What I Saw: Orphan Black
BBC American has a new series called Orphan Black that I am having a lot of fun watching. It is good and mindless (and I mean that in a laudatory way) and fast moving. It is a Prime example of Good Trash TV.
Sarah is a n'er do well young woman who grew up in the foster family system with an biologically unrelated foster brother named Felix. Their Foster Mom is called Mrs. S by both of them and Mrs. S is currently taking care of Sarah's biological four or five-year-old daughter, Kira. Sarah left the country and the daughter in Mrs. S's care. Sarah has boyfriend (they are all "wankers" as Felix notes) troubles and money troubles (she has none, not even enough to buy a burner cell phone) and drug problems (she brained the boyfriend with a glass ashtray and stole his kilo or so of coke? Heroin? Meth? to trade for money to reclaim her daughter from Mrs. S, who is on to Sarah, after all she raised her).
Sarah gets off a subway train and finds the last remaining land line pay phone in North America and begins the attempt to re-connect with Felix and Kira and Mrs. S. Sarah has been out of the country for the last ten months probably living cheap off drug deals and tourist fleecing in Thailand. This leads to an interesting dilemma for me. I get the feeling that Sarah is back in the States, you know, the TV States that looks a lot like Toronto or Vancouver. Actually, so many TV shows are shot in Vancouver these days that I am perfectly willing to accept that Vancouver is the fifty first state, sorry Puerto Rico. However, Toronto still hasn't applied for statehood in my civics book. I think that Sarah might be in Toronto, but is pretending that she is in New York City or its annex, the state of New Jersey.
On the subway station platform, Sarah is pissed off with Mrs. S for pointing out that she essentially abandoned Kira to Mrs. S's care and this makes Sarah not a really fit mother. While Sarah fumes over this insult to her Periodic Motherhood, a woman in the background is fuming over something else. Sarah walks toward the well-dressed woman, who is curiously taking off her Anne Taylor suit jacket and neatly folding it and then placing it on the dirty subway platform and who then takes off her Cole Haan three inch Power Girl Heels and lines them up nicely by the jacket and her Dooney & Bourke purse on the platform. Sarah is going to panhandle some land line pay phone money off the Power Woman stripper, but before Sarah can start wheedling for spare change and twenties, the woman turns and looks at Sarah with Sarah's face and walks into an oncoming train.
For the moment, the viewer is not sure what she saw or what Sarah saw. Sarah is upset at the suicide and not comprehending how that woman could look like her. Maybe it is a drug flashback? But Sarah recovers and from all her years of training in Tourist Fleecing around the World, just not in Thailand, Sarah lifts the woman's bag and takes off to the shadows of the train station to get the cash.
While rifling through the dead woman's bag, Sarah finds not only cash, but a driver's license (I should have paid more attention to it, maybe then I would know where in North America that this show is) that has Sarah's picture on it. The dead woman and Sarah really do look alike, exactly alike. Sarah is an enterprising and unethical young woman and she decides in the time that she has left (without the purse, the dead woman is unidentified) to go to the woman's house and see what Sarah can salvage from her jewelry box and bank accounts and IRAs.
But it is not going to be that easy and that is why we have a Season 1 and 10 episodes in it. The show has been re-newed for a second season.
In the course of her identity robbery, Sarah discovers that she is not alone in this world. I am discounting Mrs. S and Kira and Felix, who is paying Sarah back for all the times when they were growing up that Sarah fought off the School Bullies for him. Felix is gay and happy about it but growing up gay can be daunting and Sarah was undaunted in his defense. She is never going to let him forget it and he will never be able to re-pay her no matter how hard she drives him. If there is bartending to be done, a kilo of Cocaine, Heroin, or Meth to be cashed in, or a gay Morgue attendant to be seduced, Sarah has Felix to do it and to be her WingMan.
Sarah is not alone because the dead woman is not the only woman in the world who looks exactly like Sarah. There are at least nine others, known to four of the women now that Sarah is in on it, and some one is killing the look-a-likes off, one by one. As my favorite look-like Sarah, Allison says, "We are someone's Science Experiment!" Sarah has Sister Clones. Why? Who did it? Who is doing it? Well, that is why there is this TV show.
Tatiana Maslany plays the Sister Clones and she is a Treasure. She gives them all different voices and accents and body language along with their different lives and characteristics (Alison is a Soccer Mom, Cosima is a Biological Graduate Student, and Beth, the dead woman, was a cop). Miss Maslany even has Sarah (who has some sort of English accent) sometimes forget to put on Beth's Mid-Atlantic accent in times of stress, and there are stressful times for all the Sister Clones on this show. The Clone Masquerade is breaking down and the thrill and stress is building up. Miss Maslany makes this show. Because she plays all the Sister Clones, she is the work horse. She is in 90% of the scenes but she never falters with each of her characters. She can handle the acting and the action sequences and the workload, and you believe that each Sister Clone is unique.
The writing is good too. There are implausibilities but the writers never let the viewer dwell on them. By the time that the viewer begins to believe that Sarah can't just step in and do Beth's cop job without any training, Sarah has already figured that out and re-signed and moved on to something else.
I can just imagine what Dollhouse could have been had Miss Maslany been the lead character.
Highly Recommended.
Sarah is a n'er do well young woman who grew up in the foster family system with an biologically unrelated foster brother named Felix. Their Foster Mom is called Mrs. S by both of them and Mrs. S is currently taking care of Sarah's biological four or five-year-old daughter, Kira. Sarah left the country and the daughter in Mrs. S's care. Sarah has boyfriend (they are all "wankers" as Felix notes) troubles and money troubles (she has none, not even enough to buy a burner cell phone) and drug problems (she brained the boyfriend with a glass ashtray and stole his kilo or so of coke? Heroin? Meth? to trade for money to reclaim her daughter from Mrs. S, who is on to Sarah, after all she raised her).
Sarah gets off a subway train and finds the last remaining land line pay phone in North America and begins the attempt to re-connect with Felix and Kira and Mrs. S. Sarah has been out of the country for the last ten months probably living cheap off drug deals and tourist fleecing in Thailand. This leads to an interesting dilemma for me. I get the feeling that Sarah is back in the States, you know, the TV States that looks a lot like Toronto or Vancouver. Actually, so many TV shows are shot in Vancouver these days that I am perfectly willing to accept that Vancouver is the fifty first state, sorry Puerto Rico. However, Toronto still hasn't applied for statehood in my civics book. I think that Sarah might be in Toronto, but is pretending that she is in New York City or its annex, the state of New Jersey.
On the subway station platform, Sarah is pissed off with Mrs. S for pointing out that she essentially abandoned Kira to Mrs. S's care and this makes Sarah not a really fit mother. While Sarah fumes over this insult to her Periodic Motherhood, a woman in the background is fuming over something else. Sarah walks toward the well-dressed woman, who is curiously taking off her Anne Taylor suit jacket and neatly folding it and then placing it on the dirty subway platform and who then takes off her Cole Haan three inch Power Girl Heels and lines them up nicely by the jacket and her Dooney & Bourke purse on the platform. Sarah is going to panhandle some land line pay phone money off the Power Woman stripper, but before Sarah can start wheedling for spare change and twenties, the woman turns and looks at Sarah with Sarah's face and walks into an oncoming train.
For the moment, the viewer is not sure what she saw or what Sarah saw. Sarah is upset at the suicide and not comprehending how that woman could look like her. Maybe it is a drug flashback? But Sarah recovers and from all her years of training in Tourist Fleecing around the World, just not in Thailand, Sarah lifts the woman's bag and takes off to the shadows of the train station to get the cash.
While rifling through the dead woman's bag, Sarah finds not only cash, but a driver's license (I should have paid more attention to it, maybe then I would know where in North America that this show is) that has Sarah's picture on it. The dead woman and Sarah really do look alike, exactly alike. Sarah is an enterprising and unethical young woman and she decides in the time that she has left (without the purse, the dead woman is unidentified) to go to the woman's house and see what Sarah can salvage from her jewelry box and bank accounts and IRAs.
But it is not going to be that easy and that is why we have a Season 1 and 10 episodes in it. The show has been re-newed for a second season.
In the course of her identity robbery, Sarah discovers that she is not alone in this world. I am discounting Mrs. S and Kira and Felix, who is paying Sarah back for all the times when they were growing up that Sarah fought off the School Bullies for him. Felix is gay and happy about it but growing up gay can be daunting and Sarah was undaunted in his defense. She is never going to let him forget it and he will never be able to re-pay her no matter how hard she drives him. If there is bartending to be done, a kilo of Cocaine, Heroin, or Meth to be cashed in, or a gay Morgue attendant to be seduced, Sarah has Felix to do it and to be her WingMan.
Sarah is not alone because the dead woman is not the only woman in the world who looks exactly like Sarah. There are at least nine others, known to four of the women now that Sarah is in on it, and some one is killing the look-a-likes off, one by one. As my favorite look-like Sarah, Allison says, "We are someone's Science Experiment!" Sarah has Sister Clones. Why? Who did it? Who is doing it? Well, that is why there is this TV show.
Tatiana Maslany plays the Sister Clones and she is a Treasure. She gives them all different voices and accents and body language along with their different lives and characteristics (Alison is a Soccer Mom, Cosima is a Biological Graduate Student, and Beth, the dead woman, was a cop). Miss Maslany even has Sarah (who has some sort of English accent) sometimes forget to put on Beth's Mid-Atlantic accent in times of stress, and there are stressful times for all the Sister Clones on this show. The Clone Masquerade is breaking down and the thrill and stress is building up. Miss Maslany makes this show. Because she plays all the Sister Clones, she is the work horse. She is in 90% of the scenes but she never falters with each of her characters. She can handle the acting and the action sequences and the workload, and you believe that each Sister Clone is unique.
The writing is good too. There are implausibilities but the writers never let the viewer dwell on them. By the time that the viewer begins to believe that Sarah can't just step in and do Beth's cop job without any training, Sarah has already figured that out and re-signed and moved on to something else.
I can just imagine what Dollhouse could have been had Miss Maslany been the lead character.
Highly Recommended.