Previously on Orphan Black, Cosima decided to stay in Revival to follow the crazy science and got injected with the cure FUCKING FINALLY, Helena got stabbed in the belly by a stick, Rachel stabbed everyone and her mom to rise to the top of the Neolution pyramid, and Sarah got hit with a tranquilizer dart right as she was about to escape the island.
The good news is, when Sarah wakes up, she is indeed off the island. The bad news is, she’s back in a DYAD cell, and she is NOT PLEASED.
Before she wakes up though, a thing to note: She sees that same Kira vision from before, but besides just “mummy, wake up,” Kira says, “You’re gonna have to let go.” And also this time Mrs. S pops in to say, “You need to listen to her.” Both things that will be relevant later and probably Sarah should have paid more attention to them.
Ferdinand comes to see Sarah in her cell and immediately she asks about Kira. Instead, Ferdinand video conferences in her sestras. Alison is in her craft room and tells her that Helena and Donnie are on the lam but she’s fine, then Cosima is patched in and gives her a dose of good news: the cure is in her. The trial is officially a go.
But before Sarah can get any more details, Ferdinand shuts off the call and shows her live footage of Kira, coloring in another room at the DYAD, safe.
Ferdinand’s voice is arrogant when he asks her if she’s ready to behave.
Meanwhile, up in her office, Rachel has taken up meditation and has doubled-down on windows.
Sarah is brought up to see her and Rachel offers her tea but Sarah just wants her to spill it. That sounds like a joke but I’m serious, Rachel says she wants to run some tests on Kira and Tatiana Maslany slaps a cup of tea right out of her own hands. This is the 42nd episode of this show, and I have seen every episode a MINIMUM of three times, and yet things like this blow my mind every SINGLE time. It’s such a strange trick of the mind. There is truly no one else who could have pulled this off like Tatiana.
Rachel, unflinching despite almost getting scalded by hot water, says that things are different now. They truly just want to learn about Kira and her unique biology; they don’t want to keep her. Not anymore. To prove her point, Kira and Mrs. S are brought into the office. They can all go home together as long as they agree to bring Kira back for testing. Kira says please, Mrs. S says please, and Sarah feels like she woke up in an alternate universe but she agrees, just to get her family home.
Meanwhile in the suburbs, Art and his new best friend Maddie are forcing Alison to play her voicemails out loud for them. When they’re done and there’s nothing from Donnie or Helena, she asks them to leave because there are neighborhood politics she needs to address, but Maddie doesn’t want her to leave her house until Helena shows up. She’s like “you’re crafty, just craft” and frankly she’s lucky Alison didn’t whip out her trusty glue gun right then and there.
At Revival, Cosima and Charlotte are having some lunch together and competing for my favorite sestra relationship on the show. There are vitamins that are served with the food but Cosima decies her and Charlotte aren’t going to partake, just in case. Cosima coughs and Charlotte is worried, but Cosima reassures her that the treatment wouldn’t work that fast.
Charlotte says she believes in the treatment, and bb girl so do I. The mother and daughter that Delphine treated last week walk by, and Charlotte recognizes Aisha from the “school” so Cosima asks Charlotte to introduce her.
As soon as Sarah, Mrs. S and Kira come home and send Kira upstairs to get ready from school, where Rachel will pick her up, and as soon as Kira is out of sight, the walls come down and Mrs. S runs to the vacuum cleaner to turn it on to mask their hushed and worried voices; they weren’t actually as compliant as they seemed, and Sarah is SO RELIEVED. They were just playing along until they made a game plan. So Sarah takes Kira to school like everything’s fine and normal, and Kira’s like, “Auntie Rachel is going to pick me up,” and Sarah practically spits on the ground and is like “Auntie my butt!” Kira tries to say that it’s different now but even the most precocious kids are ignored when it comes to what is perceived as “adult stuff” so Sarah shuffles her off to be the smartest witch of her age.
Scott pops in briefly to give Felix one last batch of clone phones, including one for MK, who they found on the darknet and who is now in Felix’s loft.
In Revival (why are cult names always just creepy spiritual words, why can’t it be like NeoParty Science Club or something), Cosima is examining Aisha, while Charlotte proudly tells her that Aisha said that Delphine was very nice in that cute way little kids do when they want you to know they like the person you’re dating.
The Messenger and Mud find them and Cosima is like “We’re doing school,” and I mean I get why it looked a little suspicious. But regardless, Cosima has to come with them because “he” wants to see her. “He” of course being the legendary PT Westmoreland.
When Felix gets to the loft, he video chats Sarah, who has MK take off her mask. When she does, it’s obvious that she’s sick, and has been sick. She coughs and looks embarrassed but she has information: the DYAD has been recruiting naive surrogates. Rachel is restarting the cloning program. Sarah leans in close to the screen and assures MK that she’s their sestra now. She’s one of them, and they’re going to help her. Cosima has the cure, she’s going to be okay.
And speaking of Cosima, as she’s walking with Mud up the stairs to PT’s lair, and Mud is talking about all the times she’s chatted with him before, Cosima finally asks, who IS she. Mud keeps her scary empty-eyed smile on her face and says, “Don’t be nervous,” which is decidedly not an answer.
Cosima goes into the house and it’s definitely haunted, full of things like animal skeletons and taxidermy and and an old phonograph running on ghost-power alone. She sees a picture of PT Westmoreland from 1894 and I’m prepared for a moving corpse to be wheeled into this room, but instead in walks a devilishly handsome man who looks like he’s played The Devil at least three times and certainly doesn’t look like how I’d expect a 170-year-old to look. But he’s eloquent and charming and he hands Cosima her first test results and the outcome so far is “remarkable.” The cure seems to be working. He asks her to stay on at Revival, where they “follow the science,” and that’s what Delphine says, so she does her regular Cosima thing of challenging him a little, but all she has to decide right now is that she’s going to continue to develop the cure for the rest of her sestras.
He also tells her this really interesting philosophy poem about cheese and all of Cosima’s faces were perfect as he went through it. And if you will, I recommend imaging all the other clones in that exact scenario. Alison would have cut him off and asked what on earth this has to do with cheese, Sarah would have rolled her eyes and told him she wasn’t a bloody cheese mite, Helena would have stabbed him with the cheese knife. Cosima was fascinated though and would probably love to run some tests on him herself.
In her office at DYAD, Rachel tells Ferdinand that she’s found herself through Westmoreland and doesn’t have interest in their kinky sexual relationship anymore. Which doesn’t please him to say the least.
Rachel goes to pick up Kira from school, motherhood being not quite as exciting as she might have hoped.
But Sarah and her kin make it more fun by playing a switcheroo; Sarah dresses as Rachel and Mrs. S and Felix work together to get Kira out. When Rachel goes into get Kira, she recognizes the “why are you asking me a question you should know the answer to” look on the teacher’s face and knows she’s been cloneswappeed. What Sarah and Mrs. S hadn’t been counting on, however, was that Ferdinand was watching from the back of the school, and follows Sarah as she heads back to Felix’s loft to pick up MK while Mrs. S shuffles Kira to safety.
During this entire episode, Donnie and Helena are in the hospital, and honestly I’m not sure that Donnie remembers at this point that Helena isn’t actually his wife. One of the babies was hurt in the fall, but when they do another ultrasound to see if they should do an emergency c-section, the baby is healed. Helena is afraid they’ll want to steal her magic babies, so she tells Donnie where she’s going to run to and says if he tells anyone besides Sarah she’ll sick baba yaga on her, and just ask Kenzi from Lost Girl, that ain’t good.
A doctor comes in to examine Helena (and question Donnie as to why his injured wife is so skittish) and pulls out a big needle that was intended to test Helena’s amniotic fluid, but instead Helena grabs and STABS HER IN THE FACE. When the doctor is pinned to the bed THROUGH HER CHEEK-TONGUE-CHEEK Helena steals her car keys.
Then despite that HORRIFICALLY VIOLENT ACT she becomes instantly adorable as she waddle-runs out of the hospital, her little bum poking out from the back of her hospital gown.
When Sarah gets inside Felix’s loft, Ferdinand hot on her heels, MK tries to tell her that she’s too tired to keep running. They switch clothes and MK says she’ll just pretend to be Sarah pretending to be Rachel long enough for Sarah to get away. Sarah doesn’t want to leave her sestra, but MK says she wants to do this, for Kira.
MK is also frustrated; if someone was alive for 170 years there should be so much information about them, but Westmoreland doesn’t have enough. She’s almost talking to herself, “There’s not enough data” and she’s spiraling but Sarah grabs her face to calm her down. MK says it wishes it could have been different between them. Sarah does, too.
Sarah sneaks out through a door I’ve never noticed before and Ferdinand busts in through the main door. MK is ready to make a stand, and Ferdinand is thrilled that Sarah is dressed as Rachel. He’s transformed; where there’s usually a calm and creepy Dr. Jekyll is a feral and wild Mr. Hyde.
Ferdinand says some really terrifying sexually aggressive things and pins her down. He realizes, because he’s brushed her hair out of her face to reveal her scars, that it’s not Sarah he has pinned to the floor, but the last survivor of Helsinki, who he calls Veera.
Ferdinand hisses about two revenge fantasies in one, switching between calling her Rachel and Veera, truly no longer on our plane of reality. She eventually spits on him and he snaps. He stands up and, in the most horrific sequence I’ve ever seen on television, stomps on her chest over and over and over again until her ribcage breaks and she dies. My chest hurts just typing this. And it’s not just the absolutely over-the-top and unnecessary violence of it, but because it was one of our sestras. We haven’t lost a Leda clone we were attached to yet. We only grew to love Beth in retrospect, as Sarah settled deeper and deeper in her shoes. We lost Katja before we really knew her, we only found out about Jennifer after she was gone. The Helsinki girls were just a horror story we heard. But MK was their sister, Sarah just said so. MK helped them when they needed, MK cared about them. MK sacrificed herself to save Kira.
Ferdinand puts her sheep mask atop her crushed torso and leaves her there on the floor of Felix’s loft.
At that moment, Sarah and Kira are getting ready to go into the van that will take them away from the chaos forever, when Kira starts to lose her mind. She starts kicking and screaming, she’s not going. “MK is dead,” she wails, as Sarah tries to lift her daughter into the van unsuccessfully. Sarah says, “You can’t know that,” but even she doesn’t believe herself as she says it. “I don’t feel her anymore,” Kira sobs.
Kira yells that she wants to know why she’s like this, that she wants to go with Rachel, who has promised her answers. She runs to Felix and Mrs. S looks at Sarah, as though it pains her to admit it, but they can’t pretend anymore. Kira is different, and she wants to know why. Rachel can help.
Rachel who is officially on my list because all she does to Ferdinand is turn him out because he didn’t follow her orders. I would have locked him in one of those DYAD cells with the wall-screens and forced him to watch Skins Fire on repeat for all eternity.
Back at Mrs. S’s house, Kira gets ready for testing time with Rachel. Sarah just stands there watching as everything she has been afraid of is happening. She’s been running and fighting and bleeding and crying and fighting and fighting and fighting to prevent this exact thing, and here Kira is, just walking away from her and into Rachel’s arms.
Sarah and I both wonder, what was it all for? What was the point of anything if this was the inevitable end anyway? What’s the message here? It it that maybe someone should have asked Kira what she wanted to do before hatching a master kidnapping scheme that got MK killed? Is autonomy the lesson? Is it that you can’t protect your children forever? Is it that trying is pointless and loving people is a waste of time because they’re just going to leave you anyway?
Sorry, I’m still shook by that MK situation. This episode filled my heart with sand and it is weighing heavy on me today.
Later that night, with Sarah tucked away in bed, probably catatonic because I would be, Mrs. S hears a knock on her back door. She grabs a gun and is shocked to see who it is and my brain did one of those eyeball-slot-machine movies like money-hungry wolves in cartoons when they see a cash cow, trying to guess who was at the door, and my brain rolled through Helena, Donnie, Allison, Tony, Krystal and Maya St. Germain by the time the camera turned to reveal who was there but I sure as heck didn’t guess right. Because it was DELPHINE.
“I’m not a ghost,” she says, “ARE YOU SURE?!” I respond. After being sent away last week, I was sure she was gone until the finale. I was delighted and some of the sand in my heart spilled back out. Delphine says that Sarah can’t know that she’s there, that it’s safer that nobody knows, but that she wants to work together with Mrs. S on something. And I’m VERY excited to find out what.
