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“Orphan Black” recap (3.5): Sapphire Skies

Previously on Orphan Black, Delphine broke up with Cosima not for heart reasons but for brain reasons, Rudy and Seth raped a girl and stole her hair, Gracie had a miscarriage and got exiled from the exiled Proletheans, Mark and Rudy kidnapped Sarah, and Helena chose to mercy-kill a Castor clone named Parsons even though it also killed her plan to escape.

Returned to her cell after her ill-fated escape attempt, Helena is now chained to the wall in an attempt to keep her from escaping again. She’s beaten and bloody, but Pupok has no sympathy. The little scorpion tells Helena she brought this on herself. Helena finds a nail and pulls down her shirt, but Pupok can’t watch the angry angel carve her wings, and instead scuttles out of the cell to the one next door-to the cell containing Sarah Manning.

Somewhere else in Camp Castor, Mother and Rudy are examining the dead baby’s bones. Since the baby didn’t have a synthetic sequence, he can’t survive, but they can root out the defect and create a gene therapy from what Rudy calls his baby brother. Virginia eventually kicks Rudy out because Paul is back, saying she’ll debrief Mark and that Rudy should take his 48 hours of leave and be gone.

Sarah wakes up in her cell and starts shouting, until she hears a familiar Ukrainian accent through the grate. Sarah is relieved to see it’s Helena, still alive and well. Helena, on the other hand, is less happy to see her sestra.

She accuses Sarah of being the reason she’s in a cell in the first place, but Sarah promises that’s not what happened. Pupok encourages Helena not to listen to Sarah, and to not tell her anything. Sarah begs her sestra to look at her-she has worked so hard to find her-but Helena won’t.

At Mrs. S’s house, Felix brings his foster mum some tea and they casually mention they’re both worried that they haven’t heard from Sarah, but are both trying not to be too hasty in their worrying. To take their minds off things, Felix tells Mrs. S that Cosima has an internet date tonight and answers Cos’s call. Cosima tells Felix that she really doesn’t want to be there, but Felix makes her promise to give it at least 20 minutes. When she hangs up, Bobby the Bartender gives her some encouragement. Her only tip: Don’t talk about your ex. Cosima asks if she reeks of it and before Bobby can give her a bulleted list of how, Cosima’s date walks in. Bobby gives her sassy approval before leaving Cosima alone with the stunner who just walked in.

The first thing Shay says is that she can’t believe her eyes because Cosima’s photos were obviously beautiful but in real life she looks like if a smile and a hug took human form and had a lesbian lovechild. They Shay says she can’t believe Cosima is in the “hard sciences,” but that’s just because Cosima hasn’t told any of her Periodic Table-themed jokes yet.

Shay asks Cosima if this is her first Sapphire date, and Cosima admits that she is, and she rambles when she’s nervous, so Shay decides to ramble, too. She starts by telling her about her own first Sapphire date; the girl would high five Shay every time they had something in common. (Side bar: My first OkCupid date would say “Noted!” and mime writing something in her invisible notebook every time she liked my answer to her question. I feel Shay’s pain.) Shay lists off a few things about herself to get the awkward small talk out of the way, and when she mentions Barcelona, Cosima offers her a high five.

They smile and giggle and I don’t care how much you ship Delphine, if this scene didn’t make you smile, you need to check to make sure no one sold your soul to the devil.

Across town, Art is trying to get in touch with a disconcertingly unresponsive Sarah when little Gracie shows up at his door, saying Sarah had told her to find him if she ever needed anything. Art offers to take her to a shelter that will gladly help a pregnant teenager, but when Gracie admits she lost the baby, he has a better idea of where to take her.

At Camp Castor, Sarah explains to Helena that it was Mrs. S that traded Helena in, not her, but Pupok is still saying Sarah is lying, and saying Sarah will melt Helena like butter. Pupok is like the Anti-Jiminy Cricket. Ignoring Helena’s outburst about butter, Sarah tries to reason with her, telling her how hard she’s been looking for her all this time, but when Helena doesn’t respond, she says she should have left Helena to rot. To which Helena says she doesn’t rot. It’s actually a pretty adorable sisterly exchange, made darker by the circumstances, but still like little kids fighting at its core. Helena hears a noise and counts down from five. When she finishes, the food arrives and is shoved through the door. The door on which Helena has drawn two of her little stick figures, but with one crossed out.

Instead of just slipping food into her cell, SoldierClone comes into Sarah’s cell, cuffs her, and drags her away. While she gets hauled off, Helena eyes a loose bar in her cell door’s window and squirrels away a butter packet behind a brick in the wall.

Sarah is taken to Mother, who she promptly asks about Helena, because her sestra seems different. Virginia assures her Helena is used to being caged up , like an animal, so don’t worry about her. It takes a few of them to hold Sarah down, but they eventually get blood from her that they’re going to use to get stem cells from her. Sarah looks at Virginia with the hatred of a thousand suns, but Mother is not afraid. She tells Sarah this is one battle she will not win.

Art takes Gracie to Mrs. S’s house, at which time Felix embraces the role of jealous-youngest-child-when-a-new-baby-comes in a way only he can, sassing about her not looking ready for cult reprogramming and only huffing up the stairs after her when Mrs. S insists. When the kids are upstairs, Mrs. S and Art exchange quiet concerns about Sarah and Art promises to go over everything he has again to find a trail to follow to Sarah.

Sarah is thrown back into her cell and Helena greets her with the information that Mother is making medicine for the “Mark-faced boys.” Sarah accuses her of enjoying it here, but Helena only responds with a riddle. A riddle Sarah immediately interprets to mean Helena has another escape plan. Because while she may not enjoy being locked up, she thrives.

On her date, Cosima asks Shay about her holistic medicine and Shay says she makes it her job to help keep people balanced. While they’re talking, someone is taking pictures of them, specifically of Shay’s face. Some of my theories on who this could be: 1) Someone sent by Delphine to make sure Cosima is staying safe, 2) someone from Castor thinking the Geek Monkey clone knows more than she let on, 3) a stalker-ex of Shay’s or 4) Jason DiLaurentis.

Shay concludes her explanation of holistic medicine by saying she can see inside your soul, prompting Cosima to step out of her comfort zone and ignore the fact that people have been trying to actively murder her and her ilk for a few months now and invites Shay over. Shay, obviously, is down.

At Mrs. S’s, Felix pulls out an old box of Sarah’s clothes and tries to scandalize Gracie by telling her he’s gay. But she has eyeballs and she’s not a Prolethean anymore, so she doesn’t care. She’s 18 and she’s never done anything a normal teenager would have done by now, but Felix, who had probably done all those things on his 13th birthday, isn’t feeling particularly sympathetic,

Sarah tries to get information about Camp Castor from Helena, but she’s not feeling like sharing at the moment. She counts down again, but this time instead of food at the end of the numbers, it’s Paul. He’s pissed Sarah’s there, and she’s not exactly thrilled to see him either.

Paul goes into her cell and asks Sarah if she’s alright while Helena makes kissy noises through the vent and calls him “Dierty Paul’ the way she said one of my favorite lines in Season 1, calling Not-Beth a “dierty leetle copy cop.” Sarah tells Helena that it was Paul’s fault she got trapped, and Paul doesn’t deny it, saying he’s protecting his fellow soldiers like Sarah protects her sestras. But Sarah points out his “brothers” are all assholes and rapists, while at least one of her sisters has never killed anyone. Paul gestures to the murderer on the other side of the vent, and when he leaves, Helena calls out that maybe Paul is next, and Sarah yells out that yeah, maybe he is.

At Mrs. S’s, Gracie is looking at an old photo album and tells S that she’s surprised to see Sarah smiling. When Mrs. S asks why, I thought for sure Gracie was going to say how broken Sarah was when she met her, but instead she just says she was taught the clones were less than human and how can abominations have fun? Mrs. S says that people are just people. Every one of them different. Gracie asks why S is being so nice to her, and Siobhan says that when she was young, her husband was killed, and her aunt took her in when she was at her worst. And Mrs. S has been paying it forward and taking in lost ducklings ever since.

At Castor HQ, Mother is up to no good all around. She gives Mark a log book and tells him to write down every sexual encounter he’s ever had, plus any in the future, and she tells Paul Sarah and Helena are valuable, but that she does not intend on hurting Sarah. She’s just doing what she has to do. No more, no less.

At Felix’s loft, Shay gives Cosima a massage and asks Cosima if she wants to talk about the breakup she theoretically shouldn’t know about but Cosima couldn’t not mention. Cosima is hesitant, but Shay understands. “Loving is short, forgetting is long,” she says. Which I guess is true, it’s just that sometimes remembering can feel like loving still. Shay asks Cosima if she should go, but that’s not quite what Cosima wants. She asks Cosima if she wants her to stay, the word “stay” meaning more than those four letters imply. Cosima doesn’t know if that’s what she wants either, but considers it, staring at Shay’s lips and trying to calm the tornado in her brain.

Shay says she’ll go and starts gathering her things, but then Cosima says that her name was Delphine and she was French and had really great hair. (What she also could have said, but didn’t, but I will because I met Evelyne in real life once and feel qualified to do so, is that she also has eyes that are more colors than eyes have any right to be.) Cosima admits that she has no idea what she’s doing, what she wants, what she’s looking for. All she knows is that Shay is way more than she expected. Shay leans in and kisses her, and Cosima kisses her back.

I’m going to be completely honest, as much as I love Delphine and Cophine and all that, I loved the Shay/Cosima scenes. I loved them for three reasons.

The first reason is entirely shallow: When Ksenia Solo and Tatiana Maslany‘s eyes hold each other’s gaze for more than 0.003 seconds, something in the world catches fire. They are electric. And when Shay ran her hand down Cosima’s arm? Forget it. There was no oxygen to be found.

The second is that, far too often on shows, if a lesbian character suddenly becomes single, their sexuality is not mentioned anymore and they’re celibate for all of eternity. And this isn’t including the shows who don’t know that bisexuality exists and instead change characters from straight to gay to straight again as it fits their plot needs. So I’m glad they didn’t have Cosima moping about Felix’s loft all episode. Sure, I don’t 100% trust Shay (yet), and no, I don’t think we’ve seen the last of our Sapphic Scientist/Bisexual Bombshell combo, but hell if I’m not going to enjoy seeing Cosima GIGGLE again. She literally died last year, I’m not taking a single eye-twinkle for granted.

And last but not least, I think it makes for excellent storytelling. I recently had a conversation with some friends about whether or not we believed everybody had one true love. Despite my love for all things fairytale-related, I don’t think it’s as simple as that. Love, like anything that requires more than one person, is going to vary by nature. I don’t think you can always quantify love into “more” or “less”. I mean, sure, sometimes it’s possible to say you loved one person more than the other, but I think it’s okay if sometimes you just loved someone differently. Also, I wholly believe you can love more than one person in your lifetime, and even more than one person at the same time. That’s what makes relationships so special. Because not only do you love each other, but you choose each other. Every day that you wake up and text them or kiss them or come home to them, you choose them. Delphine didn’t choose Cosima. Now, it’s also true that Delphine is choosing her job over Cosima out of love, to protect her, but she still didn’t choose Cosima. So yes, sure, Cosima still loves Delphine. But until Delphine can choose her back, she’s allowed to look for someone else to choose.

Anyway. Back to camp. Sarah asks Helena again about her plan to leave, and Helena asks if she wants to be her sandwich aka the person she’ll eat if going gets rough. Sarah is tired of Helena’s games, and explains to her that she screwed up with Kira, that she left her behind with Mrs. S and was selfish and horrible and lost a year of being a mum to her daughter because of it. So Helena can tease her and hate her and ignore her all she wants, but Sarah’s not abandoning anyone ever again. So Helena decides to fill her in on the plan.

Mrs. S is telling Felix about her dead husband when Gracie comes downstairs dressed like Pilot Episode Sarah.

Gracie is ready to let loose; she wants to go out clubbing and have a mai tai. But instead they convince her to stay in and have a cocktail at the house instead, thank goodness. Gracie chugs her gin and juice and dances around to the music Mrs. S put on, making Felix join her and smiling like she’s never had her lips sewn shut. That is, until she collapses, crying out in pain, and Mrs. S has Felix call an ambulance.

In their cells, Sarah and Helena hear a noise and both count town this time. When the men come with the food, Sarah won’t return her old tray, so they have to go into her cell to get it. She attacks them and tries to steal their keys, ending up in the infirmary, where the nurse tells her to show some respect to get some in return. Sarah ignores him though, and when he gives up trying to reason with her, she tucks something from the tool tray into her mouth.

When she gets back to her cell, we learn she nicked tweezers, which she ties to a length of fabric and swings over to her twin sestra, timing their attempts based on the angle of the security camera. Helena uses the tweezers to get out of the ankle cuffs and pulls a ton of butter packets out from behind her loose brick.

She lathers herself up, pops out the bar in her cell door window, and squeezes through (not without a bit of trouble). Once out, Helena parkours up to the camera, knocks it out, then lies in wait for the security guard. Once he’s in the room, she shoves him onto a spike in the wall, killing him instantly. Sarah balks a little, probably expecting her sister to just knock him out, but keeps her voice steady as she asks Helena to get her out. But Helena has another plan: to get even. So she leaves Sarah behind.

Meanwhile, Paul is in a med tent looking at Parson’s body, and then his logbook. (One name of note, “Julia Bell”…any relation to good ol’ Art?) Paul looks at the names and the locks of hair and I can’t tell if he has never seen a logbook before, or if he’s just impressed by Parson’s game.

Speaking of Art, he goes to have a follow-up chat with Rudy and Seth’s rape victim, and she’s wearing sunglasses even though it’s nighttime, saying she can’t stay long because she has to put her daughter to bed. When Art asks how she’s been, she admits she’s been sick and lifts her shades to reveal that the whites of her eyes have gone red.

At Mrs. S’s, the paramedics find that the same thing is happening to little Gracie.

At Camp Castor, Helena slinks around, doing more spider monkey parkour and climbing over the one safe spot on a barbed wire wall. She pauses up there on the wall and looks back the way she came. Pupok tells her to go, but Helena, who couldn’t have told you if your heart was in your chest or your foot come three months ago, can feel Sarah pulling at her heartstrings.

Pupok tells her to think of her baby and to run, but Helena is starting to learn that Pupok isn’t always right and slinks back down into the base.

What did you think of “Scarred by Many Past Frustrations”?

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

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