Orphan Black season 4, episode 3, “The Stigmata of Progress,” proved to show exactly that: Things were progressing, if only negatively and with even worse news for our clones.
Let’s start with talking about Felix’s story, as his is so different than the rest of the characters on this show. Ever since he decided he was going to search for his birth family I knew he was going to run into a world of trouble and pain, and surely enough here he is with someone who claims to be his sister. I don’t know if I believe she’s actually his sister, but regardless of if she is or not I definitely think she’s not the best for him.
Adele, from what we’ve seen from her in this episode, is more like season 1 Felix. She’s aloof, doesn’t think much and she does a ton of drugs. She’s definitely not what Felix needs at this point in his life because Felix needs someone who’s trustworthy and competent… plus I think she’s some sort of cog in this murder machine surrounding everyone. I just don’t trust her! And I have a terrible feeling this is going to end up hurting Felix more than fixing him like he expects it to.
Next up we have Rachel, who’s been in captivity for six weeks without hearing from her mother. I found these scenes to be the most interesting because I like to see how Rachel is developing, both mentally and physically. She obviously has a distrust of her mother, and who can blame her? After being kept in mostly solitary confinement without any update on what’s going on, I’d distrust her too!
The best part about the Rachel scenes was that we got to see her interact with a Castor clone, which I found extremely interesting. With the exception of Mark, every single Castor clone was military and grown in the military, but Ira was not, apparently. Ira has never met any of his brothers, and so he’s sort of an anomaly — even Mark had known where he’d come from. With Ira not having as big of a connection to his brother, do you guys think he’ll go soft and end up helping Rachel? I definitely think that’s a possibility, at least.
Another possibility is Rachel and Charlotte running away together. We found out in this episode that Charlotte was actually cloned from Rachel’s DNA after about 400 attempts, which is absolutely insane but also means that Neolution has found a way to somehow successfully clone without Kendall Malone. Although they don’t have much time to figure things out because Charlotte exhibited the same respiratory disease symptoms as Cosima, I absolutely predict that Cosima and Charlotte are going to meet, and I look forward to what that’s going to look like because the more we get of Charlotte, the more sassy she is, and I cannot wait to see how Cosima handles that sass.
Now let’s talk about everyone’s favorite housewife, Alison Hendrix. Or rather, should I say let’s talk about everyone’s favorite clone swap: Helena as Alison when the detectives come visit.
When Helena murdered a bunch of people last season, my first thought was “how in the heck is she going to get away with this?!” I’m very happy that there’s a world of real consequences when a clone is actually caught murdering people, but I’m worried about what it means for Alison, Donnie and Helena because they’re totally screwed.
Apparently, a flyer for Alison’s campaign was found in the middle of the crime scene, and given the fact that drug lords don’t generally care much for suburban politics, the detectives decided to investigate why and how it couldn’t ended up there. Alison and Donnie’s drug business was a relatively major success, so I feel like they’ll have a tough one climbing out of this one.
And of course all of this is happening while Alison and Donnie are trying to exhume Leekie’s body out from under the garage. Such great timing! When Alison found out that these were planted in Neolutionists, she had the brilliant idea to get Leekie’s body and see if he had one installed in his cheek, because Cosima can’t really study the one inside Sarah’s cheek without risking her being killed from it. Luckily for her, Leekie did have a worm in his cheek, and from the looks of next week’s preview episode, we’ll be getting some answers from it.
Last but not least, we have Sarah, who I feel like just always goes and screws things up. After finding the dental office that did the work to remove the worm from the guy in the video, she decides to friggin’ let them remove her worm, only to find out that it was a trap. The girl performing the surgery called her superiors, but then Ferdinand showed up and killed her, which makes me think that it was not Ferdinand who was her superior, but rather he came to help since he was just previously with Mrs. S.
It’s all just very, very confusing, and there were no real answers in this story for this episode — just a ton of questions. But the biggest question I have, really, is what the HELL is going on with Kira?
We see Kira zoning out a few times in this episode, and she’s getting less cute and more creepy with every episode. In this episode, after zoning out, Cosima snaps her out of it and she said she had a dream of them setting Sarah on fire — because they had to. Okay, creepy child, that’s fine. Kira has always had a knack for knowing things, so I’m going to put this on the ‘try to ignore but keep in mind’ shelf for now.