The Colourless Delight of Intellectual Desires
ORPHAN BLACK: ECHOES – Season 1 Episode 2 – SPOILERS ⁓
P.J. (Dayle McLeod)
When Lucy (Krysten Ritter), who was printed about two years ago and is going through her “terrible twos”, brings her prisoner Jules (Amanda Fix) to Settlement House, she interrupts an AA meeting being run by Craig (Jonathan Whittaker), and we find out that Jack (Avan Jogia) was not Lucy’s first romantic involvement, because P.J. (Dayle McLeod) is among that meeting’s attendees. P.J. still hasn’t gotten over being ghosted by Lucy and has written many poems on the subject, but Lucy is too busy trying to get information out of Jules to pay her former girlfriend any mind.
Felix with Kira’s copy of The Island of Dr. Moreau, which originally belonged to Rachel‘s foster father Ethan Duncan, and held the code for decrypting his notes.
With Craig supervising the interrogation, Jules reveals that, as far as she is aware, a car accident killed her parents and gave her amnesia about a year ago. (She remembers nothing before that.) Jules lives with foster parents James (Adam Kenneth Wilson) and Neva (Alexandra Castillo) because her grandfather was too ill to take her in after her parents died, and the Lee family lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Apparently the show is set in the Boston area.) Lucy points out that Jules and she have the same facial features and identical forearm scars, but when she looks for a serial number on the upper arm, she does not find one. (Jules might have one somewhere else.)
Tom and Emily at Darros’ farm. Like the worker in the background, everyone who works on the farm must wear protective clothing, except for Darros himself.
Jules’ foster mom is CEO of a company called Currentsy which is s subsidiary of Darros Logistics. When Lucy goes to Currentsy’s Headquarters to investigate, the security system identifies her as Jules and lets her in, so the two women have matching biometrics.
Tom (Reed Diamond) and his associate Emily (Tattiawana Jones) visit their boss Paul Darros (James Hiroyuki Liao) at his home outside the city. Darros is busy saving a species of tortoise from extinction “They feed on them,” says Darros, pointing to some orchids, “and it makes them more virile.” When Tom suggests he might eat some orchids himself, Darros responds: “Orchids wouldn’t help you, Tom.”
Emily refers to Darros as “someone who has done so much for the world, and for me, personally”. When Tom advocates the use of stronger measures against Lucy after her kidnapping of Jules, Darros asks Emily what she thinks should be done.
DARROS: “What would you advise, Emily?”
EMILY: “She’s already murdered one man at least, and she’s kidnapped a teenager. That makes her a threat.”
DARROS: “Okay. So you do what you have to do to bring the girl back safe. We can’t protect them all, can we, Darwin?”
Emily does not know that it was Charlie (Zariella Langford), not Lucy, who killed the agent. Also, Jules seems to be much more important to Darros than Lucy.
Paul Darros
Jules tells her foster brother Wes (Liam Diaz) about the kidnapping, but she tells no one else because she’s a drug dealer and is loath to involve the police. She wonders if Lucy told her the truth, and phones the person she believes to be her grandfather. The old man relates a plausible tale of how she got the scar on her arm. Jules doesn’t know it, but “grandpa” is an actor.
Kira Manning (Keeley Hawes) also doesn’t know that it was Charlie who killed the agent, and because of that thinks her printing process might have gone wrong. (One wonders who Lucy and Jules were patterned after, and why that person was important enough to be reprinted twice.) “We are printing neurons but when we transplant them they fail to communicate,” Kira tells Felix (Jordan Gavaris) when he pops in for a visit. Then she talks him into helping her acquire cocaine, which she thinks could solve the problem. She doesn’t mention that she has printed entire people.
Jules’ foster brother Wes Lee
In pursuit of drugs, Felix and Kira visit a local bar that Felix says is “like Neolution without the tails”, a reference to the pub he went to with Sarah and Helena in “Parts Developed in an Unusual Manner” (Orphan Black episode 1.7).
They unexpectedly run into Kira’s son Lucas Miller-Manning (Jaeden Noel), who has dropped out of school to join a group of Quakers he insists is not a cult. In the course of things, we find out that Kira’s mother Sarah is alive, reasonably well, and working at a women’s shelter. Kira doesn’t have much contact with her.
Photo of the Lee family outside Beacon Bayview Medical, another company likely involved with the printing of Jules.
Later, Kira expresses a more generalized worry to Felix. “I guess I’ve always tried to be good,” she tells him. “Like a good, uh, a good mom, and a good scientist, and good person. But now, this, this project I’m working on – I’m worried. What if all the terrible, painful things that I lived – we lived – through, what if they didn’t make me better? What if it just made me selfish?”
After Felix leaves, Kira goes to her lab, and injects a white rat with cocaine (a 7% solution?) hoping the chemical will stimulate neuron interaction. She puts the rat into a tank of water and it swims very well, but dies almost immediately.