‘Orphan Black’ 2.01 Recap: “You Don’t Own Us”

When we last saw clone Sarah Manning (Tatiana Maslany) at the end of the first season of ‘Orphan Black’, she had just returned home to discover that both her daughter Kira and her foster mother Siobhan Sadler (whom Sarah calls “Mrs. S”) were missing. Sarah believes that Rachel Duncan (also played by Maslany) has kidnapped them, and spends much of the Season 2 premiere working with clone pals Alison Hendrix and Cosima Niehaus (again, both Maslany) to find her family.

At the beginning of the episode, a frantic Sarah stumbles into an all-night café where she gets a free cup of coffee from the kind owner and tries to clear her head. She’s not there long before two mysterious men approach, the leader of which takes a seat across from Sarah in her booth. The café owner can tell that something’s up and pulls out his shotgun, telling Sarah to make a run for it. However, the men distract the owner for just a second – long enough for the leader to put a bullet in the man’s head, but not before he can fire his shotgun and kill the second man. Sarah makes a break for it, but winds up locked in the café’s bathroom with no obvious exits. She grabs a fire extinguisher and busts a hole in the wall, allowing her to escape out onto the streets.

Sarah makes her way to a club where she finds her foster brother Felix (“Fee”) Dawkins (Jordan Gavaris) partying with a group of other guys in a rather provocative outfit. Felix is more than a little high, but Sarah needs his help and enlists him to get a firearm from Alison. When Felix goes to see Alison, she says she’ll have to go meet a man named Ramon to get the weapon. Later, we’ll see Ramon, who is actually just a clerk in a Walmart-like store.

We also learn that Alison is in a community theater musical, and has just gotten the lead part, thanks to the passing of Alison’s neighbor, Aynsley. Of course, what the director of the musical doesn’t know is that Alison killed Aynsley (via garbage disposal, no less!) last season when she suspected her of being a “monitor” – working for the mysterious Dyad Institute to keep tabs on her life. Alison has arranged to meet Sarah after her musical rehearsals to give her the gun, but when Sarah arrives on the scene, she’s discovered by former cop co-workers (from when Sarah was pretending to be Beth Childs) Art Bell (Kevin Hanchard) and Angelina Deangelis (Inga Cadranel), who cuff Sarah and throw her in the back of their car.

Meanwhile, Cosima is still with girlfriend Delphine (Evelyne Cormier) and still showing signs of being very sick. When we first see the two together in this episode, Delphine draws another blood sample from her, and Cosima asks her not to give the sample to Dr. Leekie (Matt Frewer), which is the first thing that Delphine does with it. It’s still difficult to determine whether Delphine is double-crossing Cosima by working for Leekie, or cares about her so much that she thinks Leekie is the only person who can cure her. Hopefully, Cosima won’t be killed off this season. She’s my favorite character on the show – which, I acknowledge, is weird to say when one actress plays half the characters.

After realizing that they really don’t have anything to hold Sarah on, Art and Angelina let her go, but not before Art tries to earn some trust back from Sarah while Angelina is outside the car. Sarah decides to dress up as Cosima to make her way into a Dyad Institute event at their headquarters, where Sarah believes Rachel is keeping Kira and Mrs. S. She runs into Dr. Leekie and palms his security pass when he hugs her. Using the pass, she gains access to the executive offices where she finds Rachel and threatens to shoot her if she doesn’t take her to her daughter and foster mother. However, Rachel insists that she never had them and only told Sarah that she did in order to get her to come to the Dyad offices. At this point, Paul Dierden (Dylan Bruce) shows up to aim his gun at Sarah, but winds up letting her go.

Sarah makes her way over to Art’s place, where she learns that the two guys from the café were actually members of the Prolethians, an organization that opposes the creation of the clones and wants them all dead. Viewers are then taken to a hospital, where bloody shoeprints make their way across the floor. A woman says she that has been shot. It’s clone Helena, whom we thought Sarah had killed last season! Also at the hospital is the surviving gunman (still nameless) from the café at the beginning of the episode. The premiere ends in what appears to be a hotel or motel room somewhere, where Kira sits on a bed and gets her picture taken by a faceless man.

Season 2 gets off to a running start and doesn’t let go for the entire episode. The premiere has no attempts at exposition to remind viewers what happened last season. Either you’re up to speed or you’re not, and the series won’t waste valuable moments re-explaining everything to you. ‘Orphan Black’ is complex, incredibly entertaining, and one of the few shows on television that doesn’t dumb things down for the home audience. That makes each episode highly re-watchable. From all indications, the second season looks like it will be as much fun as the first.

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