Orphan Black, season 2
Jun. 26th, 2016 08:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI finished season 2 of Orphan Black! Which was fantastic and I am waiting impatiently for the first disc of season 3 to arrive, and! I am excited to learn that Netflix will be getting season 4 in the middle of July, which means I should be able to transition straight into it when I finish season 3!
Possibly with a pause in between to watch Only Yesterday, a Studio Ghibli movie that is finally coming to DVD in the US. I want to see all the Studio Ghibli films and I am slowly closing in on this goal.
But I digress! Back to Orphan Black.
One of the things I really like about this show is that it does such a good job humanizing the bad guys, and showing that they have soft sides and sadnesses - without utterly gutting the qualities that make them terrifying in the first place. They're dangerous and they're vulnerable, sometimes at the same time, and it's a complexity that isn't common in TV shows and especially isn't common with female characters, and it's a tour de force exhibition of the fact that creating fully human female characters means sometimes letting them be weak and small and broken.
Sarah's grit is all the more impressive because we sometimes see her cry, and break down, and not want to fight anymore.
And now for some
I'm sorry they had Rachel take a pencil in the eye, because that looked kind of fatal (having said that, it also looked kind of fatal when Helena got shot in the season one finale, and she's still alive and kicking) and I really wanted her to stick around to deal with the fallout from this season.
In general, I want her to deal with the fact that she's alienated all her clone sisters - not that Rachel realizes she needs her clone sisters, but she totally does, she's so isolated and alone: the scene where her father asks if she remembers how much he and her mother loved her before they both died (or "died," in his case), and Rachel says she can't remember it at all, that really broke my heart.
And I also want to see her deal specifically with the fallout of her father's death! She finds out that he's alive, she brings him back to the Dyad Institute to help with clone research... and then he kills himself to get away from her! Or to keep his research away from her, because he knows that she'll use it badly because being raised by the Dyad Institute has warped her soul (another sad scene: the bit where Rachel tells Kira that she'll grow to like it at the Institute eventually, just like Rachel did), but I'm sure that's just as scarring.
But instead, assuming Rachel's alive at all, she'll probably be spending a lot of time coping with brain damage from the pencil incident. And also possibly getting a bionic eye, which admittedly could be super cool. I hope it has special X-ray abilities - or maybe infrared abilities? Which do you think would be a more useful superpower?
ALSO HOW MUCH DID I ENJOY ALLISON AND DONNIE, PARTNERS IN CRIME? PROBABLY MORE THAN I SHOULD HAVE.
I'm also fascinated to see how our clone girls deal with the knowledge of the clone boys! (Of COURSE the military made male clones, this is not a revelation that should have surprised me at all, AND YET.)
I also ended up really liking Helena's storyline; Helena, Brainwashed Assassin, Also Super Fond of Babies is not something I would have come up with on my own, but actually it does seem super Helena. I can absolutely buy that she went back to the Farm of Cultists specifically because she wanted a baby, and was so happy about the whole baby thing that she kind of ignored everything else until Gracie is like "ARE YOU NOT LISTENING, WE ARE TERRIFYING CULTISTS WITH WEIRDASS REPRODUCTIVE IDEAS."
For a long time I thought I just didn't like stories that focused on pregnancy and childbirth, but in between Orphan Black and Call the Midwife I think I have to reassess this aversion. Maybe it's not pregnancy qua pregnancy; maybe it's just that lots of shows do reproductive issues really badly.
Possibly with a pause in between to watch Only Yesterday, a Studio Ghibli movie that is finally coming to DVD in the US. I want to see all the Studio Ghibli films and I am slowly closing in on this goal.
But I digress! Back to Orphan Black.
One of the things I really like about this show is that it does such a good job humanizing the bad guys, and showing that they have soft sides and sadnesses - without utterly gutting the qualities that make them terrifying in the first place. They're dangerous and they're vulnerable, sometimes at the same time, and it's a complexity that isn't common in TV shows and especially isn't common with female characters, and it's a tour de force exhibition of the fact that creating fully human female characters means sometimes letting them be weak and small and broken.
Sarah's grit is all the more impressive because we sometimes see her cry, and break down, and not want to fight anymore.
And now for some
I'm sorry they had Rachel take a pencil in the eye, because that looked kind of fatal (having said that, it also looked kind of fatal when Helena got shot in the season one finale, and she's still alive and kicking) and I really wanted her to stick around to deal with the fallout from this season.
In general, I want her to deal with the fact that she's alienated all her clone sisters - not that Rachel realizes she needs her clone sisters, but she totally does, she's so isolated and alone: the scene where her father asks if she remembers how much he and her mother loved her before they both died (or "died," in his case), and Rachel says she can't remember it at all, that really broke my heart.
And I also want to see her deal specifically with the fallout of her father's death! She finds out that he's alive, she brings him back to the Dyad Institute to help with clone research... and then he kills himself to get away from her! Or to keep his research away from her, because he knows that she'll use it badly because being raised by the Dyad Institute has warped her soul (another sad scene: the bit where Rachel tells Kira that she'll grow to like it at the Institute eventually, just like Rachel did), but I'm sure that's just as scarring.
But instead, assuming Rachel's alive at all, she'll probably be spending a lot of time coping with brain damage from the pencil incident. And also possibly getting a bionic eye, which admittedly could be super cool. I hope it has special X-ray abilities - or maybe infrared abilities? Which do you think would be a more useful superpower?
ALSO HOW MUCH DID I ENJOY ALLISON AND DONNIE, PARTNERS IN CRIME? PROBABLY MORE THAN I SHOULD HAVE.
I'm also fascinated to see how our clone girls deal with the knowledge of the clone boys! (Of COURSE the military made male clones, this is not a revelation that should have surprised me at all, AND YET.)
I also ended up really liking Helena's storyline; Helena, Brainwashed Assassin, Also Super Fond of Babies is not something I would have come up with on my own, but actually it does seem super Helena. I can absolutely buy that she went back to the Farm of Cultists specifically because she wanted a baby, and was so happy about the whole baby thing that she kind of ignored everything else until Gracie is like "ARE YOU NOT LISTENING, WE ARE TERRIFYING CULTISTS WITH WEIRDASS REPRODUCTIVE IDEAS."
For a long time I thought I just didn't like stories that focused on pregnancy and childbirth, but in between Orphan Black and Call the Midwife I think I have to reassess this aversion. Maybe it's not pregnancy qua pregnancy; maybe it's just that lots of shows do reproductive issues really badly.
no subject
Date: 2016-07-04 09:20 pm (UTC)Yeah, I thought that when it happened, so I'm kind of interested to see when I rewatch S1 if it makes sense at all or if it has a total retcon feel.