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“Orphan Black” recap (2.03): Blood Ties

Previously on Orphan Black, Cosima and Delphine made crazy science at the DYAD, Alison got the lead in a musical about a dead body, Sarah watched Mrs. S kill one of the “birdwatchers” who helped them hide out when she was little and we watched Mrs. S kill the other after she was sure she knew nothing about Project LEDA, and Helena got angel-napped by the Proletheans who want to put a leetle baby inside her.

Sarah and Felix wake up in the stolen truck. Fee is worried about Kira, but Sarah promises him that she didn’t see Mrs. S put a bullet in a man’s brain. Neither one of them can quite wrap their head around the fact that their foster mum seems to be a professional markswoman. When Felix jumps down off the bed of the truck, he lands in a cow pie, and Sarah laughs a full-throated laugh like we haven’t heard her laugh in quite some time, if ever. It’s a comforting sound. Daniel somehow finds his way up to the birdwatchers’ digs, but finds them all quite dead, not a living soul in sight. He hears people coming and hides in the bushes, watching as the Proletheans discover the dead bodies. They’re upset they don’t have Sarah and Kira, but glad they at least have Helena. The Proletheans burn down the birdwatchers’ house and Daniel looks at his picture of Kira, at least now knowing where she was and where she’s not.

The runaways stop at a convenience store and pull a scam that involves Kira playing the innocent kid who forgot how money worked, which Sarah runs in to apologize for, while Felix sneaks out with pockets full of grub. The store owner has a feeling he’s getting hoodwinked, but between Kira’s adorable face and Sarah’s all-around sexiness, he doesn’t quite know what to do with himself, so they leave without protest. Sarah makes sure to tell Kira that this is an emergency tactic only, but Kira knows. Because Kira knows an eerie amount for a child her age. Sarah says she knows the area of woods they’re in, and that there are some cabins nearby they can crash in.

Back in Scarborough, Alison uses a vacuum to passive aggressively (OK, aggressively) wake Donnie up. Donnie tries, again, to explain away showing up in the cemetery, and says he’s worried about her. He says it seems like she’s wound too tight but he’s probably more worried he’ll end up in the Craft Room Torture Chair again. He offers to help her de-stress with a morning quickie. Alison says she just showered and I will never be able to shower enough. Ew.

Meanwhile, at the DYAD, Cosima is flirting with Delphine, calling her Doctor Cormier in a sultry voice, commenting on how sexy her confident strut is. Delphine says she’s only walking so fearlessly into Leekie’s office because he’s not around. Cosima wants to mess with Leekie’s experiment, then does a spot-on impression of what she thinks his reaction would be.

Delphine doesn’t laugh as hysterically as I did, because she has something weighing on her mind. She calls Cosima over to a television and plays her a video. The face on the screen is her own. Well, looks like her own. It’s Jennifer Fitzsimmons, a clone who was asked to make a video diary after they found polyps on her lungs. Cosima looks to Delphine and asks a question she sounds unsure she wants the answer to: “Is she alright?” Delphine gives her sad puppy dog eyes and tells her that she died three days ago.

Of course, at this point, I’m doing math like a crazy person. She was the first to show symptoms, six months before Katja, which means she died MORE than six months after first showing symptoms, which means WE STILL HAVE TIME TO SAVE COSIMA, RIGHT???

Delphine tells Cosima that she just found out about Jennifer, and though Cosima had the right to know. And maybe she just found out that she died, but considering that when Delphine gave Leekie Cosima’s blood sample (against Cosima’s wishes), she said, “324B21 is showing the same respiratory symptoms as the other two,” I think she’s just trying to avoid a fight with her science girlfriend.

Somewhere in the woods, Sarah and Felix find an empty cabin and break into it. Kira asks Sarah about Mrs. S, asks if she was still protecting them, even though she was lying. It must be tough to figure out how to talk to a nine-year-old who seems more level-headed than you. Luckily, she’s not just an occasionally creepy precocious child, because her and Sarah break out into an adorable pillow fight. She’s still got some little kid in her; they both do.

On the Prolethean plantation, the little girl brings Helena a plate of food. Helena asks her if her name is Grace and asks her why they brought her here. Grace says her father wants Helena to be part of the family, but she doesn’t even think Helena is human. Helena isn’t interested in having a new family, she has a sestra and her sestra’s daughter. Helena offers Grace some of her food, which is the highest honor, but Grace looks at it like a dog offered her a dead squirrel and runs off. That night, in the cabin, Felix wakes up to the sound of someone coming home and starts screaming and scrambling, trying to get out. Sarah tells him to calm down because she knows the owner of the cabin. He knows her, too…as the girl who took 10 grand and his car. Felix calls him one of her marks and Cabin Boy thinks that sounds just lovely. Kira runs in and before I can finish my thought about how her hair looks remarkably like the stranger’s, she asks him, “Are you my dad?” And based on Sarah’s stricken look, the answer to that would be yes.

The man’s name is Cal and he’s not sure he believes anything Sarah says. Sarah never had a paternity test or anything, but the timing is right, and I mean, the HAIR, so she’s pretty sure Kira is his. But she didn’t come here for child support money or father/daughter bonding, she just needed a place to crash. Cal can’t bring himself to kick a kid out on the street, so he says they can spend another night. As long as they don’t steal anything.

It’s dress rehearsal night at Glendale Community Theatre and Alison is a hot damn mess. When she fell off the wagon, she fell off hard, and it ran her over a few times. After the rehearsal, Angie (despite Art telling her, once again, to drop it) “accidentally” runs into Alison in the parking lot. She asks to use Alison’s phone because she locked hers in the car, saying she lives nearby. Alison is highly suspicious, because she surely would have heard if someone new moved into the suburb, and also because Alison is living in a constant state of (justified) paranoia. Angie cheerfully says they should get coffee some time, but Alison rejects her offer.

In the cabin in the woods, Kira is asking questions about her father and why this is the first time she’s meeting him. Sarah says it’s because she wanted Kira all to herself, but this doesn’t quite line up for Kira, because Sarah was always disappearing. Sarah’s eyes fill up with tears and she tells her daughter that she doesn’t want her to feel the same anger as Sarah felt at nine, alone and lost and angry. Kira asks Sarah if she likes Cal, and Sarah says that she did, a long time ago. Kira says she likes his beard because she knows how to make her Mum smile.

Meanwhile, Uncle Felix is giving Cal the third degree, asking who he is and why he had 10 grand for Sarah to nab. Cal says that he had invented something that helped pollinate bee-less areas, but now it was being used for more dubious military shenanigans, so he’s no longer loaded. Felix knows why he was a mark now; he has morals. Sarah knew he wouldn’t turn her in.

At the DYAD, Cosima and Delphine are watching more of Jennifer’s videos. In the beginning, Jennifer was so excited that Doctor Leekie had offered to help her, but by the end, when her hair was gone and she could hardly get through a sentence without coughing, she had changed her tune. The video also features Greg, Jennifer’s boyfriend. Cosima asks Delphine if he was Jennifer’s monitor, and she confirms. Cosima says she sometimes forgets that Delphine is hers.

Delphine assures Cosima that the fact Jennifer didn’t know she was a clone didn’t affect the course of her treatment, they still did everything they could for her. Delphine asks her if she’s sure she wants to go on, if she can handle the full disclosure path they’ve been going down, and Cosima responds, quite literally, “I can handle it, don’t be a bitch.”

To which Delphine smiles and says, “I thought so.” But she wanted to make sure. Because she’s being used as a pawn in this game, but she’s rooting for Cosima. She wants to make sure that no matter how often she’s asked to lie to Cosima, to mislead her, to keep things from her, that Cosima will be able to handle it. She needs Cosima to be strong, because the road is only going to get bumpier from here. In Cal’s cabin, Felix tells Sarah that he’s pissed that she never told him that she had an idea of who Kira’s father was all this time. And WHERE he was, no less. He says he has to leave, that Alison’s musical opens tomorrow and he should be there. Alison needs him, even if Sarah doesn’t. Felix tears, they hurt, man. He says he’ll say goodbye to Kira and be on his way.

Somewhere in the bowels of the DYAD, Delphine and Cosima look at Jennifer’s body. And unfortunately that does not mean they watched the Megan Fox movie together. They pull back to sheet to see Ms. Fitzsimmons, bald, pale, and cold. I can’t imagine it’s easy, seeing your own face, dead. Cosima calls her Doctor Cormier again, but this time it’s not flirty. It’s Cosima taking a step back, trying to put distance between her and her science girlfriend, because what they have to do right now is perform an autopsy on her genetic identical. It’s literally a matter of life and death.

Cosima notices blisters on Jennifer’s mouth, and Delphine says it’s from the treatment. They find some polyps in her uterus, and think maybe that’s where the disease originated. Cosima muses that this could be the cause of the infertility, which is probably not good news for Alison. Or Rachel, for that matter, if she is as infertile as her jealous over Sarah having a child seemed to insinuate. Cosima has a coughing fit and every clonesbian on earth panics and Cosima tries to assure us and her girlfriend that she’s fine.

Cosima’s clone phone rings and she says it’s her mom and slinks away to take it. It’s Alison, who is calling to warn her that she thinks she’s being double-monitored and that Cosima definitely can’t trust Delphine. Cosima tells her to calm down, that she can handle it.

I have a feeling Beth was the peacekeeper between these two before Sarah showed up, because Cosima’s tone is somewhat impatient and incredulous. The hippie science geek and the neurotic soccer mom would not ever be having a conversation if they didn’t share a face. Cosima tells her to break a leg, or whatever, in her musical, then goes back to autopsying a body that has the same fatal disease she has coursing through her veins.

On the way to the show, Angie runs into Alison again, and Alison loses it. She tells her that she knows who she is, and Angie confesses to being a cop, like Beth. I think, at this point, Alison realizes she’s not a Leekie monitor, so she doesn’t say anything else except amscray.

In the cabin, Sarah and Cal reminisce about that time Sarah stole some of his money. She tells him she totally could have taken more, but she liked him too much to totally wring him dry. Cal sees a local cop pull into the drive and tells Sarah and Kira to hide. He goes outside to chat and the cop tells him about shoplifters, and a stolen truck they found that might be linked. The cop spots a candy wrapper on the bench outside, but takes Cal at his word that he hasn’t seen anyone around.

As soon as the cop is gone, Sarah tries to hightail it out of there, but Cal tells her to just stop running for a minute. But Sarah still has a lot of “fight or flight” energy in her, so they decide to take a break for sexytimes.

It’s opening night for Blood Ties, and the first performance is dedicated to Aynsley. Alison has been preparing for this role for weeks in rehearsals, but has been preparing for this moment all day with pills and airplane bottles of booze. She sees Felix in the audience, but she also sees Donnie. She’s teetering, from the booze, the pills, the stress of it all. She starts to get a little manic on stage and then falls right off the stage. Daniel the Proclone Lackey shows up at the convenience store Sarah and Felix knocked over earlier, introduces himself as Peter, and shows the owner Kira’s picture. The owner confirms that the little girl was in there, with a British woman and a man who shoplifted. Daniel knows he’s on the right track.

Art has been doing some research in Sarah’s absence and finds his way to a compound whose entrance is marked by a flying fish. He snaps some photos and sees a little girl having a chat with a man in a cowboy hat. Grace tells Henrik that she doesn’t think Helena belongs here, but he assures her that she has a soul and can be redeemed. She’ll be part of the family soon. Grace is highly unsupportive of this plan and I’m hoping she’ll be one to release Helena into the wild.

The next morning, Sarah wakes up next to Cal, feeling the comfort and familiarity of a time when she thought her life was crazy, but in the absence of clones and murder, was actually quite boring.

Sarah, Cal, and Kira sit at the table playing cards, a brief snapshot of what their life could have been like if Sarah hadn’t run. Kira asks to go out and feed the chickens, and Sarah is in such a state of calm that she lets her go outside on her own. A car drives up and Daniel gets out, grabbing Kira. Luckily, Kira screams loud enough for her parents (!) to hear and they run out. The local cop had been close by, too, but Daniel shoots him dead. Cal gets Kira back into the house and protected by a rifle, but Daniel has Sarah. He pats her down, finds her photo of Project LEDA, and shoves her into the driver’s seat. As they drive off, I find it comforting to know that Kira knows Uncle Felix’s phone number by heart.

Back at Prolethean Plantation, The Creepiest Place on Earth, Helena has been put in a white dress. In fact, everyone in the room is dressed in white, except Henrik, who is in a suit and his finest cowboy hat. He gives another little speech about man’s work being God’s work as long as it’s done in his name. The most dangerous theory a religious extremist can have. Henrik and Helena’s hands are tied together, and they are bound. Henrik says they will reclaim Helena from damnation but I swear, someone better reclaim Helena from these psychopaths soon. In the car, Sarah is being forced to drive who knows where. Daniel makes a call and says he doesn’t have Kira, but he does have Sarah, and that she had a photo of Project LEDA in her pocket. Before he can say anything else, they are QUINN FABRAYED BY A TRUCK. DAMNIT, SARAH. It’s either the bravest or the stupidest thing she’s ever done. Possibly both.

What did you think of “Mingling Its Own Nature With It?”

Here’s a bonus screenshot that didn’t make it into the body of the recap but I couldn’t not include: Here are some of our favorite #clonesbians tweets from this week:

                     

Lesbian Apparel and Accessories Gay All Day sweatshirt -- AE exclusive

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