Previously on Orphan Black, Helena escaped from her Prolethean prison, Cosima started to research her illness, Sarah found Cal, Kira’s dad, Rachel’s home videos of her happy home life were uncovered, and Henrik made Helena’s baby in a test tube.
We begin at Rachel’s apartment, where Helena has drawn her little stick figure all over the place. Rachel shows up, but Leekie says she doesn’t have to be here, she doesn’t have to see this. Rachel wants to though, and asks to see Daniel’s body. She swallows in a way that suggests she has feelings she’s trying to suppress, but she doesn’t let them show. She controls them. She closes Daniel’s eyes and Leekie apologizes, saying he was loyal. Even though no one asks him, Paul says it wasn’t Sarah who did this, but Rachel doesn’t need convincing. Rachel knows Helena did this. Leekie confirms that the security cameras showed Sarah and Helena leaving together, twins together again. As they zip Daniel up in a body bag, dead for real and for good this time, Rachel notices that her home video has been played. Leekie blames Rachel’s aggressive methods for this bloodshed, but she says this is only the beginning.
Back at Felix’s loft, Helena is on Felix’s couch, much to his chagrin. Sarah tells him that Helena saved her life, that she has someplace for her to stay, she just needs clothes so Helena isn’t wandering around the city in a bloody wedding gown. As Felix walks by the couch toward his closet, Helena hisses at him. Sarah scolds her, talking to her like a little sestra and says he’s family. She tells Helena he’s one of their sisters, knowing It’s a word she understands. Sarah calls her meathead again and Helena responds, adorably, “Do not call me this.” But she does understand; Felix is sestra. Sarah tells her to clean up and get dressed, then asks Felix to watch her, just for a little while. Felix agrees, because he too understands the importance of sestrahood and gives Sarah his laptop so she can Skype with Kira.
Speaking of Kira, she’s with Cal and in need of new socks. He offers to buy her new ones and opens a compartment that contains a hefty wad of cash, more than one wallet, and a gun.
Meanwhile, Rachel tells Paul that she needs a new monitor. When he looks confused, Rachel tells him that she was raised self-aware, but that doesn’t mean she’s exempt from the rules of the program. She just has the advantage of knowing who her monitor is. Of having control. Leekie says his role as monitor would involve full time personal security, and a regular report of her health to Leekie. Paul reminds them that he has no choice since he’s still being blackmailed, but Rachel, ever the humble optimist, tells him that it’s a promotion. She then asks Leekie how his research is going. He tells Rachel that it’s promising enough to treat Cosima. With a touch of sociopathy in her voice, she tells him to shut down the test. She will hold Cosima’s treatment hostage until Sarah turns herself in.
Cosima is at the DYAD, video chatting with Scott about provisional patents and secret military contracts. Scott whines that he can’t be there to research with them, and Cosima has Delphine tell him that if he came to work with them, they’d have to kill his family. And what’s funny is she might not be entirely joking. Scott laughs awkwardly and Delphine hangs up on him.
Cosima muses about cute little Scott but Delphine is too concerned with the papers in her hand to notice the adorable, amused look on Cosima’s face. The papers are about a stem cell line that is compatible with Cosima, which is good news. The bad news is, these papers were meant for Leekie, who hadn’t told them about these tests, even though he was supposed to tell them everything. They wonder if it’s because it’s experimental, but Cosima says she’ll try anything. Delphine says she will, too. Sarah is Skyping with Kira, who tells her mum that she’s not a monkey anymore. She’s a leopard now. She then runs off and tells Sarah she can talk to “daddy” now. Cal apologizes; he keeps trying to get her to call him Cal. Sarah doesn’t mind, she’s just glad they’re safe and close enough to get her when she’s ready.
Felix brings Helena to Art’s apartment, telling her to be on her best behavior, and calling her “little sestra.” When she gets inside, Art gives her a pat down, but Felix is sure he won’t find anything. But Helena is smarter than she looks and has pocketed a pen, which Art confiscates before slapping handcuffs on her and telling her that she’s safe here, in a way that also reminds her she can’t escape. Helena isn’t having any of Art’s crap and says he lies with pigs, making little piggie noises at him to prove her point. Felix is ready to get the hell out of dodge and wishes Art luck, telling him to try using food to tame the beast.
Over at the Prolethean compound, Gracie’s punishment for her silence about how Helena escaped is to be literally silenced. Her mouth has been sewn shut, like Billy from Hocus Pocus, but way more terrifying because it’s a living little girl. Her mother has no sympathy for her, saying that if she won’t tell the truth, Gracie can rot for all she cares.
At her apartment, Rachel is watching the video Sarah watched; knows Sarah is trying to learn about her. Before Paul can ask her about the video, she changes the subject, reminding him that even though he reports to Leekie, he reports to her. She’s in control. She tells Paul that Leekie can get too attached to his subjects and he can’t make the tough choices. She asks about Cal, if he’s Kira’s father. Paul says the timeline works, and Rachel, that sadistic gleam back in her eyes, asks if it bothers Paul that Sarah is back with her baby daddy. Paul doesn’t care, but Rachel reminds him that his entanglements with Sarah were pretty much the reason he hadn’t been axed yet. She has a mission for him, should he choose to accept it. She hands him Daniel’s gun, catching herself saying “is” instead of “was,” and Paul asks her what she needs.
At Art’s place, Helena is looking at the fish in his aquarium like they’re lunch. Art asks her about Maggie Chen, asks what the Proletheans did to her, asks how Maggie found the clones, how she communicated with Helena…Helena does nothing but have flashbacks and draw her little stick figure on the fishtank. Art, at the end of his rope, decides to tempt her with grilled cheese, like you would an obstinate child.
Meanwhile, at Camp WannaKillHelena, Mark brings Gracie some milk in her cage and apologizes for not being able to help her. He tells her that he’s been tasked with finding the angry angel, because, after all, someone has to carry the child. He begs her to confess and then kisses her like a big old creeper.
Helena is enjoying some mustard and sardines while telling Art about how when she was seven, the nuns said she had devils inside her, so they locked her in a cellar. And in return for this darkness, Helena gave a nun eternal darkness by popping her eyeballs out, like she tried to do to Tomas when Sarah freed her from her cage. Apparently that’s been her go-to move since SEVEN.
She asks Art is Sarah knows about SwanMan, who played God. In Helena-speak, this means she believes he’s involved in the creation of the clones. She says SwanMan is in her locker and Art is overjoyed that he’s able to get an almost-clue from her stream-of-consciousness. So excited, that he starts asking for more details. But Helena gives when Helena wants to give, and asks instead why Rachel wants Sarah, and if she wants Kira. She also wants to know what good she is to her sestra sitting inside wearing handcuffs. Just when Art thinks her helpful streak might be over, Helena says she wants to tell him something. He leans in, eager. But all she has to say is that she likes the little powdered donuts. Back at the Loft, Felix has a getting ready montage. The morgue guy, Colin, shows up for a date, willing to give Fee a second chance, provided it doesn’t end in cops this time Hilarious, why on earth would that happen aga-just kidding, the popo shows up with a search warrant before they even get all their clothes up.
Paul shows up and starts interrogating Felix about Cal’s cabin. He pulls out a gun and Felix’s sass machine shuts down. Paul wrestles a terrified Felix onto the gun and presses it into his hands, forcing his fingerprints on the murder weapon.
Outside, Sarah had seen the police pull up and is hovering in a nearby alley. Her clonephone rings and Paul answers from Felix’s number. After proving Felix is still alive and relatively okay, Paul explains about the frame-up. Sarah sasses him about the fact that he has now slept with three clones but Paul isn’t moved. He tells her that she has to bring herself, Helena, and Kira to Rachel or Felix is going to be a convicted felon.
Sarah calls Art in a panic, and he tries to calm her down, but Helena overhears that Sarah is in danger and that Rachel is to blame, so she uses the key to the sardine can to get out of her handcuffs and get Art in a compromising position.
Meanwhile, Henrik cuts Gracie’s mouth stitches open and lets her apologize for letting Helena escape. She equates her attempted murder to killing a coyote who was eating their chickens, and Henrik looks at her with sad eyes, wishing his daughter would accept her newest sister-aunt. Her mother is less empathetic and says that if Grace doesn’t help get Helena back, she’ll carry the child herself.
At the DYAD, Delphine and Cosima sneak into Leekie’s lab. Cosima’s worried about getting caught, but Delphine is determined to get to the bottom of this. Cosima warns her that he’ll destroy her reputation as a “budding lesbian” and I laugh, but Delphine is not as much of a laugh-in-the-face of danger type as Cosima and I are.
Unfortunately, Sneaky Leekie finds catches them, and Cosima tries to cover for them, but Delphine has no more patience for these games. She tells him what they found and Leekie turns to Cosima to explain that the reason he didn’t tell them is that Rachel wants to withhold treatment. He shows them the LEDA picture and Cosima plays dumb, so he tells them that it’s a picture of scientists who died in a lab fire 20 years ago. But people weren’t the only thing lost in the fire; the original genome was also destroyed.
So they act like it’s top-secret information, but really they just don’t have it. As Cosima puts it, they lost the map. Finding the sequences that overcame the viability issues is like looking for hay in a haystack (which I always thought was a better version of the expression…needles would be relatively easy to find I think). Which is probably also why they can’t just wave their science-y wand and come up with a solution for the illness-they don’t know the exact sequence that causes it. (Though this could be totally wrong.)
Cosima says she doesn’t know if Sarah has uncovered anything and Leekie says that he’ll ignore Rachel and continue the treatment anyway. In Cal’s camper, Kira is drawing pictures of her mummys’ “new” sisters, and Cal is rather intrigued by this. But before he can ask too many questions, Kira tells him that someone is coming. Which I’m hoping is just highly advanced hearing skills and not precognition because this child is beginning to freak me out. A police officer shows up and asks for license and registration, and the wallet Cal picks has his name as “Andrew Cooper” and he says he’s heading back home with his daughter. When the cop starts prying, Kira shows up with a gas mask on and jokes about how he’s burning dinner, so the cop leaves them be. Cal says she’s quick on her feet and she looks at him like, “Grifting is sort of in my DNA.”
When Sarah gets to Art’s apartment, she finds him handcuffed to a column in his kitchen. Helena had left them another little paper fortune teller, so they follow it like they did last time, and it leads them to a storage unit. Sarah calls out to her sestra and tells her not to jump out and scare them, but Art notices motorcycle tracks, meaning she already left. Sarah knows this means there’s something important for them to find, so they root around Helena’s makeshift apartment, which is littered with doll heads and pictures of nuns with their eyes scratched out, like something straight out of Pretty Little Liars. They find a picture labeled “SwanMan” and realize that Rachel’s father didn’t really die in the lab explosion. She says she needs to call Cosima and I’m glad they’re having regular phone calls but I really wish they would stop having all these conversations off screen.
The last thing Art notices is that there is a sniper rifle case with no sniper rifle inside. Sarah sees a doll with a fancy dress, a pile of blonde hair strands at its feet, and no head. She knows what this means. “She’s gonna kill Rachel.”
Rachel, meanwhile, is none the wiser. She’s slinking around her apartment, ordering Paul around, putting on lipstick and spritzing herself with perfume. She walks like she is always ready to have a wine glass placed in her hand by a doting servant. As this is going on, Helena is sitting in an abandoned building, cutting the doll’s hair and putting lipstick on it. She also puts some lipstick on herself and watches as Rachel orders Paul to take off his shirt. Then his pants. When she kisses him, he leans in to kiss her back and she slaps him. She didn’t tell him he could do that. He asks if Daniel liked it when she did that, and Rachel asks if Sarah did. And I think, in a twisted way, she probably really wants to know. Wants to know if this need for control, this hunger for power that drives her every move, is genetic or if it’s something unique to her.
While Rachel continues to order Paul around, Helena starts assembling the sniper rifle, with cool precision, complete with the doll’s head on top. She is creating dialogue for Rachel and Paul, which is kind of hilarious, until she says, “Very pretty dirty sexy Rachel like my mother.” Which is confusing for a few reasons: Who was she talking about? Her own mother? Because she wasn’t raised with anyone she called mother. And she didn’t seem to accept Amelia as her mother. Is she talking about Mrs. S? Or is she talking about Rachel’s mother? Or Paul’s? Though how would she know who Paul’s mother is? I want to get in that head and look around. She’s so fascinating to me.
Sarah and Art follow the fortune teller directions and find Helena’s bike outside a building they realize is directly facing Rachel’s apartment windows, so they run upstairs. When they see Helena with Rachel in her crosshairs, they beg her not to. Helena calls Sarah over and tells her to look through the binoculars at Paul being unfaithful. Sarah tells her she doesn’t care about Paul. Art tries to interject, to which I shout SHUT UP, ART, but to which Helena says, “Pull, Art. See who’s faster.” This episode made me realize, just because Helena doesn’t always respond the way we expect a person to respond, just because she speaks in riddles and sees the world differently, doesn’t mean she doesn’t understand. That threat to Art was lucid, it was confident. SHE’S SO FASCINATING.
Sarah tells Helena she can’t kill Rachel or Paul, because they have Felix. “Brother sestra.” She says she needs Helena’s help to find SwanMan, but Helena thinks Sarah will just be using her. Then Sarah opens her heart to her and says what she hasn’t told anyone yet; she thought she killed Helena. She was reacting to losing her mother, the thing she had been looking for her whole life and had only just found, but soon realized that in shooting Helena, she was also losing a sister. She felt the connection Helena went on about, she just didn’t want it. But she regretted killing her as soon as she did it, and now was her second chance.
She asks Helena to put down the gun, and Helena listens. She helps her sestra down from her sniper nest and Helena accuses her of making her cry. Sarah laughs and calls her “meathead” and Helena once again responds “do not call me this” and it’s the sweetest thing. They walk away with their arms around each other, and Art has no idea what the hell just happened. Back at the DYAD, Delphine is whispering sweet nothings into Cosima’s ear while Leekie prepares her for her first injection. She kisses her cheek, she holds her hand, and I wish all doctor’s appointments came with a Delphine.
After the injection, Cosima tries her joking-through-the-serious-stuff approach again, saying that if her arm falls off, at least they’ll know it didn’t work. This time, Delphine, relieved that they have a solution, that they’re actually taking steps towards Cosima’s cure, and actually having some hope for once, joins in this time and says perhaps she’ll grow another limb. Cosima tells Leekie that they have a proposition for him, and Delphine sweetly thinks she means Cophine has a proposition, but Cosims meant “we” as in “the Clone Club.” She asks him, cheekily, if he likes to drink beer.
Apparently he doesn’t, because when he gets to the bar, he orders red wine. Sarah shows up and Leekie is delighted to see her again. She shows him the picture of Professor Ethan Duncan, definitely not dead. (Well, probably not dead.) Leekie asks for more information, but Sarah’s done sharing until Felix is released. Leekie isn’t sure he can swing that, but he offers her what he assumes is a sweeter deal: He can use this information as leverage to continue Cosima’s treatment. Sarah’s eyes get wide, “What treatment?” She asks if it’s what Katja had and the worry on her face is plain. They may have butted heads a few times but Cosima is her best ally right now. Sarah gets up to leave and tells Leekie that if anyone follows her, she’s going to RELEASE THE KRAKEN (aka let Helena loose).
As soon as Sarah is gone, Paul slithers in and Leekie is only a little surprised to see that Rachel sent him to spy on Leekie. Leekie begs Paul to come to him with anything he finds while he’s creeping on Sarah before bringing it to Rachel, but who knows where Paul’s loyalties lie at this point.
Outside, in Mrs. S’s very spacious truck (“much leg rooms”), Sarah asks Helena how to find SwanMan, and Helena says that he is in the “place of screams.” I don’t know what this means, but I have a feeling it’s not going to end in hugs and puppies.
What did you think of “Ipsa Scientia Potestas Est”?
Here are some of our favorite #clonesbians tweets from this week:
Cosima is still the hot one, but Sarah is looking extra… amazing this episode. #OrphanBlack #cloneclub #clonesbians
– Marie (@buknerd) May 18, 2014
Meathead is now the most affectionate and best term of endearment, FYI. #cloneclub #orphanblack #clonesbians
– shessohard (@alannahjayne) May 18, 2014
I only wish Fee had given Helena the assless chaps #clonesbians
– Jenn (@editorjenn) May 18, 2014
I NEED more sassy Delphine in my life. #clonesbians #CloneClub
– Erica Barz (@chapstick_buff) May 18, 2014
I’m calling it. Helena is “A.” #OrphanBlack #clonesbians #booradleyvancullen
– Tammy (@tylynn_sings) May 18, 2014
50 Shades of Clones! #clonesbians
– Samantha J. Green (@SamanthaJGreen) May 18, 2014
My heart rate is insane. If I die, please make sure my tombstone reads, “Cause of death, Orphan Black”.#OrphanBlack #CloneClub #clonesbians
– anh62950 (@anh62950) May 18, 2014
How can a show with so much action, conspiracy, and science have so much damn heart? Tatiana Maslany. #OrphanBlack #Clonesbians
– Jerzey (@jerzeyredhead) May 18, 2014
Lord help the mestra who comes between me and my sestra. #clonesbians #OrphanBlack
– Dana Piccoli (@DanaPiccoli) May 18, 2014
I feel like all the #Clonesbians collectively smirked at the thought of Cosima having an “extra limb”
– idk man (@ThatCynicalKid) May 18, 2014
This week, Orlando Jones even joined in the #clonesbians fun!
I’ve never seen a sexier intravenous injection. #clonesbians #OrphanBlack
– Orlando Jones (@TheOrlandoJones) May 18, 2014
