'Orphan Black' Recap: Scratch That Glitch

Everyone knows the term “jumping the shark” means a moment of insanity from which a TV show never recovers, but what’s the term for when someone lands directly on the shark’s face and does a backflip while pink dolphins jump up and puke glitter into the air all around it? Because that’s what Orphan Black does on a weekly basis. With a sick sort of glee it threatens a shark-jumping moment only to pivot into an unexpected direction. Take your pick from any of Orphan Black’s ludicrous turns over the years; for any other show they would’ve signaled creative desperation, but here they demonstrate a fearlessness on the writers’ part that is truly something to behold. Which is to say that yes, the talking scorpion returned this week.

“Transitory Sacrifices of Crisis” began and ended with eyebrow-raising moments (with more scattered throughout), but its biggest effect was to answer the question of why certain characters were still living in that dangerous city. Many characters — from Siobhan to Felix to even Paul — openly questioned why exactly Sarah was still hanging around in near-peril when she should have rationally gone off the grid long ago. It’s not only a question of character credibility (rootability goes down the drain when characters opt to remain in danger), but premise credibility. Why were we as viewers supposed to care about danger that could be easily avoided? Now that we more or less know what’s going on with these various nefarious entities, why stick around? The surprisingly simple answer posed by this episode is “basic human decency”: Sarah needs to find her sister AND keep her daughter safe in a more permanent way. Which meant that “Transitory Sacrifices of Crisis” elegantly paved the way for Kira and Cal’s exits. While any number of characters should’ve left town a while ago, these human-shaped collateral had no reason to be there any longer. And in their absence Orphan Black is a leaner, meaner machine for it.

Speaking of mean: Those Castor Boys sure are pretty rude! In a cold open equal parts gratuitous and thematically on-point — classic Orphan Black, in other words — the scarred Castor clone, Rudy, brought home a sexy lady from the club for a roll in the hay. So far so lurid, but when another pair of hands began groping her mid-act, she opened her eyes to see roughly double the number of naked dudes she’d expected. NOBODY likes an unplanned three-way. (Unless things are different in Canada?) Thankfully the scene didn’t get any more upsetting after that (though the pair of clones did get the woman’s contact info and took a hair sample), but the ultimate weirdness of the dudes’ behavior was what kept it surprising. What were these guys after? As it turned out they were after the same thing their female counterparts were: Their original genetic sources. Because, oh yeah, they’re dying.

What began as a “glitch” in the mustachioed one (Seth) ended as full-on psychosis, to the extent that Rudy straight-up put him down with a bullet to the heart. That’s an intense fate for one brother to lay upon another, but it’s also a warning sign that Cosima needs to take her own genetic deficiencies seriously as well. It’s clever for Orphan Black to present the Castor boys as a sort of dark parallel to the Leda girls and then give them all a common cause; we now know where this season is headed, plus we get to hopefully anticipate meeting the original models of each clone. For now the boys seem to think the girls know where both sources are, which means we’ll probably be treated to more scenes like the one here in which Rudy held a gun to Kira’s head, an image I truly didn’t need to see anymore of. Still though, the stakes are high and the drive remains compelling, which is an early sign this season should be a good one.

Elsewhere, but presumably in the Middle East, Helena was still being held captive by the Castor operatives who now include a nefarious-seeming female doctor intent on prodding Helena’s new pregnancy. It’s not clear what purpose the waterboarding had on Helena — you guessed it, scientists, it stressed her out! — or what information was gleaned by the retinal scans or logic puzzles, but either way it’s clear that the Castor program really sucks and is zero fun. Hopefully Sarah will successfully recover Helena soon, because that talking scorpion is probably not enough to keep Helena safe. (More likely, Helena will enjoy one of her patented mass-slaughter escapes, fingers crossed!)

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As ever, Alison’s storyline provided the most reliable lightheartedness. After her teen drug dealer Ramon informed her he was quitting the business in favor of college, she saw an opportunity: Become a local pill queenpin and thus bolster her school board electoral chances among the local housewives. Again, a truly promising plotline for one of the show’s most fun characters. As for her husband Donnie, the gamble this show made in slightly repositioning him from a nefarious DYAD minder to a pathetic tag-along continues to pay off. There’s something incredibly sweet about how he and Alison have fallen deeper in love as they’ve had to hide corpses or go into drug dealing together. They have a sort of giddy affection for each other I don’t think any of us expected. So good.

That being said, I’m not totally sure Paul’s conversion to military badass has been quite as fruitful. Sure, stubble and military uniforms suit him, but he was slightly more fascinating as a slick, sympathetic underwear model type. But as long as he continues to harbor sympathy for Sarah, his shenanigans with the Castor crew will remain forgivable. This episode’s confrontation between Paul and Cal was powerful, but could have been even more so had Paul and Sarah so much as flirted with each other in the past season. People keep alluding to Paul’s romantic past with her, but it truly felt like a lifetime ago. Oh well, it’s nothing a gratuitous male nude scene can’t fix! But another problem is how charming and organic Sarah’s rapport with Cal has been. Now that Michiel Huisman is a big star (on virtually every TV show), this may have been Orphan Black’s way of dismissing him from service, but his charisma will be missed. The question now is whether Paul and Sarah will ever resume the pose.

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Ultimately we’re still early in the season, but “Transitory Sacrifices of Crisis” still did a terrific job of transitioning us into future plotlines. The troubled, ill Castor boys are currently working in the violent and unpredictable Helena vein, and as the episode’s button — in which we revisited Gracie and her beau Mark, who burned off his Castor tattoo with a blowtorch — demonstrated, we’ll be asked to sympathize with people we once feared. That’s a classic Orphan Black move and one that continues to pay off every time it’s employed. As always, it’s safe to expect tons of sharks and tons of jumping, but we also know we’ll never be disappointed.

What did you think of “Transitory Sacrifices of Crisis”?

Orphan Black airs Saturdays at 9 p.m. on BBC America.