Orphan Black’s Radical Undercurrent Of Super Horrifying Gender Stuff

Spoiler warning to episode two, and slightly for episode three of Orphan Black’s third season.

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Orphan Black has never been a tightly plotted show. Now in its third season, the Canadian sci-fi series about a woman who discovers she has an ever-expanding group of clone “sisters” (and a brother*) is starting to sprawl well past the established outskirts of its initial premise, complete with tenuous conspiracies retconned into previous plotlines. But it’s thrilling, handsome genre TV, grounded in all but its truly silly moments by excellent character work – particularly, as it’s mandatory to note when writing about this show, by Tatiana Maslany, who gives every one of her roles a distinctive identity so complete that you can pick out individual character tics even when she’s playing a clone who’s pretending to be another clone.

Where the show has always been strong is the conceptual underpinnings of its premise, which is stuffed full of thorny questions and pointed observations about women’s bodies and agency. Apart from the revelation in the first season finale that the clones’ very genetic code is restricted intellectual property, which left philosophical questions about self-determination and ownership of humans hanging in the air, a number of different but recognisable reproductive anxieties have manifested themselves in the sisters’ bodies: single motherhood and financial/social insecurity; biological infertility; forced pregnancy; involuntary sterility; the emotional knottiness of surrogacy; the prospect of never being a mother at all.

Several of the clones have expressed bitterness about their infertility – they were sterile by design, presumably for IP reasons as well as to minimise the potential effects of synthesised DNA finding new expressions out in the wild – and in cold, villainous Rachel and damaged Helena, the desire to have babies has led both of them to kidnap protagonist Sarah’s daughter Kira on separate occasions. Meanwhile, evolutionary biologist (and fan favourite) Cosima discovered that the mysterious and eventually fatal illness that’s appeared in several clones, including herself, had its origins in their reproductive systems.

Of course, no persecution of people with wombs is quite complete without organised religion, so the clones have also been pursued by religious fundamentalists who believe they are an abomination against nature. Helena, raised by the church, started out as a zealot hunting her sisters; but as Sarah’s “mirror image” twin, she shares in the genetic accident of fertility, and has become a valuable commodity to certain elements in the Orphan Black universe.

There’s no explicit condemnation of “playing God” in the show’s treatment of cloning technology; as much pain and danger as the clone conspiracy has caused, the Club are genuinely happy to have found one another. More than anything, the series shows you just how damaging it’s been for these women to have had various institutions (largely run by men) controlling their bodies on such minute levels, while it also celebrates scientific work when it’s used to challenge and heal.

The show’s trademark episode titles – cryptic, foreboding and verbose – were taken in the first season from The Origin of Species, and in the second from quotes by Francis Bacon (the father of the scientific method). In this third season, the episodes are named with fragments from the final speech given by Dwight D Eisenhower as president, where he introduced the term “military-industrial complex” to the vernacular and described some (very prescient) fears about its influence on the American character.

This is because at the end of the second season, it was revealed that Project Leda, the private-sector program where the cloned women were created, had a male-clone counterpart named Project Castor – a military program. Just as the ability to bear children has been a primary driver of the objectification, dehumanisation and commodification of women throughout history, the relative physical strength and reproductive redundancy of individual men has seen them being variously socialised and forced and incentivised into joining the military, usually to fight wars on behalf of more powerful men, and far too often as mere cannon fodder rather than brave warriors.

So the Leda/Castor dichotomy that was made explicit in that revelation — “women to science, men to the army” — is a chilling distillation of how those at the highest levels of power have throughout history reduced the bodies of large numbers of both men and women to tools for them to achieve their own ends. The military has treated men’s bodies as expendable on a large and long-term scale, and has essentially relied on a continued supply of male bodies to replace the fallen, which is why the idea of mindlessly obedient and deadly soldiers created in a lab on demand is such a common sci-fi trope. This makes it the ideal institution through which to examine how our current systems of social and institutional power are damaging to men, just as medical science is an apt lens to explore how women’s bodies have been violated and misused in the name of the greater good.

A few episodes into season three, it’s intriguing to watch how the Castor clones operate. Raised alongside who knows how many of their brothers within the military structure by a scientist they call Mother, and fully aware of their nature, they’re both more childish and more vicious than the Leda clones. We’ve already seen one of a set of twins kill the other, following a protocol despite his own pain; they also seem much more unstable, both medically and psychologically, than almost all of the civilian-raised women (the notable exception being Helena, who was institutionalised by the church).

The show has been fairly negative about the military so far; the fact that only one of four known Castor clones has shown himself to be capable of any form of compassion (and it’s the one who’s spent years in a creepy farm cult) suggests that Orphan Black has a perspective to explore regarding toxic masculinity and how it’s shaped and warped by institutions, which present a rigid view of what men should be valued for.

Orphan Black is fascinated by the things that make us who we are. The original purpose of the clone programs haven’t been fully revealed yet, and when it eventually is, at the rate the show’s going, it probably won’t bear much resemblance to what creator Graeme Manson had in mind when he wrote the pilot. But the clones have always pondered nature versus nurture as they try to redefine themselves as sisters, as mysteries, as science experiments, as “normal” women. To open the nature/nurture discussion up wider so that it incorporates chromosomes as well as genomes, and what society teaches us about being men or women as well as what our parents teach us about being people, is the kind of move that sets this show apart.

* NB: It should be noted that a brother to the Clone Club, a trans man named Tony, was introduced late in season two, for one episode only, and it was very weird. Fan reaction ranged from “huzzah, more and varied queer representation is great!” (which is true), to “Yeeesh, so even Tatiana has limits” (sadly, also apparently true), to “Tony? More like POOCHIE”. It’s unclear whether Tony will ever return to Clone Club, but he seemed to nope out of there pretty quickly to get back to his cloneless life, and the ladyclones haven’t mentioned him since. So for the purposes of this article, please know that references to the Leda siblings as women shouldn’t be interpreted as erasure or misgendering.

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Orphan Black airs on SBS on Tuesdays at 9.30pm. Episode two and three of season three are available to stream via SBS On Demand.
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Caitlin Welsh is a freelance writer who tweets from @caitlin_welsh. Read her Girls recapshere.