One of the biggest mysteries of Orphan Black this season is the worm that has been embedded in countless characters cheeks. Following the latest episode I’m starting to believe that it might actually be way less lethal than we think.
Let’s forget the fact that if you try to forcibly remove the worm from the patient’s cheek it kills the host immediately. That’s definitely lethal by the very definition of the word but, apart from trying to remove this worm, everything Cosima stated last week seems like it’s actually the opposite of life-threatening.
In case you somehow forgot the entire mystery, Sarah found out that several people (herself included) have had a worm embedded into their cheek for the sake of some Neolutionist evolutionary reason that they’ve yet to explain. When implanted the worm is the size of a grain of rice and it grows to a size that has yet to be seen, although we know it gets pretty damn large.
Most of the patients with this worm in their cheek have had it voluntarily put in, and the highest profile patient we know is none other than Aldous Leekie, one of the heads of the Neolutionist movement. If the worm were so lethal, so dangerous and toxic and life threatening, then why would the head of Neolution get it voluntarily implanted in his cheek?
Granted, we have no proof that Leekie’s implant was a voluntary move but I doubt that the head honcho would be taken control of and forcibly put through the surgery unless this was a move done by Topside, and for some reason I doubt that very much.
The fact that Leekie has an implant proves to me that this worm is doing something much greater than a simple kill-switch. Cosima had stated that the worm was injecting foreign DNA and doing some sort of gene therapy on the patients… which is odd considering that Cosima is doing her own gene therapy to try and get her respiratory disease cured. This, combined with the fact that Neolution is also in the fertility business, trying to get infertile women to be able to have kids, makes me believe that none of this is a coincidence. In a universe like Orphan Black coincidences are rare things.
Project Leda is unhealthy. The clones suffer from two major health deficits: The respiratory disease that Cosima and several other clones (including Charlotte) suffer from, and infertility. Maybe the infertility was introduced by design but it’s still a health deficit that people like Alison and Rachel want to fix.
I’m of the belief that this worm is actually introducing and testing some sort of gene therapy to advance Neolution’s cloning process and actually cure the clones of their problems. And if it’s not going to cure them then it’s at least going to help them, because the two people we know have had them implanted are very important to the Neolution movement and I don’t believe for a second that they’d just kill them.
You might be wondering though, “Why would Neolution test this gene therapy and fertility project on random non-clones?” Well, the answer is simple: There’s only so many clones left. So far we know about 22 female clones, and they’re dropping like flies, either because they’re getting murdered by Topside or they’re dying from the respiratory problem. The best way to try and fix this, other than testing it on clones that they may lose, is to run human trials on people who aren’t clones — this way Neolution can keep their clones healthy and not risk losing them all to failed medical tests.
When you only have so many clones to work with and you don’t want to run a ton of medical tests on them because those tests could be fatal, it makes sense that you would want to test it on people who are far less valuable. As for Sarah and Leekie, I believe they have the “latest generation” of worms implanted, which makes me think that Neolution is closer to finding a cure to their problems than they would have us believe.
It may be a weird theory, and sure there are going to be a few holes in it, but this far into the season that’s the best guess I have as to why this worm is getting voluntarily implanted in people like the head of Neolution.