August Winter, left, and Krysten Ritter in a scene from Orphan Black: Echoes.Sophie Giraud/The Associated Press
Could anyone clone Orphan Black? Over five seasons, the sci-fi, bio-punk Canadian series starring Tatiana Maslany just kept raising the bar on itself.
Maslany is able to play five distinct clone characters on a mission to discover how they were created? Great. What if they had multiple nationalities? How about 10 clones, or 17? What if they seamlessly interacted with one another, two, four, five at a time? In fight scenes? Ecstatic fans formed Clone Clubs; critics and the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television hurled plaudits and Screen Awards at the show; and Maslany became the first Canadian to win a leading actor Emmy (drama) for a Canadian series.
So when AMC, along with Boat Rocker Media, which produced Orphan Black, approached showrunner Anna Fishko about a sequel, she knew the answer was, “No one should even try.” (She’d written for several series, including AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead.)
“Tatiana’s performance was so incredible, no one would want to stand in the shadow of that,” Fishko said in a recent video interview. Instead, she asked herself a new set of questions: What if she set the sequel in the 2050s? What if Kira, daughter of Orphan Black’s OG clone Sarah, grew up to be a scientist (Keeley Hawes) who figured out how to print out human organs, and eventually an entire human?
What if said printout, Lucy (Krysten Ritter), determined to discover her identity, ran into a younger version of herself called Jules (Amanda Fix) and an older version called Eleanor (Rya Kihlstedt)? What if Kira’s boss was a shadowy billionaire of dubious ethics named Paul Darros (James Hiroyuki Liao, currently having a gas playing the perpetually aggrieved medical examiner on AppleTV+’s Presumed Innocent), himself kind of a copy of Elon Musk? What if one of Darros’s henchmen (Reed Diamond) was obsessed with Celine Dion? (That’s not a crucial plot point, but Fishko thought it would be amusing.) The 10-part answer, Orphan Black: Echoes, arrived June 23 on AMC, AMC+ and BBC America.
At its core, Orphan Black was about identity – what makes me, me? – and Echoes plays variations on that theme. In Episode 1, Lucy wakes up on a sofa in a lab in Boston, and though her short-term memory works, she can’t recall anything about her past. (“The printing process can’t capture the subtleties of long-term memory,” Kira frets to a colleague.) Without memories, is Lucy even a person?
She escapes the lab and makes a rural life with army vet Jack (Avan Jogia) and his daughter Charlie (Zariella Langford-Haughton), who is deaf – but who, really, is the Lucy they love? And why does she repeatedly dream about a bloody knife? (Fun fact: Jack’s pal Tina, a former Special Forces officer, is played by John Irving’s daughter Eva Everett Irving.) Soon enough a singing henchman tracks Lucy down, she flees back to the city – “I have to find out who I was to protect who I am” – and, in typical Orphan Black fashion, the questions multiply.
“I wanted to explore what makes us who we are, not in a technical sense, but an emotional sense,” Fishko says. “What gives us the feeling of security in our identity? What are the experiences we have that make us feel like ourselves? These are things we get to investigate that the original series didn’t. Which combination of our relationships, our physical bodies and our memories lend us a sense of self and purpose?”
From left: Kathy Baker, Amanda Fix and Ritter.Sophie Giraud/The Associated Press
It’s a tricky thing to set a science-based series 28 years from now, since innovations arrive moment by moment. Fishko keeps Echoes’ futurisms subtle. “I wanted the audience to access the world, I didn’t want them to be distracted” by haircuts or fashions, she says. “I’m speaking to you from the apartment I grew up in, in New York. My father has lived here for 55 years, and his building and this apartment look exactly the same.” She laughs. “So we found things we thought would change – the look of computers, screens, phones – to play with.”
As the centrepiece of their research, Fishko and her writers consulted with the head of the bio-tissue printing lab at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. “They can print bladders, they can print tiny little hearts that beat, they can print brain tissues with nerve cells that fire,” she says. “They’ve printed an ear for a burn victim. He gave us so much information about what they’re already doing, and what he imagines they’ll be able to do soon.”
How it works, she adds, “is not so different from an ink jet printer. There are a certain number of cells in the human body, and you need one cartridge for each cell type.” (Print me some brain cells, mine just exploded.)
Interestingly, the series stays away from AI. For one thing, Fishko developed the plot before AI blew up. For another, “I felt we were tackling enough,” she says. “I wanted to focus on the organic. I didn’t want the show to be about robots or cyborgs, I wanted flesh and blood.”
So about that henchman in a speeding car, belting out Celine Dion’s (theme alert) It’s All Coming Back to Me Now: “I’ve worked on lots of different shows, but not all have the humour and charm that Orphan Black did,” Fishko says. “I wanted to find scenes for that. This one is my favourite in the show. I had to fight for it. People said, ‘You don’t need it, it costs money, it’s not moving the story forward.’ But if we only did scenes that moved the story forward, the show wouldn’t be much fun.”
Echoes’ villain Darros, the billionaire who’s above the law, feels perhaps the most relevant to now, and adds another layer of questions: If you do the right thing for the wrong reasons, does it matter? What if making a few people uncomfortable will save millions of lives?
Fishko complicates things by kind of being on his side. “Someone who’s achieved the highest status that can be achieved might feel their power and wealth obligates them to take risks that other people can’t because they’re too afraid of the consequences,” she says. “Darros believes it’s actually his job as a superpowerful person to execute his plan.” (A plan, of course, designed to lead to Season 2 and beyond.)
So, would Fishko – who, incidentally is married to an ex-philosophy professor – sacrifice a few individuals to, say, cure cancer? “I leave that to the philosophers,” she says. “But I think I might.”