Coming cold to the BBC America series Orphan Black is a little like stumbling on one of Einstein’s notebooks.
Your first thought will not be, “Hey, I got this.”
But as Orphan Black launches its fifth and final season Saturday at 10 p.m. ET, the good news is that it can be better understood even by raw rookies.
Tatiana Maslany as Sarah, with Mrs. S (right).
More to the point, it’s worth the effort, because Tatiana Maslany gives one of the finest performances on contemporary television.
Or maybe that should be that Maslany gives “many” of the finest performances on contemporary television. At any given time she plays half dozen different characters, all clones who were created in the same insidious experiment.,
As that suggests, the mythology and backstories get dense. Explaining how all the characters got from there to here, on widely varying paths with widely varying points of view, would require a term paper.
Still, the show hasn’t acquired a large base of loyal fans for nothing, and as the final 10 episodes begin, the path to its conclusion has come into sharper focus.
Sarah (right) chats with Rachel.
Often-ragged wild child Sarah, the clone through whose experiences the story has unfolded, finished last season in bad shape after taking a terrible beating from the impeccably groomed Rachel.
This season opens with Sarah trying to patch herself back together, literally, in the cold dark woodlands to which she has staggered.
It doesn’t help her state of mind, though it underscores the precariousness of her position, that she keeps seeing fevered visions of her daughter Kira (Skyler Wexler) trying to wake Mommy up.
Sarah’s immediate goal is to find her sestra Cosima, who has scientific answers for some of the bad things that keep happening with the clones.
Cosima has her own issues, some of them involving the nebulous state of the clones’ fertility. The only clone besides Sarah who is known to have conceived, Helena, is missing and the subject of a serious womanhunt.
So Cosima is trying to find fellow scientist Dr. Delphine Cormier (Evelyne Brochu), her mentor and romantic partner.
Unfortunately, Cosima is on the radar of Rachel, which is never a good thing, since Rachel works for the Neolutions, who under 170-year-old evil mastermind P.T. Westmorland seek to manipulate the lives of all the clones and not in a good way.
There are a lot of other subplots at play here as well, involving other clones and backstories and the devious intentions of the Neolutions.
But you can get the general thrust of the show just by knowing that Sarah, ever the rebel, understands a lethal showdown with Rachel and the bad guys has become inevitable.
Weakened physically and further crippled by the fact that some of her past allies have lost their will to fight, Sarah nonetheless seems determined to plunge forward.
Tatiana Maslany with Ari Millen, as one of the male clones.
It’s a safe bet this season of Orphan Black will be careening toward its own version of High Noon – and you don’t have to be a sci-fi geek or clone mythology expert to enjoy it on that level.
Or to enjoy watching Tatiana Maslany on any level.
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