TV review

Orphan Black – refreshing take on sci-fi story

Tatiana Maslany plays upwards of ten different strong, female characters. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (Creative Commons)

Tatiana Maslany plays upwards of ten different strong, female characters. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (Creative Commons)   (Click to enlarge: opens in new window)

Mary Finch reviews BBC America series Orphan Black.

Orphan Black is brilliantly written television. The story revolves around young women who find out they’re clones, created as part of an illegal experiment. The storylines develop rapidly as they discover more about themselves and the wider agenda they’re part of.

It’s a refreshing, intelligent feminist take on the sci-fi genre, placing the most surreal elements of science in an everyday context of mothers and workers. For example many films fail the ‘Bechdel test’. This rates a film as sexist if it doesn’t have at least two women in it, who talk to each other about something other than a man.

Almost all conversations in Orphan Black take place between two women about other women. Almost all the main characters are women, who are complex, individual and central to the storylines, rather than being treated as background props.

Rachel, the almost unfeeling director of the cloning experiment, shows intense vulnerability as the story about her parents unfolds. The ditsy blonde clone working in a nail salon, unaware of her biological identity, is quickly shown to be systematically investigating it. There are no one-sided women.

The vastly different personalities of each clone are made deliberately noticeable, as is their struggle to be seen as individual and human, rather than just test subjects. The clones’ fight to have control over their own biology has formed a central plotline of all three seasons so far, and this leads into even more explicit pro-choice politics.

The daughter of a conservative Christian family is unwillingly made pregnant with a clone’s foetus. But her solution is simple, the donor Helena says: “Do not have my babies if you do not want to have my babies.”

The main protagonist, Sarah Manning, is from an obviously working class background. Rather than her being demonised for criminal behaviour, it’s presented more as a result of her harsh experience of the foster system and her lack of opportunities, caused by class constraints.

Another main character, Cosima, is a lesbian, which is shown as incidental to both her character and the show. LGBT people aren’t presented as remarkably different from their straight counterparts; they certainly aren’t a novelty. They’re treated as real, normal people. Inevitably, there are drawbacks; notably there is an overwhelmingly white cast – black and Asian women are completely left out of the picture.

But Orphan Black is a huge step forward for women, with a pro-choice, pro-feminist angle. It is extremely well written television, cutting across the misogynistic representations that otherwise dominate capitalist media.