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“Orphan Black” recap (3.3): We make a family, yes?

Previously on Orphan Black, Gracie and Mark were on the run from whichever Proletheans survived the fiery wrath of Helena, who got sold to Castor by Mrs. S; Cal took Kira to Meereen; the Castor Clones are on the hunt for the original DNA and glitching all over the place, including Seth the StacheClone, who was put out of his misery by Rudy the ScarClone.

Unfortunately for Sarah and Felix, Rudy didn’t bother to take his brother’s body with him, so they’re left to clean up the mess. This isn’t Sarah’s first go-round with a clone’s dead body, so she’s staying tough. When they finally get the body into the bathtub, Felix suggests they take some shots before they figure out their next step.

Felix suggests Mrs. S; surely mommy dearest would know how to dispose of a body. Sarah doesn’t want to ask Mrs. S for any more help, but Felix says he can do it. Before they can make a final decision, Art bangs on the loft’s door, so they scurry to cover up evidence that they just dragged a dead body cross the floor. Sarah slides the door open and the two of them act like they’ve never had to lie to cover up a crime before, squirming and trying to block Art’s path to the bathroom. Art sees blood on the floor but before Felix can convince him it’s spilled paint from his latest project, Art pushes his way into the bathroom and finds the body.

They pinky promise it wasn’t them who killed him, and ask him to look the other way. Art is uncomfortable with this plan, but they Skype Cosima to introduce the two of them and he’s distracted a little when Cosima says she knew Beth and misses her, too.

Sarah and Felix show Cosima and Scott the dead clone and the scientists figure it must be a design flaw, like the ones the Leda clones have, but in the brain.

That’s why Seth and Rudy wanted the original genome, to find the cure. Cosima wants to examine Seth’s brain so Felix invites them over to their family bloodbath.

Art tells Sarah that the reason he’s at the loft in the first place is because he has a lead on Prolethean Mark’s location and Sarah is ready to play detective, this time without having to straighten her hair or put on an accent.

Mark wakes up in the motel to find Gracie gone; before he can full-on panic, she returns with coffee and breakfast. She asks why they’re spending their honeymoon hiding in a seedy motel and not having sex, but he’s being twitchy (not to be confused with glitchy) and not informative. In order to avoid answering more questions, Mark and Gracie finally consummate their marriage.

In the suburbs, still so far removed from the goings on of her sestras, Alison is stirring up her own trouble. And by trouble I mean soap. She’s using homemade artisan soap as a cover for the drug business she bought from Ramone because of course she is. Team Hendrix: Craft Big or Go Home. On their campaigning spree, Alison meets a resistant woman who is suddenly really interested in Alison’s campaign when she realizes she’s the new Ramone. All is going according to plan.

Post-coitally, Mark says he had been waiting to have sex; his brothers were the ones with the sex missions, not him. Gracie says she knows they’re in the same town as her father’s old friend and she’s pretty sure it’s not a coincidence. Mark confesses that he’s not an AWOL soldier, but that he was sent to recover something from the Prolethean compound. He says that he needs to get the scientific material he was sent to obtain and then they will truly be free.

Not too far away, Art and Sarah follow Art’s lead and find Alexis, the midwife from the Prolethean compound. Sarah says she’s looking for Helena, but Alexis doesn’t know or care what happened to her. Sarah grabs her and shakes some info out of her: Helena’s eggs were harvested and made into babies that were put in Helena herself. Alexis says it’s a miracle like it was something that comes automatically out of her mouth but that she doesn’t believe it one bit. She also mentions that Gracie is pregnant with a child with the same egg/sperm combo. Before Sarah leaves, Alexis sneers and says her only regret is ever having to be civil to an “abomination.”

Sarah locks eyes with her all, “You ain’t seen nothing, yet.”

At the motel, Gracie asks Mark how he feels about the baby she’s carrying, and he promises to be there for her, for them, no matter what. This is all Gracie needed to hear; she wants to help Mark, she wants to be free. Gracie drives her father’s truck to his old friend Mr. Finch’s farm. And she means business.

Mr. Finch is as creepy as you would expect a friend of the creeptastic Johansson, saying words like “blossomed” and leering at her. Gracie asks for the box her father kept in his care and he tries to extort $1000 from her but she uses the threat of her mother and religious ginger voodoo powers to get him to give it to her for free.

Meanwhile, Art and Sarah are trying to figure out why Mark took Gracie with him. After a little cop talk, Art mentions that Sarah isn’t all that unlike Beth, that the similarities go deeper than their enchantingly good looks. Sarah looks at him, the way he talks about Beth, and knows there’s something more going on under that tough guy facade. He tells her Beth is the one he called that night, before she jumped. He didn’t take her seriously, shrugged it off as another post-pill episode. His mourning was delayed by Sarah’s impersonation, so he’s still piecing things together, still trying to deal. Sarah tells Art that he couldn’t have known, that there was nothing he could have done, but Art changes the subject back to Helena, saying, “Let’s get your sister back.”

He couldn’t save Elizabeth Childs, but he’s sure going to try like hell to save Helena. For Sarah. For Beth.

Speaking of Helena, she’s hanging out in her cell, singing lullabies to her tiny fetus and peeping out the bars on the door when she hears a noise.

The noise was Paul’s truck returning to base with Rudy. Virginia welcomes her son with a slap, but Rudy swears he had no other choice; Seth was Stage 5 in the field and protocol requires a mercy kill at that point. Virginia is still distraught; if they had come straight home, this wouldn’t have happened, he would have been on base when he glitched out. Paul sends Rudy away and gives Virginia a carton of cigarettes to appease her. They chat about the defect, about how the Castor clones are dropping like flies, and how Helena’s brain seems to be fine. Well, clean of any defects, anyway. Despite Paul’s hesitation, Virginia wants to send Rudy back out into the field; they’re in danger of being shut down by Topside. All she needs from Paul is for him to get them more time.

In Felix’s loft, Cosima and Scott are hacking at Seth’s body, trying to get at his brain. Scott is standing by squeamishly while Felix keeps a safe distance, but Cosima is basically straddling the body, covered in blood and not minding a bit.

In fact, she uses this time to wax poetic about the meaning of life. What makes a person a person? Is it their brain, their neurons and cells, or there a soul that left the body that lie lifeless beneath her? Or is it like Simmons on Agents of SHIELD said, “Every bit of energy inside us, every particle will go on to be a part of something else. Maybe live as a dragonfish, a microbe, maybe burn in a supernova ten billion years from now.”

Scott pleads with her to get back to the science, but Felix tells her to do her. He gives her tongs so she can pluck the brain out, causing Felix to scurry away and Scott to turn green. She teases her sidekick, calling him “Igor” and smearing blood all over his smock.

At DYAD, Dr. Neelan is testing Rachel by showing her pictures and having her name them. She’s getting better, her aphasia waning. However, when shown a key, her hand starting to do the motion of a key, but her brain interpreted it as a stabbing motion and she said “knife” instead. Dr. Neelan said “close” which I’m pretty sure is just not true but he’s probably just glad to see her old murderous self coming back to the surface. She asks when she can go outside and he tells her that Rachel Duncan is dead. Rachel knows this means Delphine took over. “I’m finished?” she asks, though it’s difficult for her to say. Difficult literally, physically, but also emotionally. Rachel Duncan, who has been striving for control her entire life, who has done everything in her power to not be the pawn she was created to be, but to be a queen who manipulates the pawn, is more out of control then her darkest nightmares could have prepared her for. She’s not in control of DYAD anymore, of Sarah or Cosima, she’s not even in control of her own body, her own voice. Rachel Duncan is finished.

Dr. Neelan shows her another card and she says “horses” half-heartedly, and Dr. Neelan turns it over to reveal it’s actually the twin horses that represent Castor.

At Camp Castor, Virginia finds Rudy and gets his logs from this mission, which include a hair sample from Patty. Virginia tells Rudy that Mark has gone dark and sends him to find out if he’s still on task, and if he’s not, to bring him home. Finding himself finally alone with Mother, Rudy breaks down and says how scary it was to watch Seth deteriorate so quickly. He puts his thumb in his mouth and cries while Mother holds him, and I’m not sure if they intention was to garner sympathy, but it had the opposite effect on me. I was creeped out.

Team Hendrix is bouncing around their garage, enjoying a better high off the success of their new dual business than one any of the uppers in their possession could have provided. Marci comes over to visit and tries to sell them a house in a new school district for a great deal, but Alison isn’t afraid. Marci claims she Alison can’t possibly win, but if she was so confident, she wouldn’t be trying to get rid of Alison. Alison just flashes her a winning smile, unwavering in her confidence, considering the last man that tried to cross her family is rotting beneath her feet this very moment.

Art and Sarah go to Finch’s farm and say they’re looking for Mark and Gracie. He admits he saw Gracie recently, but says she was just there to bring the sad news about her father, that’s all. Meanwhile, Alexis finds the surviving Proletheans and wins back her favor by telling Gracie’s mother where her daughter is.

Mark and Gracie are in their motel sifting through Johansson’s box, but it’s just papers and notebooks, no DNA, no answers. Mark says he’s going back to the farm to check for the samples himself, and Gracie makes him promise to come home safe, thereby ensuring his demise.

Sarah and Art take a break at a diner, making canvassing plans in their search for Gracie and Mark, when Sarah notices Art’s phone blowing up. Sarah makes him promise to not risk his job for her again. She can tell there’s something he’s not telling her, and she’s starting to put pieces together. Beth didn’t call Alison or Cosima that night from the train platform. She called Art. Sarah tells him to just say it, and Art says that’s the thing, he never did say it. He was in love with her, and he never told her. He looks at Sarah, looks into the face of his dead partner, and says they share a fire, a fierceness, even though they never met. Sarah promises he’ll be more of a help if he keeps his job and the resources that come with it.

So Art leaves to ensure he does just that.

At Camp Castor, Rudy goes to see Helena, who calls him the “ugliest Mark yet” because she’s the greatest and she was kept in box twice in her life now and she’s not afraid of these people because she knows her sestra will save her. Paul kicks Rudy out of the room, but before Beth’s old monitor can leave, Helena clucks his tongue at him and teases him for being a sestra slut. She licks her hand in what I think she believes was sexy? but was actually just weird and adorable, and he just tells her he is sorry it “came to this.” As he walks out the door, Helena promises to kill them all someday.

Sarah is about to leave the diner when she spots Gracie praying at the table. She slides into the booth and Gracie recognizes her immediately. She hadn’t been sure if Helena had made Sarah up because Helena was a little bananas, but Sarah is very real and very determined to find her sestra. Sarah uses her relationship to the baby Gracie’s carrying to try to convince her to help, but Gracie is uncomfortable with the idea of them being connected in any way. Sarah uses this as a transition to tell Gracie that her husband is one of these “abominations” she so despises. Gracie wants to leave but Sarah won’t let her; Helena needs help and Mark will know how to find her.

After her run-in with Sarah, a shaken-up Gracie starts frantically packing her things in the motel. She slips her father’s secret box under the bed just before she hears a knock at the door. She’s surprised to see her mother standing on the other side of it. She hugs Gracie, calls her stupid, and says that their people still have a purpose. They have not yet finished spreading their insanity or wreaking havoc o’er the land.

At DYAD, Scott is examining Seth’s brain and says he wouldn’t have lived another week. Cosima understands now the chaotic desperation with which the Castor clones are after this information. (PS. Cosima is coughing again and NO THANK YOU.) Cosima runs a program to compare Castor and Leda DNA to try to find out if the soldier clones have synthetic DNA, too, and her computer starts lighting up like a Christmas tree.

She calls Sarah, who is at Mr. Finch’s barn, and after speaking Geek Monkey for a bit, she explains to Sarah what her results mean. The Castor Clones and the Leda Clones are siblings.

Sarah hangs up because she needs to focus on the task at hand. She finds Finch dead in a chair, and Mark appears, promising Finch died of natural causes that may or may not be related to the finger smashing Mark had been doing just prior to his death.

Sarah tells Mark that his darling wife lead her directly to him, and that she knows he’s a clone. She asks after Helena, but Mark doesn’t care about her. Sarah tries to play into the Castor’s sense of brotherhood and tells him that Helena is her sister, that she, Sarah, is his sister, too. Castor and Leda, two originals from the same two donors. Mark presses the gun to Sarah’s head and says that she is NOT his family.

He storms off then, and Sarah starts to chase him but stops when she sees him drop to the ground, shot. She wisely stays put and watches Gracie’s mother chase a stumbling Mark into the field. Gracie’s mother trains her shotgun on Mark, and despite his insistence that he really does love her daughter, she kills him dead.

What did you think of “Formalized, Complex, and Costly”?

Here are some of our favorite #clonesbians tweets from this week:

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