Orphan Black season 4 episode 2 “Transgressive Border Crossing” begins with Mika’sĀ (Tatiana Maslany ā everywoman) phone call to Sarah in Iceland telling her to run because the neolutionists are coming after Kendall Malone (Alison Steadman). She runs.
Spoilers ahead.
Sarah has been in Iceland with Kira (Skyler Wexler), Siobhan AKA Mrs. S (Maria Doyle Kennedy) and Kendall Malone, who is the original source of the genetic material for all the clones.
They gather a few things, burn their house down and take off, with Kira asking if her daddy will be coming with them. Nope. Not right now. Cal, Cal, wherefore art thou, Cal?
The clone phone tree goes into action spreading the word about the neolutionists. Cosima is living in a basement lab under a comic book store. The Hendrix drug money paid for the lab. She and Scott (Josh Vokey) are still trying to unravel the health problems making Cosima weaker and weaker.
Dyad has apparently stopped working on clone science. We’ll see if that statement holds true. We thought we were finished with the neolutionists, and look what happened.
Alison is busy running the universe. She doesn’t think she has time to muck around with a new threat. Plus, Helena is living at the Hendrix house. Just cleaning up all the food Helena leaves lying around is a lot of work.
Nobody is phoning Helena about the new threat, because TWINS! Donnie (Kristian Bruun) is very excited about Helena’s babies, especially because they pretend to be husband and wife at the doctor’s office. Alison is a little hurt about the babies.
Helena tells the nurse about having sex. Well, dang. We missed the whole Helena’s first time scene.
Sarah, Kira, Mrs. S and Kendall arrive at the comic book store. Benjamin (Julian Richings) takes Kira and Kendall to a safe house. Sarah and Mrs. S are escorted to Cosima in the basement lab. They Skype with Alison about MK and talk about what Beth knew when, and what the neolutionists could want with them.
Sarah investigate what Beth knew. She goes back to the beginning to puzzle out what the neolutionists have to do with the threats against them.
Sarah goes to Art (Kevin Hanchard). He tells her about MK. Shows her photos from the last case he and Beth worked. It’s a man with his cheek cut out and a surgically modified penis that suggests neolution.
Art and Sarah go to Beth’s place. They discover her drugs and a hidden camera and hard drive. They watch a bunch of videos of Beth’s life, including her almost shooting Paul and her interest in Aldous Leekie.
Flashback to scenes with Beth. We see her using drugs, trying to figure out what the whole clone thing was about, and talking to MK (or Mika, as Beth called her).
Among the things we see in the flashback is a card with a symbol on it that looks like something we will see again.
Seeing the video sends Sarah and Felix (Jordan Gavaris) off to Club Neolution on a search for a pregnant woman with one white eye. They saw her in Beth’s video.
Felix isn’t very interested in helping Sarah. He’s been busy searching for his own birth family. Since he learned that Sarah and Mrs. S are actually family, he’s felt left out. He’s been trying to go his own way. Alison knows this, but no one else does. He picks the noisy bar as the best place to tell Sarah.
Cosima admits to Mrs. S how much she misses Delphine. She doesn’t know if Delphine is dead or alive. These are two month old tears, so Cosima has been grieving a while.
At Club Neolution, Sarah meets a guy named Dizzy (Joel Thomas Hynes) who thinks she’s MK. He shows her a video of a guy with a living thing implanted in his cheek. He talks about gene splicing. When the cheek thing is freed, it kills the host.
Sarah lifts Dizzy’s phone and sees a text about a meet-up with MK at a laundry.
Art is still busy watching hours of Beth’s video. He sees her dressed up in a blonde wig, taking her gun and going out.
Sarah goes to the laundry. MK isn’t there. She calls. She tells Sarah she can see her through the laundry security camera. MK explains how she hacked into a deep net to discover that the neolutionists knew about Iceland. She says she can’t talk to Sarah because it will kill her like it killed Beth.
Art, watching the video, sees Beth come home in the blonde wig. She has blood on her hands. MK is in the apartment.
Switch to a flashback in which Beth tells MK to leave. She cuts up the card with the symbol on it. Then she says, “I screwed it up. We can’t fight this anymore, Mika.”
Beth gives Mika her gun, tells her to go into hiding. Beth hugs Mika and whispers, “Watch the others for me.” She walks out the door to her date with a train.
Back to the present and it’s MK describing the flashback we just saw to Sarah. MK knows about the “maggotbots.” Sarah realizes MK’s actually parked right outside the laundry in her sheep mask. When Sarah figures that out, MK speeds away. Sarah doesn’t see her face, just the sheep mask.
About the maggotbot thing . . .
When Sarah is in the laundry, the two neolutionists in paramedic outfits from episode 1 come in and want to cut her cheek out. They speak Afrikaans. Sarah gets away, but we don’t see how.
Sarah rushes home, terrifies Kira by demanding to look in her mouth. Sarah searches frantically for a torch. When she finds a torch, Mrs. S confirms it ā Sarah has a worm in her cheek.
The overarching season 4 theme about cyborgs, biotechnology and bodily enhancements has come home to the clone club.
Some Thoughts
We see a few seconds of Rachel and young Charlotte painting, but we see nothing of Krystal Goderitch in this episode.
There is no mention of Shay. Did she and Cosima break up, even after Delphine delivered the card with 324B21 on it?
While I have been laughing for weeks now over Dolly the cloned sheep and the mask MK wears, no one in the clone club found it funny but Cosima. Crazy science is everything, Cosima and I agree on that.
Transgress
I looked up transgressive and found these definitions for transgress:
1. to violate a law, command, moral code, etc.; offend; sin.
2. to pass over or go beyond (a limit, boundary, etc.):
Really good text, enjoyable to read.
I would love to know what happened between Cosima and Shay.
I’ll check your blog every week, for new reviews of Orphan Black š
Thanks. I enjoyed your take on the episode, too.