We needn't have worried about Orphan Black's fourth series. It's more than back on form - it's back to breaking new ground.
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| Hang on to your ego. (Image copyright: BBC America) |
Or, to be more accurate, cleverly looking
at the ground you thought you already knew from a different perspective. You’ve
seen all the characters here before, but in a way you’re seeing them for the
first time. They’re viewed from the point of view of the clone Beth, the police
detective who started Sarah Manning’s journey into the moral murk of corporate
conspiracy by committing suicide in front of her.
Sarah’s brother Felix (Jordan
Gavaris) is there – hurrah! – but is dismissed in a short scene as a charmingly
mouthy London rent boy being cautioned in the police station; the normally
lugubrious Art (Kevin Hanchard) is seen as an attentive friend and single father,
while Beth’s boyfriend Paul (Dylan Bruce) is a cold hearted bastard who doesn’t
have the guts to end their toxic relationship – not surprisingly, as he’s a
clone monitor employed by the DYAD Institute. It all fits around and
illuminates what’s already been established skilfully and beautifully. The
story forges forward too with the reveal of another clone, the slightly
autistic M.K., living a solitary and paranoid life behind a (Dolly the) sheep mask, while
informing on the sinister Neolution organisation to Beth.
There are cameos from the clones Alison
and Cosima pre-Sarah, but what really impresses is Tatiana Maslany’s portrayal of
the fragile Beth. Pills and booze are the only things holding this woman
together. It’s completely understandable: she’s learned that she can’t have
children, has an extended family of genetic duplicates and an emotionally
withdrawn partner, as well as discovered that scientists are implanting
maggot-like organisms in the cheeks of Neolutionists. If I had to endure all that
I’d probably shoot someone in a panic, the tragedy that finally pushes her over
the edge.
Put like that, the catalogue of
disaster that befalls Beth sounds laughably melodramatic, but Maslany
completely sells it with her believable realisation of a young woman worn out
by events and emotional and moral insecurities. Beth’s collapse into sleep in M.K.’s
caravan, because she has nowhere else to go, is a low key but telling coda to Beth’s
story, particularly if you know what’s going to happen to her.
It’s the sign of a bold and confident
series that it can spend most of the opening episode of an eagerly awaited
fourth season concentrating on a character barely seen before, as well as looking
back over four years to the beginning of the storyline. ‘The Collapse of Nature’
succeeds brilliantly not just because of considered, intricate and focused
plotting: Orphan Black spends as much
time developing its characters as it does spinning out it’s stories, so you
never lose touch with the flawed, but on the whole likeable, people at the
heart of its sometimes unwieldy web of conspiracy. For a series that’s always promoted
the strength of family, that’s as it should be.
Roll on ‘Transgressive Border
Crossing’. This could be a vintage year.
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