Krysten Ritter Talks Stepping Into the World of Orphan Black with Spinoff Orphan Black: Echoes
Photo Courtesy of AMC
Orphan Black is one of the most singular television series of the 2010s, an addictive conspiracy thriller that wrestled with scientific ethics and human cloning as easily as it told a remarkably heartfelt story about sisterhood and found family. Its widespread critical acclaim and awards season buzz probably always meant we’d return to this universe someday, though the arrival of Orphan Black: Echoes seven years after the original concluded is a longer gap than most of us likely anticipated. More of a sequel series than a straight spinoff, it’s a drama that explores familiar themes, even as it uses them to ask more uncomfortable, even controversial questions about the limits of “crazy science.”
Set several decades after the events of the original Orphan Black, this latest series follows Lucy (Kristen Ritter), a woman who suddenly wakes up unable to remember who she is. But after stumbling upon a foreboding vat of electric pink goo, she learns she was printed out in a high-tech lab. Not a clone, per se, but an artificial copy of a specific person at a particular point in their life. After breaking out of the facility in which she’s being held, Lucy manages to build a new life for herself in an off-the-grid rural community, but when her past comes back to haunt her—in the form of an attack from an unidentified thug—she sets off on a journey to find out who she is, where she came from, and who made her the way she is. Sound familiar?
But just because Echoes is set in the same universe as Orphan Black, it doesn’t mean that the show is interested in telling the same story as its predecessor.
“It’s totally different from the original,” Ritter tells Paste. “We have some Easter eggs and fun little hidden things in there and some obvious things—a man character, who’s revealed at the end of Episode 1—that are connected to [Orphan Black] but this is a completely new show.”
Some of Echoes’ central elements will certainly feel familiar to fans of Orphan Black, particualrly Keeley Hawes’ Kira Manning, whose emotional arc is the central narrative linchpin around which much of the series turns. But where the original series was predominantly Sarah Manning’s story and relied almost solely on star Tatiana Maslany’s Emmy-winning central performance as more than a dozen different clones, Orphan Black: Echoes follows a half-dozen central characters across multiple timelines and different kinds of relationships, from romantic entanglements to familial bonds.
“There’s a new set of circumstances, different technology, and different characters,” Ritter continues. “And the structure of the show is completely different—I’m not playing eight versions of myself, for one thing. But I appreciated how much my character still got to do.”
Ritter’s not wrong. From the emotional shock of realizing she’s not exactly human to more action-oriented chase and fight sequences and thought-provoking debates about memory and agency, Lucy goes through it during the season’s 10 episodes.
“From the start, Lucy is a blank slate,” Ritter says. “She’s an experiment gone wrong, and her whole journey is a study of identity. Why was she printed, and who was this other person that she’s supposed to feel like, supposed to have these memories of, but doesn’t.”
One of the central questions posed by Echoes revolves around the question of memory—the loss of them, the fight to keep them, and how much of who we are is defined by the things we remember. And Lucy, who doesn’t know anything about the person she used to be, is determined to choose who she wants to become.
“She’s really rebelling against the idea of who she’s supposed to be, who she’s been programmed to be, and creating her own life for herself instead,” Ritter says. “And that makes her a bit of a live wire. She has a lot going on she’s jugging and balancing: finding out why people are after her, figuring out who she is, and how best to protect the family that she’s created.”
In the years since her initial escape, Lucy has built a genuine life for herself, falling in love with former Army medic-turned-landlord Jack (Avan Jogia) and essentially adopting his deaf daughter Charlie (Zariella Langford) as her own.