'Orphan Black' Season Premiere: More Clones, Less Satisfying?
Orphan Black is back for a third season, and Saturday night’s premiere plunges us into the world of clones, now both female and male. The first two seasons of the series were exhilarating for the way the TV screen was clustered with strong women of various personalities, most of them played by Tatiana Maslany. The new season gives another actor, Ari Millen, an opportunity to do the multiple-role clone thing.
The first two episodes made available to critics include waterboarding-style torture, a clone with a Tintin haircut, and a talking scorpion. As if that wasn’t enough, it brings to the fore what looks like the new dynamic in Orphan Black: warring scientific experiments, as Project Leda (the one that gave us clones Sarah, Helena, Alison, and Cosima, among others), competes with Project Castor and its male clones, who tend to be of a more violent nature. Oh, men —the show seems to be saying — they’re just more backward and predatory than women, aren’t they? That may even be true, but it’s also a trite observation.
In this way, one source that gave Orphan Black its originality and energy has been diluted. It was both fun and absorbing watching the clone women piece together their common history. Although seemingly set slightly in the future to judge from the progress of science, the series worked as a metaphor for early feminism, with its dedication to rediscovering the history of women that the patriarchy had done its best to suppress.
Related: 5 Things We Learned on the Set of ‘Orphan Black’
Now, in search of a new-season Big Bad, the oily Castor boys bring to the show the kind of characters that are all too common on TV: strapping males waving guns and making demands, with women on the defensive.
To be honest, I’ve usually found Maslany’s performance more of a stunt than an achievement. She shifts between various accents quite well, but all of her clone incarnations present the same poker face, the same expression of perpetual worry interrupted by brief moments of happiness or dread. Millen’s embodiment of the male clones follows the same pattern, which now makes me think the flaw didn’t reside in Maslany’s performance so much as the conception of these characters by show creators Graeme Manson and John Fawcett. The protagonists and antagonists in Orphan Black are TV and movie archetypes — stoic sorts who endure trials and pain only to emerge either stronger or dead.
There are sufficient twists in the new episodes that keep the action moving while preventing me from revealing too much. The pace is swift, the tension runs high — except, perhaps, for the Alison clone, whose suburban soccer mom is used most frequently for comic relief.
Orphan Black will premiere on Saturday night across multiple channels — BBC America, AMC, IFC, SundanceTV, and WE tv — at 9 p.m., and on BBC America in subsequent weeks.
