Thoughts on Orphan Black Echoes: full season review

Orphan Black: Echoes finished its first season on AMC+. I’ve watched it all now and am ready to share some thoughts on this science thriller led by Krysten Ritter and Keeley Hawes.

The elephant in the room in Orphan Black: Echoes is Tatiana Maslany. She doesn’t appear here but the thought of her beyond-brilliant performance in Orphan Black looms over everything. Using a tie-in to the previous program was both a blessing and a curse. There’s no way to compare what Tatiana Maslany did with the current story and timeline.

Thematically, the two series do connect. The current timeline (2052) uses printed copies of people rather than clones to tell its story. The ethics, the science, the individual choices, and the actualization of characters as unique are all thematic throughlines from before.

Instead of using one actress to play all the printed copies, Orphan Black: Echoes used different actors for different ages. Lucy (Krysten Ritter) leads the story. To show her character at different ages brings some challenges. Krysten Ritter is a terrific actress, but she has very distinctive features – an upturned nose and large lips. Matching those features with both a younger and older version of her was tough. The teen version, Jules (Amanda Fix), has fairly similar features. The mature version of her, Eleanor (Rya Kihlstedt), wore a prosthetic nose but that was about the only similarity. Heights didn’t match. Physical things like ways of moving didn’t match.

The second lead character is Kira Manning (Keeley Hawes). Kira is the child of Sarah Manning from the Orphan Black series. We don’t see a child version of Kira, but we do see a 20 something university student Kira. The younger Kira was played by August Winter. August Winter and Keeley Hawes are reasonably similar looking.

In episode 5 we see the beautiful love story that brought Kira and Eleanor together. August Winter was wonderful here. The 20 something Eleanor was played by Krysten Ritter. So, technically, you could say Krysten Ritter did play two parts, clone-style, as a young Eleanor and a current Lucy.

And the plot?

What about the story? Is it a good one? I outlined some of the basics of the plot in my discussion of the pilot episode.

I found it fascinating. The rich man behind the work done in the labs was Paul Darros (James Hiroyuki Liao). He wanted to take the most brilliant minds of the century and print young versions of them. He thought the potential of their brilliant minds with a long life ahead of them would solve many of the world’s problems.

The ethics of popping people out of a printer didn’t concern Darros. They appeared as teens with no knowledge of who they were, no memories, no connections to anyone. All they had was inborn intelligence which Darros hoped to exploit.

But if you can print copies of Nobel Prize winners and famous mathematicians, what’s to stop you from printing copies of loved ones you lost and can’t stand to be without? What’s to prevent you from discarding faulty copies like garbage? Both those questions were part of the plot.

There was danger and excitement. Jules, Lucy, and Eleanor teamed up with Kira to try to destroy Paul Darros and disable the printer. They faced threats and solved mysteries. There was plenty of action.

There was humor. My favorite example is when Lucy reveals to Eleanor and Jules that she has a boyfriend. The two look at each other in disbelief and say, “A boyfriend?” as if it were inconceivable.

Jordan Gavaris and Evelyne Brochu from the original series made appearances. When Delphine (Brochu) explained to Jules who she was, Jules responded with, “THE clones?” in such a funny way.

Overall, I thought it was a good series. Well written, well acted, with convincing looking science and characters to care about. I hope it is renewed for another season, because there is a lot more story to tell.

Women directors include Ingrid Jungermann, Dawn Wilkinson, and Jem Garrard. John Fawcett, one of the creators, directed the final episode, which left some threads dangling.

If you haven’t taken a look at this one yet, give it a chance. If you’ve been watching it like me, what did you think?