Joss Whedon’s ground-breaking TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer ended its run over 10 years ago. And though its influence on our cultural landscape is clear, it seems as though the larger takeaway lesson hasn’t properly stuck. That lesson? The geek community is ready for strong women. It has been for quite sometime. So why is this a war that’s still being waged?

For every good example of strong women in the geek-driven community (the strong women of Westeros, the box-office supremacy of Katniss), there’s a crushing moment of exclusion. There's still no Wonder Woman or Black Widow movie, and the creators behind the popular video game Assassin’s Creed think women aren’t worth the trouble.

That’s why the existence and, more importantly, the record-breaking success of BBC America’s brilliant female-empowerment tale Orphan Black is so vital.

The BBC America science-fiction show about clones and their mysterious origins has received a lot of critical notice, thanks in large part to an attention-grabbing performance from Tatiana Maslany, who expertly plays the show’s five main characters. The strong buzz around both the novelty of the concept and the show’s well-written cast of characters resulted in a 91 percent uptick in viewership for Orphan Black’s second season. What the extraordinary Orphan Black proves is that the geek community is not just ready for one type of badass woman; it’s ready for (at least) five.

Because Maslany’s performance and the show’s writing contain multitudes and run the gamut of archetypal feminine strength. We have Sarah (who covers wiliness, brawn, and a mothering instinct), Cosima (sheer brain power), Alison (cunning, heightened femininity, and another kind of mothering instinct), Rachel (ruthless ambition), and, best of all, Helena (relentless, feral strength). Helena is the show’s true gift to women, particularly in this season when she took on masculine oppression wherever she went, be it in bar fights (how Game of Thrones of her) . . .

. . . or a male-run cult community. The second-to-last episode ended with Helena literally skewering the patriarchy before torching it to the ground.