Last year, Orphan Black entered the TV rat race as a scrappy, offbeat, underdog. By the time its 10-episode season wrapped, the show, and particularly Tatiana Maslany’s performance, had become one of the breakout success stories of the year. With its second season, the show returned to the airwaves amidst a wealth of newfound expectations.
And there’s the rub—few things can kill a show faster than unmanageable hype. At its core, Orphan Black is merely a well-executed genre exercise, a marvelous cocktail of thriller, sci-fi and broad comedy. As such, its second season found the show bumping into the inevitable issues that plague shows of this ilk. Primarily, despite its predilection for rapid pacing and twist-y storylines, the show often struggled to make its larger mythology as intriguing as its intimate character work. Often, its overindulgence in its conspiracy-thriller roots would become its undoing. “By Means Which Have Never Yet Been Tried” is filled with characters either switching sides or revealing themselves to be something other than what we expected. After seeming like little more than a Dyad pawn for much of the season, Paul is revealed to be a double agent for another organization that’s trying to help the clones; likewise, the once malevolent-seeming Marian Bowles is now presented as yet another ally; finally, Siobhan aids in the capture of Helena and—like Delphine in the previous episode—expresses immediate regret at having betrayed the clones.
At a certain point, keeping up with where the various characters’ loyalties lie becomes more trouble than it’s worth. For a show that once excelled at subverting expectations and keeping the audience on its toes, many of the twists and turns in “By Means Which Have Never Yet Been Tried” now come with a definite “been-there-done-that” feel. Moreover, I fear many of the non-Tatiana Maslany characters are beginning to feel less like actual characters and more like pawns to set plot into motion.
After the capture of Kira at the conclusion of last week’s episode, a frightened Sarah decides to voluntarily surrender herself to Dyad experimentation. Their plan, it seems, is to remove one of her ovaries in an attempt to crack the key to clone reproduction. As the Dyad scientists examine Sarah, Rachel attempts to once again coax the secret of the synthetic sequences from Ethan. Rather than tell her, however, he discreetly consumes a deadly poison. As he dies, Ethan expresses great sorrow that things had to end this way as a tearful Rachel can only watch helplessly while her father figure slips away.
Meanwhile, a deathly sick Cosima appears to be coordinating some kind of escape plan via lab associate Josh, She then gets Kira to sketch a strange drawing involving a few stick figures and a fire hydrant. When Rachel is eventually rolled into surgery for her ovary removal, Josh signals to Kira’s drawing, which has been placed near the operating table. When Rachel eventually clears out the room to have one final talk with Sarah, our hero realizes that the sketch refers to a homemade contraption that Josh has placed within her reach. With an unsuspecting Rachel in front of her, Sarah activates the device and it fires a sharpened pencil directly into Rachel’s eye.
As much as Orphan Black has lost a bit of its surprise element over the course of 19 episodes, this sequence is about as effective a jaw-dropping moment as you can expect. Whether Rachel is truly down for good, or will appear next season with an eye patch accessory is uncertain.
From here, Sarah takes Kira and escapes the Dyad Institution. It must be said, for being the Big Bad Organization, Dyad is almost insultingly easy to enter and exit. Once Rachel is dispatched, there’s basically no one around to even stop the two from leaving. It really makes me hope that the next season will move away from Dyad as the big evil, since—with the exception of some of Rachel’s actions—it never really presented itself as being more of a threatening presence than, say, Helena was last season.
Mother and daughter then return to Felix’s apartment and find themselves in the company of Helena, Alison and Cosima. Perhaps the biggest knock against this season has been the scattering of the clones and how this separation has prevented the kind of humorous interactions that made the first season so enjoyable. As if making up for lost time, this pivotal scene finds all five clones coming together in one room for the first time. They promptly proceed to bond through …a dance party?