ORPHAN BLACK: ECHOES – Season 1 Episode 1 – SPOILERS ⁓

PRELUDE

Lucy (Krysten Ritter) wakes up on a leather couch in what appears to be someone’s living room, with two rosy-faced lovebirds chirping in a cage nearby. A woman (Keeley Hawes) sitting across from her, speaks. “You’re awake,” she says. “Take your time. You might feel…” Lucy interrupts her with a barrage of questions, and gets other questions in response. It is discovered that Lucy has good short term memory, but does not know her own name or where she is. It is implied that she should recognize the other woman, but she does not. She is shown a photo of a young child, which she also doesn’t recognize. After becoming angry and smashing a lamp, she is sedated.

Later Lucy (who might have been intended to have an entirely different name) wakes again, alone in the room except for the birds. The lamp that she smashed has been replaced, so she dismantles it for tools and breaks out. Beyond the door is the inside of a warehouse, and after looking around a bit she finds a laboratory of sorts and a tank filled with pink fluid. The other woman appears again and (reluctantly) tells Lucy she was created using a 4D printing process. Lucy panics, finds a door to the outside, and exits onto a rooftop from which a futuristic cityscape is visible.

FIRST MOVEMENT

Two years later, Lucy is living a quiet existence, romantically involved with former Army medic Jack (Avan Jogia) who has a young daughter named Charlie (Zariella Langford). Lucy speaks fluent Spanish and says she likes crossword puzzles and SpaghettiOs. She still doesn’t know who she is, but she has one recurring dream (sometimes while she is awake) that could be s flashback to an unremembered past. Lucy keeps a dream diary, and tells no one about it.

Jack works in a local diner, and Lucy fixes cars. While adjusting a power steering pump, the pink fluid triggers Lucy’s recurring flashback in which a much younger version of herself is holding a bloody knife and steps in a puddle of blood. The daydream disorients her. She is struck by a passing truck and, despite her protestations, is taken to hospital, where she has a conversation with Dr. Palmer (Vicki Kim).

LUCY: “The tests. Did anything seem different?”
DR. PALMER: “Lucy, your tests came back completely normal. Were you expecting us to find something?”
LUCY: “No. No, I was just worried. Um, you know, this is probably a weird question…If I wanted to know if I had had a baby, is that something you could tell from these tests?”
DR. PALMER: “Not with any certainty, no. Is that something you’re unsure of?”

Lucy goes home and, believing she’s safe, offers to move in with Jack, but the doctor was not being completely honest and Lucy’s creators were notified. A man (Jeremy Hutton), whose forced smile and general appearance is reminiscent of the Project Castor clones of ORPHAN BLACK, shows up and tries to abduct her. The Castor-like dude has encountered Lucy before, and really doesn’t like her. “It’s been a long time,” he says. “Bet you thought you’d figured it out this time. Set up a whole little life for yourself. But I know what you really are.”

During the fight, Lucy discovers that she has a serial number tattoo that is visible only in blacklight on her upper left arm. (She also has a scar on her inside left forearm.) Lucy fights surprisingly well, and is able to flee to a nearby apple orchard. The man catches up with her there, but before he can shoot her, Charlie drops him with a single bullet to the head.

INTERLUDE

Kyra Manning, (the same woman who greeted Lucy when she awoke at the beginning of things) runs The Additive Foundation, a global corporation that 4-D prints vital organs for transplant. Manning meets with someone called Tom (Reed Diamond) and they have a discussion about Lucy.

TOM: “You built her. You sure all the pieces are in the right place?”
KIRA: “The scan we used didn’t have enough detail for certain kinds of memory recall. She doesn’t remember who she is. That doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with her executive functioning.”
TOM: “You sure? There’s no room for error anywhere in there?”
KIRA: “Say what you came here to say, Tom.”
TOM: “She just killed one of my guys. If she’s got some kind of whatever you want to call it, uh, flaw, then she is a bigger problem than we had anticipated.”

Tom suggests that Lucy has become a liability, and Manning wonders whether this idea is coming from Tom, or from the man he works for. “We’ve been trying to bring her in alive for two years,” says Tom. “All I’m saying is, if there’s something wrong with her, we may need to consider some other options.” Manning tells him it’s not his decision.

TO PROTECT WHO I AM

After delivering Jack and Charlie safely to Jack’s army buddy Tina (who will be played by Eva Everett Irving when she first appears in Episode Two), Lucy explains why she needs to go. “I have finally built something for myself,” she says. “I have a life. I have people who care about me. I’m not gonna let them take that.So if I have to find out who I was to protect who I am…”

Craig (Jonathan Whittaker), an old friend who helped Lucy after her initial escape, lets her use his computer to get GPS data off of the dead guy’s phone, and that leads Lucy to a downtown building where she spots a girl (Amanda Fix) who looks a lot like the teenage version of herself in her vision, and has a scar similar to her own.

Accidentally knocking the girl’s headphones to the ground, Lucy hears David Bowie’s song “Janine” coming from them. The song is somehow significant to Lucy. (She had it on her truck radio earlier in the episode.) The girl runs and Lucy gives chase. A jogger (Georgia Leva) who might also be a security guard, tries to stop them but Lucy puts the girl in her truck and drives off.

Manning receives a phone call, possibly about the kidnapping of the girl. She hangs up and makes another call. “Hey, Aunt Cosima,” she says. “It’s Kira. I’m worried. I think I may have done something terrible.”

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Krysten Ritter told Lacy Baugher Milas of Paste Magazine that Lucy’s journey is a study of identity “She’s really rebelling against the idea of who she’s supposed to be, who she’s been programmed to be…finding out why people are after her, figuring out who she is, and how best to protect the family that she’s created.”

Showrunner Anna Fishko told Tracy Brown of the Los Angeles Times: “Connection and relationships are really important in the show. ‘Do those things make us who we are?’ is something I thought a lot about. Are you the relationships that you have? Do they define you? And also, is it possible to re-create them or is your cumulative experience of them actually the thing that defines the relationship?”

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Orphan Black: Echoes can be streamed on Netflix, and is available on Blu-Ray and DVD.