Not A Review Of “Orphan Black”

It’s probably not a surprise to anyone that I’ve been watching BBC’s “Orphan Black” since the first episode. “Orphan Black” is, of course, a show about a vast conspiracy to create, monitor, monetize, and sometimes terminate human clones, which is totally up my alley, right?

Although the real reason I started watching it was because it had a similar name to my ancient stuffed animal friend, Orphan Orange.

Incidentally, Orphan Orange is Canadian, having come from the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, so maybe he could be a member of Clone Club too. But I digress.

Anyway, despite the fact that I’ve been watching “Orphan Black” for four years, my wife had never seen an episode — which of course meant I could never give it the “not-a-review” treatment — until just recently, when she happened to not be asleep one evening when I fired up the DVR to watch it, and she happened to look at the television.

Wife: “What’s this? Is this zombies?^*”
Me: “No, this is ‘Orphan Black’. It’s about a human cloning experiment.”
Wife: “Oh. Is that why they look the same?”
Me: “Yep!”

So my wife sort of paid attention to the show for a while, making various stray observations, such as:

Wife: “I hope they’re paying that girl more than the rest of the cast for playing so many parts.”
Me: “I’m pretty sure they are.”

And:

Wife: “If they’re clones, how come only one of them is gay?”

And:

Wife: “If one of them is blonde, shouldn’t they all be blonde?”
Me: “It could be a dye job.”
Wife: “Nah, I don’t believe they’re clones.”

And:

Me: “That Tatiana Maslany is amazing. Sometimes she plays a clone impersonating a different clone, and you can tell that the one doing the impersonating is just trying to imitate the other one’s mannerisms. It’s really something else.”
Wife: (beat) “Yeah that’s too complicated for me to care about.”

So anyway, this went on for the requisite 40-odd minutes, and my wife managed to stay awake the entire time. Granted, part of this was because I kept having to pause the show to explain four seasons’ worth of mythos and background, but still. That much filling-in would normally be more than sufficient to send her off to sleepy-land. When the episode (which was a pretty good one, though it needed more Ferdinand — of course, all episodes need more Ferdinand) was over, and I asked for a verdict, she pronounced it “Okay”. Which is pretty high praise for a nutty science-fiction clonefest she’s never seen before.

Of course, the next week, we were back to this:

Me: “Hey, I’m going to watch ‘Orphan Black’. Are you interested?”
Wife: “Meh.”

So there you have it! “Orphan Black” — so okay, it’s meh. Unless you’re me, of course, in which case it’s totally awesome.

^*My wife quite reasonably asks “Is this zombies?” whenever she finds me watching something that she doesn’t know what it is and looks like it might be ominous.