“Orphan Black,” a sci-fi thriller about clones, set in Toronto, is a good show, but it’s not flawless. After a strong first half to its début season, during which the episodes were universally funny and sharp and suspenseful, the show lost its footing slightly as it approached the finale. Its conspiracy plot felt shaggy; the pace flagged. Season 2, which began Saturday on BBC America, continues along this line: individual scenes are terrific, but a few plotlines strain credulity. If it weren’t for Tatiana Maslany, the show’s star, “Orphan Black” would be just a likable-enough thriller, with Toronto local color—enough to recommend it to a Canadaphilic sci-fi buff like me, but maybe not to you.
Maslany explodes that calculation entirely. The actress delivers a performance so magnetic that it transforms the show into something with staying power, a near must-watch. Maslany plays eight clones. Through digital trickery, her characters play scenes with one another—bickering, bonding, and strategizing. On more than one occasion, she plays one clone pretending to be another, exposing her own fakery in precise titrations, so that we sense the pretender’s anxieties and her miscalculations. This could easily come off as a circus trick, a gimmick. And yet it doesn’t: with her observant black eyes, wide smile, and an array of wigs, tics, and accents, Maslany makes herself invisible in a situation that practically demands hammy showmanship. It’s a tour de force of subtlety. She has chemistry with herself.
In the show’s excellent pilot, which you can find on Amazon Instant Video, Sarah, a Cockney-accented guttersnipe in a leather jacket, stands on a near-empty train platform late at night. She spots another woman, who is stepping, oddly enough, out of her stilettos. When Sarah approaches, the barefoot woman turns, and Sarah sees her face: it’s the mirror image of her own, only racked with sorrow. Zombielike, the woman pivots, then steps off the platform in front of an oncoming train. As cops pour into the station, Sarah makes a split-second decision. She struts down the platform and, with a grifter’s intuition, scoops up the dead woman’s handbag and belongings, stealing her identity.
What Sarah discovers, in league with her gay-hustler foster brother, Felix (Jordan Gavaris), is that the woman was named Beth—she was a messed-up cop with an American accent, a well-stocked bank account, a swank apartment, and a very hot boyfriend. After practicing her performance by watching old videos of Beth, Sarah takes possession of all of these. (She occasionally gives herself away, with her loosey-goosey sexuality and her Clash T-shirts.) The question of why Beth killed herself, and who she is, unfolds over the first season. The upshot is that Sarah and Beth are only two of an unknown number of clones, created for mysterious reasons. (They refer to themselves as Clone Club.) These women are being studied by an organization called the Dyad Institute, which, unbeknownst to them, has assigned them “handlers”—disguised, mostly, as spouses and lovers—who take their vitals and do tests. Sarah, as the foster child of a far-left British activist (who is now taking care of Sarah’s own neglected daughter), has managed to stay off Dyad’s radar. Meanwhile, there’s a religious cult with its own angle, and the cops, including Beth’s ex-partner, are interested, too. These twists are unpretentious fun, but it’s Maslany’s shape-shifting that evokes deeper themes, about how personality is itself a form of acting, as well as a side effect of trauma or love. These are natural ideas for a spy show (they come up on “The Americans,” too), but they’re multiplied when the spies are genetic facsimiles.
If you haven’t heard of Maslany before, that’s probably because she’s Canadian, from Saskatchewan; her previous credits are for things like “Ginger Snaps 2,” the sequel to the cult lesbian-werewolf film (which I’d also recommend, as long as you’re going Canadian). Maslany has done improv comedy and she’s played a heroin addict and the Virgin Mary on Canadian television, but on “Orphan Black” she powers up, as in a video game, by collecting extra lives. Along with Beth and Sarah, she plays Alison, a gun-toting mom with a craft room that functions as her anxious unconscious; Cosima, an American science geek, lesbian, and hippie, the warmest and most humane of the clones; Katja, a hip German; and at least one new clone this season, although I’m trying to avoid spoilers. There’s also Sarah’s twin sister, Helena, a creature unlike any other, as the mid-nineties advice book “The Rules” might put it. At the end of last season, we also met Rachel, a corporate ice queen, who swanned into the narrative in a Wintour-worthy bob.
As Sarah comforts and snipes with her DNA sisters, it’s difficult to remember that we’re watching Maslany in each role. This is partly because of the show’s technical wit: Maslany will play a scene as one clone, then another, and, when these two (or even three) takes are digitally merged, she appears to interact more intimately than was possible in older “twin” films, shoving herself against a wall or placing Sarah’s hand on Alison’s knee. But Maslany’s true skill is empathy, not technical mimicry. Television these days overflows with high-octane performances, many by movie stars, who tap into their native charisma, then crank it to 11. (Consider this a blind item.) Maslany wasn’t even nominated for an Emmy, and yet her unusual blend of grit and delicacy puts all those gaudy monologuists and chin-wobblers to shame, demonstrating how a submerged performance can be bolder than a surface one.
The circumstances beg one to compare the different roles, as if they were in competition. Basically, Maslany is solid as Sarah, an ethically ambiguous heroine, whose charm can verge on a survivor’s narcissism. She’s disarming as the funky Cosima, with her Berkeley vibe, white-girl braids, and air of bemused vulnerability. (For instance, she helps us to believe that Cosima would glide into an affair with her French female handler, even when her actions don’t make that much sense.) Maslany’s standout characters, however, are Alison and Helena. When Alison first appeared, she seemed like a comic cliché: the pill-popping suburbanite in a sports bra. But somehow, no matter how strained or satirical Alison’s plot becomes, Maslany finds a tart vulnerability within her. In one of last year’s best episodes, Sarah played Alison at a party, putting on her tight headband and tighter jaw to cover for the real Alison, who was downstairs, using a glue gun to torture her husband, Donnie, into confessing that he was her handler. Sarah’s Alison was hilarious, a parody priss. Yet the real Alison was heartbreaking. She vibrated with unsettling dominatrix rage; then she crumpled, her lip trembling, at the revelation that “eating, farting Donnie” might simply be her husband.
Then there’s Helena, Sarah’s birth twin, who appeared midway into the first season, with pre-Raphaelite curls and a guttural hiss. While Sarah was raised by a skeptical but loving mother, Helena was kept in a cage by a violently abusive religious nut, in Ukraine. As a result, she is feral and unstable, with a Jagger swagger and serious knife skills. Yet she can be oddly funny, too: her imitation of Beth (or, really, her imitation of Sarah imitating Beth) was priceless, as she pulled on a black wool hat, walked into the police station, and passed off her strangeness as a hangover. In last year’s single most alarming sequence, a little boy crept to a bathroom, hearing an intruder. When he cracked the door, there was Helena, covered in blood from a recent attack. As she crooked her finger for the boy to enter, a grin spread across her face like a scar, and I nearly had a heart attack. She was “an angry angel,” the child told the cops, and that’s what Helena feels like: not a stock villain but something wilder, her hunger for connection as bloody as her fury.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention another performance. As Felix, Jordan Gavaris plays one role, which could easily have one note: the flamboyant gay sidekick. Instead, Gavaris finds a fresh way to play off each of Maslany’s clones, and puts a sly topspin on every joke. If he doesn’t steal her scenes (who could?), he’s certainly a co-conspirator. ♦
