'Orphan Black' Recap: Pain in the Brain

Warning: This recap contains storyline and character spoilers for this week’s episode of Orphan Black.

Of these three activities, please name your favorite: exhuming a dead baby; poking your finger into an open wound; plunging a scalpel into an exposed brain. “How could I pick just one?” you’re probably asking yourself. Well, in this week’s Orphan Black, we were treated to ALL THREE wonderful scenarios.

If you thought last week’s extremely disgusting episode was pushing it, this episode truly toppled it over. As good as this season has been so far, it’s clear at least one element will be its lasting legacy: It keeps finding newer and weirder ways to be disgusting. Thankfully, “Newer Elements of Our Defense” was another solid episode overall. At least the parts that we watched through our fingers were, anyway.

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The biggest thrust (or wound fingering) of this episode involved the shooting that capped off last week’s episode. We were correct to assume that Gracie’s rifle-toting mother did not, in fact, successfully kill off Mark, and instead left him bleeding in the corn field. That gave Sarah enough time to muster some basic human decency and spirit him away to safety (a condemned home).

Now, scenes involving self-surgery are almost a trademark of the macho-dude action genre, so congratulations to Orphan Black for finally joining that rarefied club! Again, the sound effects alone were stomach-churning, but we probably could’ve done without all those closeups of Sarah fishing the bullet from Mark’s gushing wound.

But the pleasure in pairing these two unlikely characters for this gruesome duty lay in how it gave Sarah a chance to obtain answers about Helena. Unfortunately, Mark didn’t actually know very much, but once he passed out from blood loss, Sarah sneaked his motel room key away to dig for further clues. (Sarah did a lot of digging in this episode.)

At the motel, Sarah found a trove of exposition: That lockbox full of journals yielded the crucial info that Gracie’s crazy/dead father, before he was a full-time Prolethean, had once been the lab assistant to the scientist who’d created all the clones. Further, he’d once swiped the “original sample” embryo and implanted it in his wife. That meant that the “original sample” they’d all been looking for was actually Gracie’s older brother himself.

Good news, right? Well, the bad news was that he’d died as a baby and Sarah was now going to have to dig up his remains. Which she did, with Mark’s encouragement. Unfortunately, Mark passed out again just in time for Rudy to arrive and attempt to kill Sarah. Mark woke up and was able to talk him out of it (bullet-hole fingering really cements a friendship), but the episode ended on the cliffhanger of Mark agreeing to kill Sarah himself. Prediction: He probably won’t.

Related: ‘Orphan Black’ Renewed for Fourth Season

Back to Gracie’s terrifying mother: She probably has a name, but for now, let’s just refer to her as “DOOMSDAY HORNS.” For a woman who resembles Laura Linney’s shy-looking younger sister, she really knows how to cut a terrifying swath across Canada: first, in tracking Mark through the corn like the Terminator, and then later, after Gracie suffered a miscarriage, in her cold-blooded eviction of Gracie from the family business (and family). Who could’ve guessed that of all the evil weirdos we’d meet this season, that DOOMSDAY HORNS would be the scariest?

On a lighter note, Felix caught Cosima wearing too much perfume and a frilly sweater while eating Eskimo Pies, which meant only one thing: She’d been pining for Delphine, and it was NOT a good look. So like any good gay best friend, he took her out for drinks and forced her to sign up for a Tinder-like app for queer women called Saph-Fire. (Get it?) Again, not the most high-pressure subplot, but it’s always a pleasure getting to see Felix, let alone watch him spend one-on-one time with other Clone Club members. More, please.

Alison and Donnie’s suburban drug ring encountered a few hiccups this week, as their local kingpin/supplier had caught wind of their business and demanded a face-to-face with Alison. But, as the whims of the small-world gods would have it, Alison knew the guy! Guest star Justin Chatwin (Shameless) seems to have joined Orphan Black for a spell, playing an impossibly young and handsome drug supplier who’d once had his heart broken by Alison in high school and still seems to harbor feelings for her. This will definitely not lead to any complications (just kidding).

Last but not least, insane Helena had an interesting week. Her subplot in this episode was like a one-woman Shawshank Redemption, but with a talking scorpion. Much of her screentime was devoted to her increasingly clever methods of attempting to break out of her cell, which included feigning illness, gnawing a functional skeleton key out of a chicken bone (uh, sure, Orphan Black), and throwing buckets of literal s–t at the guards.

Eventually, during one of her escape attempts, she came into contact with another test subject being held against his will at the military base — and, you guessed it, he was a Castor clone. But his upsetting twist was that he’d been restrained and robbed of his skull cap, leaving him only with an exposed brain and a death wish. In a scene equal parts moving and nauseating, this clone pled with Helena to murder him while her scorpion pled with her to ignore him and escape.

Helena’s officially developed a sense of human empathy, so it wasn’t exactly shocking when she agreed to put the guy out of his misery, but I’m not sure her method of death was what you or I would have chosen. There’s just something about stabbing and wiggling a scalpel into an exposed brain that just does not seem like a good time. This show!

Much like last week’s episode, “Newer Elements of Our Defense” seemed to tacitly acknowledge that it was not crucial in terms of story or twists, and therefore made up for it with memorable moments and gross-outs. Because, man, does Orphan Black really excel at those things. While there’s part of me growing increasingly impatient to see the story start coming together and for the real fireworks to begin, Orphan Black remains a total pleasure to behold week after week. A frequently upsetting and disgusting pleasure, sure, but whatever works! Now hand me a bottle of vodka and some pliers; I’ve got an, um, issue I need to address.

Orphan Black airs Saturdays at 9 p.m. on BBC America.