Previously on Orphan Black, Gracie married Prolethean Mark after Helena’s fire interrupted his mission to get something back from Johanssen, Duncan left behind a code in a book that could be the answer to the clones’ genetic sequence, Alison took over Ramon’s drug circuit under the guise of a soap-making business, Cosima found out that the Leda and Castor clones are more related than they thought and Mark got hunted down and shot by Grace’s mother, Bonnie.
When Gracie’s mother comes out of the field with the swagger of a serial killer in a horror film and the sneakers of a mall walker, she beelines for the barn, causing Sarah to scurry away. Sarah grabs Mark’s gun from the ground and ducks into the field to find her brother. He’s still alive, just bleeding a lot. Mark walks Sarah through tying off his leg wound and she complies, then starts dragging him to safety. He asks her why she’s helping him, but she tells him to shut up. Which is Sarah Manning for “because family is all I know of love, and we’re not that different, you and me.” Sarah sees Bonnie’s backup show up and tells Mark she knows he doesn’t trust her but it’s “come with me if you want to live” time.
When she can’t find anyone on the farm, Bonnie takes Gracie to someone named Mr. Appleyard’s house, and he is old and blind and creepy because he touches Gracie’s belly and grows concerned.
Meanwhile, at Castor HQ, Helena is feeling a bit more like her old self because she was given some noms.
When she gets the bone of the chicken she’s devouring, her devilish little mind starts to whir. She tourniquets her arm and hides it under her sleeve, then goes apeshit in her cell. Literally, flails and screams like an ape whilst flinging her shit. She bashes her head on the bars of the door, which means they have to take her to the infirmary. The soldiers shoot her up with meds and the naughty little minx obediently slumps to the ground.
Across town, Cosima calls Alison to see how things are going in her parallel universe. Cosima says she feels great because Kira’s stem cell treatment is working, and Alison says her school trustee election is going better than anyone could have anticipated.
The clone call is cut short when Donnie flits into the room in a dither because he noticed a car following him today and “calm, cool and collected” aren’t words in his vocabulary. Alison thinks the car is Marci spying on her, but Donnie reminds her that they’re committing a felony or three on the regular so it could be the police. Alison decides that, just to be safe, they’ll put all of their paraphernalia in a storage unit, and be back in time for swim practice.
After finding an abandoned house nearbyish, Sarah offers to call an ambulance for Mark, but he says that would be like painting a target on his back. Mark says his stomach shot is through and through anyway, but they will have to remove the bullet floating around in his leg. Sarah says she’ll agree to help, but she’ll want answers as payment in kind.
At Castor HQ, SoldierClone is called in to escort Helena back to her cell, but they say he can take his time since the angry angel will be out cold for at least an hour. Pupok appears by Helena’s side and guides her through her mission: Scout for an exit and get back in bed before anyone notices she’s gone. Helena tells Pupok she’ll be “quiet as church mouse” which surely the nun-raised assassin has plenty of experience with.
Despite Pupok’s insistence that she hurry, Helena stops to look through a fan vent to see another Castor clone who is being experimented on and who does not look very happy about it. Maybe partially from the shock of it, but also from the drugs coursing through her veins, Helena slumps down, dangerously close to unconsciousness. Pupok snaps her back to attention like that little voice that tells you you’ve overslept for work. Pupok says they need to get back before it’s too late, so she stumbles like she has just been shot by her sestra and needs medical attention STAT.
When SoliderClone gets to the infirmary, Helena’s bed is empty, but he’s relieved to find her on the floor instead.
In the abandoned house, Mark is basically performing surgery on himself while Sarah runs in circles because she has no interest in digging a bullet out of someone’s leg with her bare hands. Also she wants to know where her sestra is. Mark says Castor HQ is mobile and he’s been out on his mission for over a year, so he doesn’t know where Helena is. He would pinky swear, but he needs her finger so she can stick it in his bullet hole. After pouring some vodka on the wound and taking a swig herself, Sarah finally does it. After she feels the bullet, confirms that it’s not buried in the bone, and pulls out her finger, both her and Mark start gagging, but miraculously neither of them pass out, as surely would have happened if this were a situation my brother and I were in.
Mark tells her to dig the bullet out with the pliers, and to her credit, she doesn’t walk out right then. She instead uses the leverage of having a household tool buried in Mark’s flesh to talk more about Projects Castor and Leda. Sarah says she knows the Castor clones get sick, because the Leda clones do too. Mark confesses that they thought Johanssen had stolen some of the original DNA samples, and that’s why he was assigned the case. Sarah gets the bullet out and dumps more booze on the wound, relieved that ordeal is over. Mark presses his head against Sarah’s forehead and thanks her; he might not have done the same for her.
In the suburbs, Donnie is struggling to carry heavy boxes so Alison relieves him of them, because she does Hip Hop Abs every day and burying Leekie in the garage was the most exercise Donnie has had in two years. They’re startled to find a man waiting for them in the backyard, and even more startled when he tries to shush Alison.
This man is the one who has been following Donnie, and it’s because his boss needs to meet with them. He subtly threatens their children by name and takes the boxes of drugs neatly marked with a labelmaker as collateral.
Cosima, meanwhile, is in Felix’s loft reading notes from Professor Duncan’s book to Scott. Scott is getting a little frustrating; without the key, the code is impossible to crack, and without cracking the code, they don’t know if these notes are about something Very Important or about Duncan’s favorite episode of Murder, She Wrote.
Felix comes in and is taken aback by the sight. Cosima is a sight; she’s wearing a sweater that was very obviously never part of her own wardrobe, smoking French cigarettes and eating an Eskimo Pie.
If she’s embarrassed to have been caught in her own personal Taylor Swift song, Cosima does her best not to show it. She says, “I pine for no woman.” She may regret ever having met Delphine Cormier, but she will. not. pine. dammit.
Knowing a queer cry for help when he sees one, Felix tells Cosima to stop wallowing and come with him to Bobbi’s Bar. I’ll admit it, gay men and gay women don’t always get along very easily, but when they do, the connection is a uniquely deep one, fraught with oft unspoken understanding.
At the new Prolethean playground, Gracie is changing into a brand new Amish-esque outfit when she starts to miscarry. She tries to hide it from Bonnie when she comes to check on her, because that’s how twisted this little cult is, but Bonnie yells for Alexis to come help her baby and her baby’s baby.
The baby’s daddy is thinking about Gracie, twirling his wedding ring while Sarah sews up his leg about as skillfully as a little kid sewing a teddy bear back together. Sarah asks again about Castor, about growing up together, and Mark says they weren’t allowed outside attachments. All they had was each other. Literally the opposite of the Leda clones, who were sent out to form an infinite number of different attachments, but didn’t have each other. Mark says Gracie changed all that for him, but that hunting people is what they were trained for, they would have been found, so his plan was to find the DNA samples and exchange them for his freedom, but all he could find was a box of junk. Knowing Cosima has made connections with less, she asks where these samples are, but Mark finally gives into the pain and blood loss and passes out. Sarah digs through his things, finds a motel key, calls 911, and gets the hell out of dodge.
While waiting in the car to meet The Boss, Donnie pulls a gun out of the glove compartment and shoves it down his pants. Alison scolds him, but it’s too late, because their company has arrived. Donnie has the nerve to tell his wife to “play cool” as if she was the one who once accidentally shot a guy.
Much to Alison’s chagrin, the man from her backyard pats Alison down, making him the second guy in as many weeks to touch her naughtybits without her permission.
Donnie starts to stammer out excuses why he shouldn’t be patted down, but The Boss doesn’t want to talk to him, he only wants to talk to her. When Alison gets in the car, she knows why-The Boss is Jason Kellerman, a boy she dumped in high school. (And is also Jimmy/Steve from Shameless.)
At Bobbi’s, Felix starts setting up a “Sapphire” page (super clever name for a Sapphic dating app, by the way) for a 5’2″ geek monkey with great tits and sass to match. Cosima asks him what the heck he thinks he’s doing; she’s obviously not looking for love right now, but Felix says this isn’t about love. It’s about putting herself out there, opening the door for someone to come into her life, someone who will stay in her heart forever, not just so long as her job allows her to.
Alison is getting giggly with Jason, bonding over the past, which brings them to the present. She isn’t interested in giving him the gritty details about how and why she came to sell drugs out of her craft room, but she will tell him that she can double Ramon’s weight because of her pull in the inner circle of suburban housewives. He admits he was impressed with the homemade soap ruse, so they shake on it.
Sifting through Johanssen’s stuff she found under a bed in the motel, Sarah finds papers signed by Ethan Duncan and immediately calls Cosima.
Together, they figure out that they’re not looking for a test tube with goop in it-they’re looking for Johanssen’s son. A picture of the child’s mother is among the papers, and Sarah would recognize that death cold stare anywhere, with or without the hunting rifle.
At the Prolethean’s, Gracie is lying in a circle of women who look ready to play Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board, but who really are praying for her lost child. Bonnie sends everyone out and then scolds Gracie, saying she betrayed the family and losing the child is her punishment. Gracie tries to apologize, but she was only welcomed back because of her incest-y child of science, so now she can leave.
Mark catches up to Sarah at the motel and gets her with a gun to her head for the second time tonight. She immediately tells him what she found, knowing Mark will know how to find Johanssen’s son, and knowing it could, in turn, lead her to Helena. Mark takes Sarah to Bonnie and Henrik’s old house and tells her to pull around back, where she finds a grave. The baby’s name was Abel, and Mark is going to make Sarah dig it up.
While she digs, and while he holds a gun to her head, Mark decides to try to get to know his sestra. He asks Sarah why she’s working so hard to save someone she once tried to kill. Sarah says maybe that’s exactly why she’s working so hard. Maybe she feels like she owes it to her. It’s not Helena’s fault she was a monster, Kira helped her see that. She just needs help. Mark asks how she even knows Helena is alive and Sarah says not to worry about it, it’s a freaky twin thing. To warn her, maybe, of the state Helena could be in, or to hurry Sarah along, Mark says that his people will do anything to find a cure.
Luckily, Helena is a survivor, and she uses her makeshift chicken bone key to open her cell door and scoot out into the night. She finds a medical tent that looks like what they put ET in, and sees that someone named Parsons is inside. Parsons turns out to be the Castor clone she saw through the fan, restrained and uncomfortable, and with his brain exposed like Dr. Finkelstein. He reaches for Helena’s hand and uses all his strength to beg for death.
Pupok scolds her for wasting precious escape time, but even though Helena’s heart isn’t literally in the right place, it is metaphorically, so she takes pity on her brother, saying they’ve both been abandoned, and stabs him in the brain right good.
Dr. Coady finds her and calls Helena a stupid girl, but Helena calls her a shit mother right back. And I like to believe Helena learned the word “shit’ from her new sestras; she definitely didn’t learn it from the nuns, and Sarah would say “shite” so I’m going to go ahead and say she picked it up from Cosima in the short time they spent together.
In the graveyard, Sarah tells Mark to stay awake, calling him ‘brother’ to try once again to speak to his inherent familial loyalty, but when she pulls the tiny coffin out of the grave, she finds herself face to face with Scarface. Mark is not particularly attentive, currently.
Sarah tries to trade the coffin for Helena, saying it has Castor’s original DNA in it, and when he opens it to check there’s really a tiny baby skeleton in there (there is) Sarah smacks him upside the head with a shovel. She runs again – the poor thing is always running-and Rudy follows with the coffin under his arm.
Sarah runs away, quiet like a church mouse, while Rudy taunts her about Kira, making fake baby voices and acting out how confused Kira would be when her mummy was gone. He catches up with her and has a knife to her when Mark stumbles out and orders him to stand down, as his superior officer. Rudy does, but not before slamming Sarah’s head into a post. Mark calls him “little brother” and they stand face to face, reunited at last. Mark tells Rudy to grab the coffin, and Rudy reminds him they can’t keep any loose ends. Mark looks at Sarah with unfeeling eyes and agrees before lunging at her.
What did you think of “Newer Elements of Our Defense”? Next week, Kenzi comes to play! Though actually I have a feeling Kenzi and Shay will have little in common besides sharing Ksenia Solo‘s face (a common practice around these parts).
Here are some of our favorite #clonesbians tweets from this week:
A Prolethean Family reunion def has 36 varieties of deviled eggs #OrphanBlack #clonesbians
– Stacey Lockie (@StaceyLockie) May 10, 2015
Holy fuck! How many times can my heart stop & restart in one hour? #OrphanBlack #CloneClub #clonesbians
– Angela Marie (@_une_femme_) May 10, 2015
I think they’re in Rosewood. I mean, look at all these barns #clonesbians #CloneClub
– Jenny (@iFlipForRizzles) May 10, 2015
The rib bone is such an all purpose tool it needs an infomercial #OrphanBlack #CloneClub #clonesbians
– kid jr. (@NayaCutYoNails) May 10, 2015
These people are morons. They keep leaving Helena unattended with too many items to shank people with. #OrphanBlack #CloneClub #Clonesbians
– Kim Dawson (@kdawson424) May 10, 2015
That sound you heard was all the lesbians going to google “Sapphire”. #OrphanBlack #CloneClub #Clonesbians
– TheOtherNic (@CloneNic) May 10, 2015
Sapphyre probably. With a Y. #OrphanBlack #CloneClub #clonesbians
– Colleen (@cmmcguire) May 10, 2015
Prolethean Kate Mckinnon is clearly running for Mother of the Year, right alongside Snow White. #clonesbians #CloneClub #queerytales
– Jenny (@iFlipForRizzles) May 10, 2015
Team Hendrix drug dealing hijinx is really giving me life right now. #clonesbians #OrphanBlack
– Jerzey (@jerzeyredhead) May 10, 2015
The only gun these two should have is a Glue Gun..and that’s even iffy. #OrphanBlack #CloneClub #Clonesbians
– Elizabeth D-V (@324_B21) May 10, 2015
Helena is such a resourceful little cray cray. #clonesbians
– Chen Drachman (@shokoshik) May 10, 2015
