Susan Duncan goes back to the office and tells Evie that the clone she saw wasn’t Sarah but Cosima, so Evie has one of her henchwomen bring her in. But the first clone she runs into is Krystal, and she doesn’t think twice about locking her in a meeting room. When Susan sees who they caught, she says it’s not Sarah OR Cosima this time, but Krystal, who is naive and, though rightly paranoid, generally harmless. Because obviously Susan didn’t see her in kickboxing.
Cosima, meanwhile, is clad in scrubs and wandering past screaming pregnant women, wondering where the hell she even is.
Cosima finds herself in an observation room that looks into a sort of living quarters for “carriers.” She overhears one of the patients saying she was supposed to be done by now, and the nurse telling her to stop complaining or she won’t get paid, and it all has an ick factor to it Cosima can’t quite put her finger on yet.
At dinner in the safe house, Adele does her best to fill the awkward silence, bless her heart. Sarah starts asking questions about Gene Connection—how she could afford it, why she trusted a corporation with her DNA, why she chose that company specifically. Adele handles it quite well for someone who is being verbally attacked by someone she barely knows.
Felix eventually gets fed up with Sarah’s third degree and throws food at Sarah, making Mrs. S snap into Mom Voice again and tell them to cut it out.
Sarah gets a call from Scott, and the music warbles more than ever. Sarah says it’s the results of the DNA test, and she listens to what Scott has to say, then looks into her brother’s eyes for a beat. She looks a little broken, and when Felix asks if Adele is his sister, Sarah’s eyes fill with tears as she chokes out a “yes.” But it’s unclear, to me, if she’s upset because she just found out her brother-sestra is being manipulated and couldn’t bring herself to break his heart, or if Felix and Adele are really related, and Sarah now has to confront why she was actually upset about Adele showing up.
Kira excuses herself and her mother and takes her into the next room to comfort her. Mrs. S welcomes Adele to the family by topping off her glass of wine, but the music is still warbly and oh, so sad.
Looking so at home in her scrubs, Cosima gets looped into an OR when a “carrier” goes into labor. The nurses call for the doctor and say things like “batch 42” while Cosima tries to comfort the woman, who is clearly having second thoughts about this pregnancy, too little too late.
Out in the lobby, Krystal is being escorted out of Bright Born when she sees Ira and understandably freaks out, but she’s just pushed right out of the building, everyone pretending like nothing is happening.
The pregnant woman tells Cosima that her mom tried to tell her that his was wrong, and gives birth while yelling for God to forgive her. When the baby is born, Cosima sees that it has such an extreme cleft palate, it has no discernable nose or mouth, just a hole, and according to the doctor, there’s also “sever webbing.” Cosima is horrified, and the horrors don’t cease when the woman she was talking to earlier appears in the doorway, and Cosima realizes that it’s none other than Susan Duncan.
Cosima is learning that sometimes you shouldn’t meet your heroes when she realizes that the person who created her and her sestras—perfect specimens, in my opinion—Duncan resorted to these grotesque human experiments. Evie tries to defend their work, but Cosima tells her that nothing can justify babies being born like the one she just saw whose malformations were not due to natural causes. Evie and Cosima have a pretty intense staring contest until Susan kicks Evie out.
Cosima says that she’s sick, that she didn’t ask for this life, but Susan calls her a beautiful baseline, a way to study the human genome. She tries to guilt Cosima into turning over the original Leda sample, saying that Leda was a perfect experiment and that if they could replicate it, these Bright Born experiments could cease.
But Cosima won’t budge.
That is until Susan points out that if they work together, they could find a cure for her and her sestras. Then tears fall down her perfect face, and she looks genuinely torn.
At the safe house, Sarah apologizes to Kira for all the fighting on their Mummy-Daughter Adventure, but Kira was just glad to have her mother with her all day. Kira admits to her mother that she knows how her sisters feel sometimes; and not like, can empathize with how difficult loving Sarah can be. She can sense Cosima’s sadness, Helena’s loneliness, Rachel’s anger. She can even feel some of her unknown aunties. Sarah is not nearly as alarmed as I am and says that what she thought were dreams probably were not, and will hopefully look into that ASAP before Kira stops talking to people in the TV.
Kira says that she feels Sarah, too, and kisses her mother on the cheek. Sarah cries because the weight of the world is too much for her daughter’s tiny shoulders. (PS. The music steadies itself out for a bit during this scene.)
Back at Bright Born, Susan tells Ira that they’re closer than ever to the Original, to a cure. Then they MAKE OUT. With their MOUTHS. And honestly even though the age gap is extreme, what bothers me most is that in a way Ira is kind of her son? At the very least her daughter’s brother. I know Rachel was adopted, and I know Susan faked her death when Rachel was Charlotte’s age, but STILL. Not to mention it’s technically her own science experiment she’s making out with. It’s like if Dr. Frankenstein fell in love with his monster. It’s VERY squicky. Actually, wait, no—that happened on Penny Dreadful, and it STILL wasn’t as weird as this!
ANYWAY it looks like next week Cosima is back on Operation What The Fuck Happened to Delphine, so hopefully we’ll have concrete answers soon.
What did you think of “Human Raw Material”?
Here are some of our favorite #clonesbians tweets from this week:
