Orphan Black: Natural Selection

Spoilers for the episode

The Story:

A woman commits suicide in front of Sarah so she steals her handbag and then her identity because they look identical. Then makes her brother go identify the body as her so she can escape her ex-boyfriend who she stole a load of drugs from.

Thoughts:

The lookalike woman turns out to be Elizabeth Childs who seems to have a much better life than Sarah or at least more money. Quite a few things get revealed about Beth in this episode.

First she’s a cop, then that she’s under investigation for shooting someone and lastly that she already knows about the clones and is doing something dodgy with another clone called Katya. Who like Beth doesn’t live past this episode.

They don’t confirm that all the lookalikes are clones but it’s kind of obvious and I like that the show isn’t obsessed with hiding it or throwing us off so they can have a twist.

I love Sarah’s freak out about Beth being a cop. Mostly because she’s stuck in the police station but also because she’s got to give Beth’s statement at the hearing. She calls her brother Felix to get him to stop the plan to pretend she’s dead by identifying Beth’s body as hers but he doesn’t pick up.

That’s quite a lot of trouble she’ll be in if found out and I also like how she gets out of it. Downs a load of soap and throws up in the hearing on the table.

She lives in the moment and is a bit of a con artist so she’s quite good at bluffing her way through bad situations. Like Walking into a bank to pretend to be a woman she’s only seen on a video for a few seconds and then bluffing her way through conversations with Art who is Beth’s partner on the force and Beth’s therapist.

Sarah needs the money from Beth’s account so she can disappear with her daughter. This is when Art finds her and takes her to her hearing at the station.

There seem to be a lot of differences between Sarah and Beth but considering how everyone expects Beth to take off and not go to her hearing maybe they aren’t so different.

Sarah also runs away from her problems a lot creating new ones in the process. She abandons her child then pretends to be dead and doesn’t think how those things could conflict especially when she wants her child back.

She also ends up sleeping with Beth’s boyfriend when he gets suspicious as a way of distracting him. There was lots of Sarah nudity but there was also lots of male nudity.

You see Felix and his drug dealer friend then Beth’s boyfriend then Felix again and then a random large man in a towel stood outside. So there was actually more naked men than women. That makes a change.

Sarah’s support in all this is Felix her foster brother and drug dealer who takes all the crazy form Sarah in his stride. His response to her telling him she saw a woman kill herself is eww and he’s not that surprised she’s stolen the woman’s stuff.

You kind of think he’s going to be one of those people that enable and let the main character get away with everything. And he does to a certain extent but he also tells her when she’s crossed the line. He lets Vick have a wake even though Sarah told Felix not to because she didn’t want her daughter to find out.

Vick is so funny once he thinks Sarah is dead and I wish we could have heard all of his eulogy not just the first part when he says he’s got evidence to back up his statements.

Felix visiting the Morgue to identify Sarah’s body is strange. The morgue guy hits on him and then they flirt again when Vick is crying over the dead body. I sort of wonder if this is normal for the morgue guy.

The last five minutes of the episode is when things get really interesting. It turns out that it wasn’t just Art who was following Sarah but another clone called Katya who Beth was doing something with. They had a plan and were using Beth’s connections.

Katya eventually figures out she’s not talking to Beth but gets shot in the next second so there’s possibly a third person following Beth. And Sarah decides that at this moment with a bullet through her wind screen and a dead woman in the back seat that it’s time to answer the phone.

And that’s how the episode ends. I don’t know why I never got around to watching this before it’s so good.

Next Orphan Black: Instinct

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