If you’re feeling drained and beaten by The Handmaid’s Tale, then Orphan Black is the series to recharge your faith in humanity. With its legion of layered women, LGBTQ characters (whose sexuality is always secondary to their actual personalities) and loud and proud allies, Orphan Black is the exact opposite of this year’s other ‘feminist’ drama – and a lot more fun. Sadly, after five seasons of sci-fi madness, it is coming to an end, and the TV landscape will feel more barren without Sarah Manning and her clone sisters.

The show is about scientific conspiracies, clones and half the cast is played by the wonderful, Emmy-winning Tatiana Maslany. But the real punch-the-air charm of Orphan Black lies in its feminism, which, after being relatively subtle for four seasons, has emerged into the forefront of its final season.

For example, characters wear t-shirts with the slogan the future is female on. Felix, the adopted brother of Sarah, gives a moving speech about the “galaxy of women” who have raised and shaped him. The villain, PT Westmorland, with his faux-Victorian style, is as literal an embodiment of the patriarchy as it is possible to get. On the whole the show has never been interested in pushing an agenda, although you can forgive it for wanting to put one of its political goals into explicit words in the final season. Really, the show has just been interested in portraying a diverse group of clones who happen to be women, and who have been shaped in all manner of different ways due to the nurture they received.

Where most shows would have room for one or two central female characters, Orphan Black has loads, and it allows the show to portray a variety of women. With Sarah, the lead, if the show can be said to have one, we are presented with a woman who is tough, stoic and is fighting for the safety of her daughter while also being an epic screw-up. But the show isn’t limited to just showing one type of woman. Characters like stay-at-home mother Alison would be a one-dimensional background character in any other show, but Orphan Black gives her the space to be both funny and heartbreaking, as she battles with her life choices and accidentally sort of murders a load of people. Cosima is allowed to be both a genius and emotionally vulnerable in her touching relationship with Delphine. Helena shifted from boogie-man to an entirely understandable man-made monster, clawing her way back to humanity with the help of her sisters, and some utterly bizarre one-liners (“You are strong like baby ox. This I like”). Even Rachel, the arch-villain, is capable of redemption, if she chooses.

Mrs S (Maria Doyle Kennedy), Sarah (Tatiana Maslany), and Kira (Skyler Wexler) Photograph: Ken Woroner/BBC America

And that’s because one of the key themes of the show is sisterhood. This isn’t a show where women fight about men, or compete with each other. They support each other, they cover for one another, they’ll even stick on a wig and engage in some awkward BDSM for each other. That focus on sisterhood has led some to complain that the male characters were underwritten – and in earlier seasons that was true. But from Scott the lab geek to Ira, the gentlest of the male Castor clones, Orphan Black has shown that the most admirable men aren’t the ones who try to live up to a toxic idea of masculinity, but the ones who respect the people around them.

The show doesn’t portray women as perfect goddesses – even if that’s how Felix chooses to show them in his art. Orphan Black successfully smashes the whole notion of “strong female character” to smithereens. Sometimes women are power-grabbing dominatrix’s – sometimes they’re ditzy but ballsy beauticians. The women aren’t treated with kid gloves either – they’re on both sides of beatings and murders. These women are allowed to show vulnerability and they react believably to traumatic events - when Cosima’s laugher over finally being free of Neolution turns to tears, we feel the emotional release with her.

Although the show has an absence of women of colour, it does contain a variety of women of different ages, sexualities and nationalities - all of them working together to achieve shared goals. Just as The Handmaid’s Tale presented a female dystopia in which misogyny was allowed to run amok, Orphan Black offers a utopia that shows just what women are capable of when we support each other and embrace both our similarities and differences. At a time when it seems like misogyny is rewarded with anything from a get-out-of-jail-free card to the US Presidency, it’s the sort of positivity 2017 needs.