Orphan Black: Echoes (2024) [Jules]

Thrust into the middle of things as we are, your reviewer thinks he ought to do the same for his write-up.

This series is already moving at a very different pace from its originator; we’re flung into knowing aspects of a conspiracy our lead characters don’t, moving rapidly across four seemingly co-equal plots and having to catch up with all of them simultaneously to make headway on how they’re going to connect.

This is a very exciting way to plot a series, to get the audience wondering, “what’s next?”, but it also might give people not accustomed to a headlong rush a bit of discombobulation. At this time in the original series, we were just learning there were four identical clones and someone was killing them, but we didn’t know who, and neither did they; here, however, we’re privy to a number of aspects of the plots that our seeming leads, Lucy and Jules, are still in the dark about, so while we were lagging behind Lucy in the pilot, here we’re in front of them and may be waiting for a while yet for them to reach our vantage point.

Jules gets kidnapped

Lucy’s spur-of-the-moment kidnapping of Jules gets very quickly entangled with her sober-house sponsor Craig — and before I go further, yes, Jules is whom she kidnaps; Amanda Fix’s character, whose name we learn, as well as her odd family situation. Jules, it turns out, has no memory before a year prior, but has the same scar as Lucy and a very distinct resemblance. And the same propensity for escaping from a scrap, because she manages to head-fake Lucy, stabs her with a piece of toiletry, and escapes back to her apartment. Fix is a remarkably compelling actress; like Tatiana Maslany before her, she’s a veteran of indie films, and although Jules herself doesn’t really dig too deeply into where she came from before she wound up with an adopted family, how Fix portrays her keeps us following Jules with a keen eye.

There are a few nice world-building touches given — back at her family’s apartment, her adoptive brother is a budding social-media stand-up who does comedy on his giant person-sized phone screen; Jules, it turns out, has an illicit drug-selling business; she has a poor relationship with her adopted family, and a grandfather whom she can call to ask about her past when she wants… or, so it seems, to her.

Lucy’s end of the plot is figuring out what Jules doesn’t know about her own past — getting into Jules’s foster mother’s place of work through a biometric scanner seeing her as Jules; finding that the hospital Jules was brought home from is the same one Lucy was taken to last episode, and, although we’re clued in and she isn’t, finding out the name of the corporation her foster mother works for and how it ties into the henchpeople we’ve seen. But she also has to explain to her partner Jack at least some of what the hell is going on; technically, she has to explain less to Craig, who, though skeptical, has more of an ability to go along with whatever Lucy claims is true. Craig is a really fun character to watch get tossed into the mix, here, and I hope he gets to meet more of the supporting cast as the show goes on, even though he’s sort of boxed off into his own corner of the wider series.

And then, there’s Kira. Kira Manning, played here by Keeley Hawes as a very Alison Hendrix-coded scientist. (If you’re a fan, you know exactly what the heck I mean.) To reinforce this, a familiar face shows up to give us that dynamic: Felix Dawkins, Kira’s uncle, once again played by Jordan Gavaris, except here’s he’s a 70-something-year-old who looks remarkably well-preserved. He’s dropping in on his beloved niece to make sure she and her son are all right; he gives us a few hints about what Kira’s mother and Auntie Cosima have been up to, but the main point of his being there is to solve a problem for Kira — for whatever experiments she’s working on right now, she needs some coke.

So, to a club they go, to score some (as you do), where they bump into… Kira’s son. And where Kira is so out-of-place that she’s loudly asking people who look as though they’ve taken cocaine whether they actually have cocaine. Felix, though older, is still no less adept at using his… charm, to get things, and he provides Kira with the requisite baggie of coke from a sexually-willing donor. It’s really nice to see Felix again, and Gavaris is a really grounding, familiar presence to have, even for just an episode; not only has Felix been missed on our screens, but Gavaris has, as well, and he’s not lost a single step. Pairing him, a Canadian playing a Brit, with Hawes, a Brit playing a Canadian, is an even-more fun meta layer on top of the farce they play out; I really want to see them get paired together again, either here or in something else.

Cocaine helpes memories

But Kira has something she’s not telling her uncle — the cocaine is to stimulate memories; in practice, a little white lab rat swimming in a vat of some substance. But the rat dies, and we are left wondering what that means, and why that’s significant — the show may be providing us with more answers than what our lead characters are getting, but we’re not getting all of them, yet.

Jack, Lucy’s partner, and Charlie, his daughter, contend with some emotional difficulties following Charlie’s shooting of a baddie last episode; Avan Jogia does an absolutely wonderful job acting and signing in ASL at the same time, and, in a way I hadn’t expected going in, Jack and Charlie anchor the show’s emotional core beautifully. The two hadn’t quite been on my radar as a viewer, but they bring a real warmth and reality to this ostensibly-futuristic world — they play the truth in a father/daughter relationship that you simply can’t fake. I hope this plot keeps getting developed as the season goes on.

And, finally, Reed Diamond and Tattiawna Jones’s double-act henchies meet their employer, who also appears to be Kira’s employer: An ecology-obsessed billionaire played by James Hiroyuki Liao who practices zen gardening and delivers lines remarkably similarly to Mark Ruffalo. He knows everything we know about what’s going on, and more; he knows who Jules and Lucy are, keeps tabs on them both, and runs the business Jules’s foster mother works for. As Reed Diamond’s character says, “Listen to what he doesn’t say.” And what he doesn’t say, does say a lot about what he may be.

His mild appearance may belie his strength — just as the appearance at episode’s end of Jules’s grandpa turns out to be an even-bigger feint that what we might’ve been expecting. We are several orders of magnitude up in scale of plotting than the original series was, at this point — this is more of a Season 3 or 4 or 5-level framing of things than what calling this “Season 1” might give you to think. We’re already deep into a trip, and this show expects you to be on top of that.

If you’re a little discombobulated already, again, I don’t blame you, but I think it’s the point — like the little white mouse, we’re neck deep in the dark substance of this world, and we’ve got to keep our heads atop it.

Directing his second episode for the season, John Fawcett brings his typical excellence to the series; it’s a real thrill seeing a master at work, again. Writer Sharyn Rothstein does a fine job of playing off typical second-episode work with expert depiction of returning characters and making new ones even more interesting. I really wish this wasn’t a weekly release, because the slow-drip just makes me want to see more, immediately! But I know it’s being paced this way, weekly like the original series, for a reason — and I hope it’s gotten you all thinking and theorising out there just as much as it has me, behind my laptop here.

Bring on Episode 3!

Orphan Black: Echoes is releasing weekly every Sunday from June 23rd to August 25th on AMC, AMC+, and BBC America.