Orphan Black" won the prestigious Peabody Award a couple weeks back, being recognized as “a super-charged, stylized sci-fi action serial that ponders identity, humanity, bioethics and genetic research when it occasionally stops for breath. Tatiana Maslany is a marvel in the title role.”Full Trailer:[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjnwweTyOPw&feature=youtu.be[/media]Entertainment Weekly has a nice interview with the series creators.

Maslaney turned in one of the best performances I've seen last year. She was robbed an Emmy nomination.

Caught with the first season based on the word of mouth and it was as good as I had heard. Can't wait to see the new episodes.

mattCR said:

Maslaney turned in one of the best performances I've seen last year. She was robbed an Emmy nomination.

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Besides that no awards recognize sci-fi, I think part of the problem is that the characters and her performances are so markedly different in each role that it's easy to forget that one person is usually playing about 4 roles in one episode, is in nearly every scene of every episode and is frequently playing 2 roles against themselves within the same scene. That Maslany makes it look easy is another example of how amazing she is in the role(s).

Caught that preview-special that aired last week or thereabouts on BBC. True, was just an hour-filler, but it was worth it just to watch Patton Oswalt completely fanboy over Tatiana while sitting right next to her.

Wheaton saying to the show's creators,"Living in a post-Lost world, I just want to say, don't fuck this up!", was great.

Good season premiere that largely kept up the frantic pace of the first season finale. I was a bit confused by the timeline, though; while some storylines had to pick up a mere hour or two after the first season finale, like Sarah's storyline, others seemed like days or even weeks had gone by.Loved Ramon, Allison's very suburban drug dealer/arms dealer.I feel very mixed about Helena still being alive. On one hand, it's more powerful when dead really means dead. She was shot at point blank range and didn't seem to be breathing when Sarah vacated the premises. On the other hand, it seemed like a lot of setup with her being Sarah's twin only to be cut abruptly short by her inevitable demise. And it's interesting that Helena's apparently experiencing the accelerated healing we saw from Kira when she got hit by the car.Rachel's the interesting wildcard clone this season. She has this whole organization built around her, and she's clearly used to being the queen bee. It was satisfying seeing Sarah arriving right on cue, and having nothing go accordingly to plan once she did.I do appreciate the level of detail when it comes to the portrayal of the clones, especially when one is impersonating another. The real Cosima has actual dreadlocks. When Sarah was impersonating Cosima at the benefit, if you look closely, her hair is in tight braids rather than dreads.I hope the Art/Angie storyline is going somewhere.

^ Yeah, my knee jerk reaction to seeing Helena still alive was that it was lame but, as you said, it does seem to play into Kira's healing ability so it does make sense with what's come before.

Felix's 5 way and ass-less chaps were pretty funny. And while it's messed up to laugh at a rape whistle, I laughed at Alison's rape whistle.

I think they did at least establish that her injuries were dire, and that it wasn't a simple 'she's over it'.

Maslaney still kills me in this. The scene that really nailed it for me was her pretending to be another clone just to snap out of it at the pool party.. that is just nutty.

It is uncanny how she manages to change facial ticks, speech, composure, walk and all mannerisms as she moves between characters. Just mindbending.

I laughed at Allison performing in the community theater play and the rape whistle scene. Both were very funny

I'm a little concerned myself about Helena's return. By the end of the first season her role seemed to get a little tired, but if they push her in another direction than last season, the character could possibly still be compelling for a while. I think it just depends on what they decide to do with her maybe.

mattCR said:

I laughed at Allison performing in the community theater play and the rape whistle scene. Both were very funny

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Art: It's not "Cats."This show wasn't really on my radar during the first season, but I saw a few people getting amped up for season 2 on Facebook so decided to check it out and binge watched season 1. Really liking it, although I also have mixed feelings about Helena's return, although I'm sure some of that is due to her being my least favorite of the clones.

Just a terrific second episode. Hard to believe they're coming out of the gate at the frantic pace of the first season finale.I'm glad they had a real explanation for Helena's survival, rather than just hand waving it away. Situs inversus is a real thing which is normally a recessive genetic trait. However, like the episode said, there are a small number of "mirror" where one twin is the mirror image of the other. This is apparently called situs viscerum specularis. Having binge-watched the first season over again on Blu-Ray in the couple days before the new season premiered, it stood out to me that Helena seemed to be the only one of the clones who is left-handed. So they'd apparently planned for this from the beginning.Sarah's storyline really picked up again once she climbed out of that trunk. I liked how ragged they allowed her to look after days of running on adrenaline. But mostly, I liked seeing her back in her own world. So much of the first season was spent with Sarah impersonating Beth, it's great to see her get to operate on her own terms. Tatiana Maslany captures her maternal instincts wonderfully; there's just a natural rapport between Sarah and Kira that makes you believe that Sarah spent years raising this little girl before she got dumped on Mrs. S's doorstep. And the writing with that mother/daughter relationship is so smart, that when they get up to the room where Kira's been bunked, Sarah instantly knows that Kira has something to tell her. And rather that condescend to her, she trusts that her daughter might know something she doesn't. That Sarah went up those stairs without having decided her course was a brilliant character moment, because it showed that she's able to constantly reevaluate based on the best available information.And that relationship between Sarah and Mrs. S is so wonderfully complex. There's a great deal of love between Sarah and Mrs. S, but not a great deal of trust. And Mrs. S's motives are so ambiguous. Clearly she doesn't work for the Proletheans, since she killed Barry and Brenda for selling Kira out to them. Based on her involvement in Project LEDA and the creation of the clones, it would seem that she is in the Neolutionists' corner. But if that's the case, why did she keep Sarah (and later Kira) hidden from them for close to three decades? The look on her face as she let Sarah drive off with Kira was just a brilliant bit of acting from Maria Doyle Kennedy. Mrs. S had been holding Sarah's irresponsible parenting over Sarah's head since the show began, and earlier this episode had declared that her own guardianship of Kira had been bulletproof. And yet here Sarah read the situation correctly before she did, and made the right call for Kira when she didn't. You see all of that captured in that one stare as the truck drives off into the distance.Cosima's storyline really hooked my interest. Here she's given and out-of-date and long mothballed laboratory in the Dyad Institute's old wing, which would seem to point to her research just being an indulgence by the Neolutionists to keep her close and keep her under observation. But then Rachel walks in and hands her work of real substance. So it would seem that even if Cosima's setup was designed by the Neolutionists to be an indulgence, Rachel wants to take advantage of her to get real answers. You can see how much she despises Sarah, but I don't think it's so much for the personal assault that occurred in the season premiere. I think it's envy, because Sarah is whole in ways that she and the other clones are not. Her reference to the original DNA material being "robust" intrigued me. I wonder if we'll ever get to learn who the original was and if she's still alive.The scenes on the neo-Prolethean compound served as great mythology building. One of my view complaints about the first season was that, if the clones are caught between a rock and a hard place, the rock was a lot less developed than the hard place. The conspiracy surrounding the Neolutionists and the Dyad Institute was so complex and multi-layered, and then Tomas was such a broadly-drawn, mustache twirling villain. The offshoot of the Proletheans featured in this episode were far more three-dimensional. It was interesting that they focused so much on the head of the compound's teenage daughter, given that she had nothing to really contribute in the episode. She was clearly raised to look at a clone as an "it" rather than a "her". Part of me wondered if she's a clone from a future batch born a decade or so after the first batch.Given everything going on in the other storylines, Allison's storyline was the least interesting to me. It was nice seeing her grapple with the guilt of what she did (or rather, didn't do) to Ainsley in light of the revelation that Donnie is her monitor. And of course, her storyline had some of the best laughs of the episode. But it just seems like such low stakes compared to everything else going on.

The only thing that truly bugged me about this show is that they all have identical fingerprints. Identical twins don't have

Adam Lenhardt said:

I'm glad they had a real explanation for Helena's survival, rather than just hand waving it away. Situs inversus is a real thing which is normally a recessive genetic trait. However, like the episode said, there are a small number of "mirror" where one twin is the mirror image of the other. This is apparently called situs viscerum specularis. Having binge-watched the first season over again on Blu-Ray in the couple days before the new season premiered, it stood out to me that Helena seemed to be the only one of the clones who is left-handed. So they'd apparently planned for this from the beginning.

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I do like how they try to explain things at least somewhat grounded in biology on this show and plan ahead with details like that. (With one big exception from the first season - the clones should not have had identical fingerprints. Identical twins don't...)

That bugged me too, in the first season.

I wonder what's in the cows? Birthing chambers like the Tleilaxu in Dune?

They aren't identical twins though. In fact, I think we're going to come to find outside of Sarah, they may have all been grown as duplicates, which is a big difference from just being born identical twins

I'm beginning to wonder if there's a TV show I watch that Michiel Huisman is not in. The question of who Kira's father is has been in the back of my mind since someone asked Sarah in the first season whether Vic was her father and Sarah just chuckled and said, "God no." I like Huisman's character, I like that he brings a really different vibe than the other characters on the show, I just worry that with all of the other irons he's got in the fire, the show won't be able to utilize him as much as it will want to. I'm sure an independently-produced Canadian sci-fi show can't compete with HBO or even a big American broadcast network like ABC.The Dyad guy murdering the local cop in Cal's driveway was messy, and I hope that has repercussions.As wary as I was about them resurrecting Helena, I'm glad they're utilizing the character in a completely different way this season.In the first season, the show took great pains not to call attention to its main Toronto setting, to the point of digitally blurring out the province and city name on Beth's driver's license in the pilot. In tonight's episode, I noticed that they even replaced the Ontario license plates from the first season with generic, vaguely Canadian license plates that don't specify a province or US state. I don't really see the point in it all; is anybody really going to sit down to watch Orphan Black, see that the bulk of the show takes place in Canada, and then stop watching?Interesting with the new clone that died of the respiratory illness that the German had and that Cosima has. The autopsy scene was a whole new level of unnerving; how weird must it be for Cosima to be cutting essentially herself up like that?And man, this show sure is racking up the car crashes.

Jeez, Michiel Huisman is popping up in all sorts of random places these days.

Imagine the torturous job of an actor. One day, he's doing sex-scenes with gorgeous fiddler Annie on Treme, then he moves on to sex-scenes with Maslany, and then it looks like he'll probably have to suffer through sex-scenes with Emilia Clarke.

I'm glad to see Michiel Huisman getting some work in solid shows. I guess casting directors were among Treme's very small audience.

I hope Felix isn't gone for too long.