After Home, Not Alone I eventually ended up watching the opening episode, “Natural Selection,” of a TV series produced by BBC America for the Canadian market called Orphan Black. PBS acquired the U.S. rights to this rather odd show, which ran for 50 episodes between 2013 and 2017, and gave it a major promotional “push” with lots of trailers suggesting a cross between a policier and a science-ficton story.It opens with an apparent suicide in a subway in which a young woman named Elizabeth (Tamara Maslany) apparently commits suicide by hurling herself in the path of an oncoming train. Sarah Manning (also Tamara Maslany) happens upon the scene and decides to impersonate Elizabeth and get her hands on her fortune, which turns out to be $70,000 in a recently opened bank account and also a bag full of cocaine. Sarah has a former foster brother, Felix Dawkins (Jordan Gavanis), who appears to be Gay – he cruises a doctor named Colin (Nicholas Rose) who was treating him for a minor injury, and later he puts on a dress during an argument with his roommate Vic (Michael Mando) over Sarah’s stash of cocaine. There’s a great scene in a bar in which, as in all too many real-life bars, the music is so loud you can’t hear what the people in the bar are actually saying to each other. Sarah also meets with Elizabeth’s boyfriend Paul Dierden (Dylan Bruce), who wonders just why “Elizabeth” is so much more sexually aggressive than he remembers her.
Towards the end of this show, Sarah is accosted by yet another woman who strikingly resembles her, Katja Obringer (I hate to do this to you, but you know who plays her? That’s right, Tamara Maslany again!), only as soon as Katja gets into Sarah’s car she’s shot and killed by an unseen assailant who shoots a rifle through the windshield of Sarah’s car, and Sarah has to duck down and drive as best she can to avoid being killed herself by the same gunman. Though the writers, Graeme Mason and John Fawcett (the two are credited with creating the show and Mason with writing this particular episode), don’t come right out and say it in this polit show, in later episodes it turns out that Elizabeth, Sarah and Katja were among 50 or so clones created by super-secret research lab for some sinister purpose, and either the agency that created them in the first place or some other sinister group has marked them all for destruction and is killing them one by one.
Orphan Black seems from this first encounter to be a shoe that’s almost too self-consciously edgy for its own good, but it could be interesting over the long haul and I’m not sure whether or not I want to make the commitment to follow it in an ongoing way. In fact, that’s one thing I hate about serialized TV dramas in general: the sense that the producers are asking you to make a long-term commitment to their show and are effectively demanding that you watch all their episodes or none –and generally, given that choice, I end up watching none. It’s also not clear just where the show takes place – Britain, Canada or the United States – though I”m guessing the setting is American since most (though not all) the actors speak with American rather than British accents, the money Sarah is misappropriating is denominated in dollars (not pounds.: though Canada’s currency is also called the dollar, it’s not worth the same as the U.S. dollar), and the cars have their steering wheels on the left-hand side.
