This highlight reel is basically just me babbling about Rachel Duncan for paragraphs and paragraphs, sorry I’m not sorry.

On a personal level, I don’t think anything Orphan Black writes or films will ever quite top the iconic Sarah and Helena reunion of Season 2, Episode 4. That said, Sarah and Rachel’s battle of Season 4, Episode 10 has risen pretty high in my Top 5 list of Best Orphan Black Sequences.



The clone interaction that people keep not talking about is not only on point (if you look v e r y closely at Sarah’s lower leg, you will discover a clever secret to the VFX behind that scene) but the scene itself is quite beautifully horrifying on a renaissance painting level. Susan Duncan slouches, bleeding, in a leather armchair which I’m choosing to believe is symbolic of the seat of power that Rachel is after, while Rachel paws, wide and mad eyed, at a recoiling Sarah with her (CGI!) knife, all the while spewing hateful, jealous bile that comprises her rotten core and kicks her straight out of Clone Club.

Its pretty gay great.

Likewise, Season 2, Episode 4 was pretty gay and great. But what’s most interesting about it is how similar these two encounters are visually if not in intention.

Guys we’ve gotta stop meeting like this

Helena, approaches a horrified Sarah clad in the garb of a nightmare bride, wielding a knife. She’s just killed the guy who was going to torture Sarah, so everything is actually fine. Rachel, clad in her classy white power smock, tortures Sarah with her fuckin’ smug white walking stick. She wants to actually murder Sarah to death, so everything is really not fine. Interesting from a perspective of Orphan Black character and thematic parallels.

Unrelated, I think it’s so gross how that stick was in Ferdinand’s crotch at one point. Ugh

….oh no, I just realized that Rachel’s BDSM face is really similar to the face she made when she was jabbing that gross cane into Sarah leg oH NO

BLUDGEON ME WITH PARALLELS!

Parallels! Between Sarah’s contentious relationships with her two most polar opposite sisters, parallels are boundless. Helena loves the crap out of Sarah. Rachel will probably be responsible for shoving Sarah in front of a train. Helena is a trained assassin from birth. Rachel is a trained businesswoman (for a business she ironically can never own…or will she?). Helena is quirky and lovable, Rachel is unpredictable and terrifying.

So boss-ass I stabbed my own foster mother in the season finale

Bitch me too

Now, parallels between Rachel and Helena! Oh ho ho! So they’re both obsessed with Sarah, they both have a propensity for sharp pointy things, they both really like the color white, and they both have fucked up childhoods. If you’re following me, clearly this indicates an imminent S5 showdown between the Helena-Sarah-Rachel triumvirate. TWO SISTERS ENTER, hopefully Sarah and Helena leave intact. It makes sense that the two women who have the closest connections to Sarah will eventually, somehow, come physically face to face instead of face to sniper scope. It’s a battle that’s been looming since season 3 and it has to come full circle—something Orphan Black’s been surprisingly good at this season.

Honestly, in a season that was woefully light on Helena action, if Helena v. Rachel DOESN’T happen in the final season of the show, I will be very very surprised.

NOW ON SALE: DUNCAN’S RISE (sexual innuendos sold separately)

“We operate in countries where human cloning is not illegal. Where our corporation supersedes their citizenship. Their personhood. So why grant them this illusion of freedom? If we want to know if our lab rats tails will grow back, we damn well will cut them off, and see!”

A chilling statement from a lab rat.

There’s something to be said for slaves breaking free of their masters. There’s even more to be said about slaves who become the masters. And in between these things to be said, there stands Rachel Fuckin’ Duncan, who has rather unexpectedly* stands out from Orphan Black’s considerable stacks of villains to become the most interesting and complex one of all.

*but if it’s unexpected, that it happened so seamlessly implies that perhaps we simply weren’t paying attention



The various antagonists who have cycled through the OB narrative—the Proletheans, the Dr. Leekies, the Evie Chos, the Henriks, the Tomases, the Dr. Nealons and Susan Duncans—all of these people now, in light of Rachel Duncan’s (dare I say orgasmic, yes I dare) R I S E to power, seem to have been living MacGuffins heralding the true evil that has been walking beside our heroes all this time…another clone. A woman of intelligence and ambition, of deeply ingrained self-hatred and jealousy. A woman who seeks to sever herself from a collective she was born into by becoming the very thing that the women (and men) like her fear—a controller of an unethical and dangerous experiment.

Rachel Duncan loves 3 things: herself, Sarah (cooler version of herself) and P O W ER. …All three together bake a PROPUNK cake, YUM—whoops did I say that

What makes Rachel such a good antagonist though, is that she contains a very small mark of goodness in her. There is a segment of good antagonists who are essentially protagonists that have gone horribly wrong. They’ve been twisted inside by some event in their life that has changed their perspective. They’ve been hurt, cast off, broken. They may be twisted people, but at their core, there is still something worth salvaging, and you can see this in Rachel. You could see it the first time she cried at the death of her father, and the second time before Felix, as she sat helpless to his mocking. You could see it with her interaction with her smaller counterpart Charlotte when she started to exhibit signs of The Clone Sickness. And you can perhaps see bits of it with her and Ferdinand. Someone who is intimate…but whose perception of intimacy is a bit skewed.

Somewhere within Rachel Duncan is a young girl who wants desperately to know what genuine love, caring and companionship is. But that young girl has been encompassed by an angry, jealous and vengeful woman with a thirst for power.

A good antagonist.

THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN

DaAAAmn what category Kaiju is THAT

Speaking of controllers, on to the Wizard of Oz, “the man who wrote the book”, …Jacob? The revelation that the father of Neolution is somehow not only alive and well, but closer than we think appears to tilt Orphan Black directly into the avenue of science fiction that it, for the most part, teeters over. That said, the subdued way Orphan Black has utilized Rachel’s bionic eye, among other things, has been very indicative of the show’s continuing intent to use existing concepts of technological innovation in interesting as opposed to ham-fisted ways. From the most absurd (men with tails) to the much discussed (bionic implantation), nothing on Orphan Black is without a some basis in study. The world is changing, and on Orphan Black, it’s changed.

So how could Orphan Black possibly ground the concept of an immortal man in scientific lore? Perhaps the bots—Neolution tech—are the key. Suppose you trigger something biologically with your gene therapy bot that allows you to live long after the supposed human lifespan? Or, assuming Westmoreland’s gene expression tech predates Evie Cho’s bug, there could be something else equally as hypothetical going on. I’ll hang tight for my girls Casey and Nina to weigh in because they’re like, way smarter than I am. And they have degrees.

Me trying to science like “I’m with Scientific American”

Anyway, either way what’s ultimately the most unsettling about this revelation is that a—quoth Cosima—”racist blowhard who thinks poverty is genetic” is still alive and kicking in whatever current year Orphan Black thinks it is. If Orphan Black is going to touch upon some of the darker elements in the history of eugenics, that would be interesting. Folding in concepts of the ideas that many classical men of science harbored—ideas of scientific racism and sexism in relation to human biological and social evolution—would be fascinating to see on the show. Being that our resident self-identified eugenicist has returned to us, there is potential for Delphine to represent some bastion of modern science, to champion ethics and patience over the reckless “steering of evolution”. Delphine appears to believe that Westmoreland helping her and bringing her to his island wasn’t simply an act of good graces. Questions: Why does she think that and what exactly does she know about the elusive/immortal P.T. Westmoreland?

what’s the story with the eyebrows, hair didn’t like the view from on top of your head?

….i don’t have a comeback for that, i’m a Very Serious Man and Not Amusing At All

I do doubt OB will go super controversial…nonetheless it would be very interesting, and there’s much to talk about there. I’m half hoping Westmoreland ends up being some incarnation of Kubrick’s freakish Dr. Strangelove. Arrogant, brilliant, malicious and hopelessly backward. Maybe with a touch of diagnostic apraxia, why the hell not. They should get Donald Sutherland to play him—keep it Canadian!