Summary

Orphan Black starts with the story of Sarah Manning when witnesses a woman commit suicide by jumping in front of a train. This stranger is her clone. Caught in a tough situation and in need of cash quickly, Sarah takes her clones’ identity as Beth Child with the plan to steal her money and start a new life with her daughter. Instead, Sarah is thrown into the increasingly entangled mystery of her reality: she is one of multiple genetically identical clones scattered across the world. There is Sarah the street-smart British clone, Beth the suicidal American cop, Katya from Berlin, Alison the suburban mom, Cosima the quirky scientist, and others as the series goes on. Sarah, however, is different from the others. She, unlike the others, has a child and is the only one capable of bearing children. Sarah tries to wrap her head around the truth and figure out the purpose behind the cloning, all while an assassin is killing them off one at a time.

The Clones

In the Orphan Black cloning project, the clones were separated at “birth” and raised in different environments, producing wildly different adults ranging from a suburban mom to a tortured killer. Unlike many cloning representations such as that of Ursula LeGuin’s “Nine Lives,” where the clones look and act in similar ways, the clones in Orphan Black are each individuals. Actress Tatiana Malsany, who plays all versions of the clones, does an impressive job playing each clone as a unique person. The clones are identical in appearance but different in personality, intelligence, socio-economic status and lifestyle. This mirrors what is often seen with twins in our world: the individuals in a set of twins can grow up to be very different despite having the same genetic code. By having clones that look identical but are dramatically different, Orphan Black shows a future in which clones are not other versions of ourselves, like Multiplicity with Michael Keaton, nor a world in which clones are used as slaves, like in Brave New World. Orphan Black depicts an almost "realistic" view of cloning, if it happened today.

Raised from the time of their clone birth in different environments, the clones become different people--but people nonetheless. This is where Orphan Black distinguishes itself from other cloning stories. While the most popular cloning stories show clones as mere replicas of a person, lacking individuality, Orphan Black shows indiviudality through the use of clones. 

However impressive the depiction of clones, Orphan Black does not ignore the dangers of having them. Right away in episode 1, when we are first introduced to Sarah, she wakes up with a startle as the train arrives at “Huxley Station.” It is here, at the station subtly named after the author of Brave New World, where she meets her first clone and sees her commit suicide. At “Huxley Station,” the viewers are reminded of the dangers of cloning and government control in Brave New World, and the eventual suicide of the protagonist. Orphan Black’s violent beginning begs for a violent end as we, and Sarah, wonder why the clones were created and why they must be destroyed.

-Hannah Resnick