Orphan Black S04 E09: The Mitigation of Competition

On last week’s episode of “Orphan Black” Mrs. S took down Duko to the tune of Jesus Christ Superstar performed by Alison and Sarah Stubbs in one of the best paybacks, ever! Donnie sucks at prison life and Mika is back in the fold. While Cosima whips up a Hail Mary cure with Sarah’s eggs and Ira’s sperm, we are wondering where Helena is. Maybe the swan knows.

United

Like alley cats facing off, Sarah and Rachel decide to retract their claws and work together. Now I don’t really blame Sarah for being so mistrusting of the proclone, but they need to take Evie Chow down and the only way to do this is to bury the hatchet… or the pen like Sarah did when she attacked Rachel last season. Thanks to that well placed pen, Rachel’s artificial eye is revealing clues, but neither Rachel or Ira understand what the visions showing swan and the old man have to do with anything. The man seems to want Rachel to follow him. He is trying to show her something.

I loved the meeting between Rachel, Ira, Felix and Sarah. Ira is really quite clueless on just how tricky Rachel can be, but it doesn’t matter because Evie is on TV making plans to build a new Brightborn facility in her old hometown of Tisdale. Evie is ready to go on implanting the maggot bots into the unsuspecting human race, but there is one little problem. Two pregnant ladies have escaped from Brightborn and they made a video.

Helena

While Art and Sarah search for the escapees from Brightborn, and while Donnie gets frisky with Alison, Sarah calls Helena to check on her condition. Helena, looking like she just escaped from the set of The Revenant, is comfortably surviving in the wilderness. She hunts deer with a bow and arrow and has built a home with sticks, mud and tarp. Helena is definitely ready to join Team Rick on “The Walking Dead.” I could easily picture Helena and Carol taking down Negan and his men.

The beautiful thing about Helena is that she worries about her sisters. She knows from Sarah’s tone that Alison and Donnie are in trouble. Unfortunately, her arrival at Felix’s home has totally confused poor Adele. Felix has done a great job of explaining Alison as a twin, but how do you explain Helena? You don’t. Felix has to pick between his biological sister and his clone family. With Adele not really believing that Helena is really a triplet and with Helena mentioning Pouchy, Felix says goodbye to his sister. He doesn’t want to drag Adele into the mess. It was a bit sad seeing Adele leave because she is just as witty as Felix.

Cosima

The clock is ticking. Cosima and Charlotte are sick and hopefully, the eggs and sperm supplied by Ira and Sarah will open the door to a cure. Susan gives Cosima a rare edition of a book written by Morland, “On the Science of Neolution.” It was written during Victorian times when the mindset assumed that poverty was genetically caused.

Conclusion

There was so much going on in this episode. Alison has lost her faith and she wants to go to Niagara Falls. Evie wants the clones dead and she wants to know where Duko is, so she sent her henchman to get Alison to talk.

Sarah and Art find one of the pregnant women who escaped Brightborn, but she’s dead. Tabitha death was made to look like a suicide, but Kendra is still missing. Thanks to Trina, Sarah and Art locate Kendra and her newborn baby. Little Jacob is blind and he is coughing. Rachel wants Kendra, the baby and the incriminating video showing the Brightborn doctors murdering one of the deformed babies, but Sarah refuses. Ira, Rachel’s lap dog, kidnaps mother and child.

I really thought that Rachel was going to hand over Kendra and baby Jacob to Evie, especially when she asked to be part of the board of directors. I still don’t trust Rachel, but she came through tonight. She taped her conversation with Evie and then spread it all the news. While Rachel publicly took down Evie, Alison and Donnie were dealing with one of Evie’s henchmen.

Yep, tonight’s episode had a lot going on and there is only one more episode left in the season. What is going to happen with Evie now that everyone knows about the video? I guess we’ll learn if the zygotes will lead to a cure and maybe we’ll find out what Rachel’s visions mean. But, for now, we know two things… Delphine is alive and, Helena was like the goddess Diana with her little bow and arrow. She saved Alison and Donnie.