ORPHAN BLACK

I yesterday closed my blog with a promise to find the site of the TV cloning series Orphan Black.  After some effort I learned that it is on Amazon Prime Video, and if you're a prime member, you can view all 50 programs (five-years at 10 episodes each) for free.  I watched the first one and was impressed enough to go into a binge mode soon.  The complication will mushroom with 49 to go.

In Year One OB got 95%/94% ratings from Rotten Tomatoes, Year Five remained at 95%/89%.  OB is rated MA in the USA, for mature audiences, as you will find gore, nudity, sex, alcohol, etc.  But the rating systems vary, depending on which organization is doing the evaluating, for you will also see NC-17, R and unrated.  The colors purple, red and black also can be meaningful, with black only for older audiences.

Interesting that other countries list by ages (but world-wide, the scene is almost beyond comprehension):

• Singapore:  13, but is re-edited for their country
• South Korea and UK:  15
• Brazil and most countries:  16
• South Korea:  18

OB is a Canadian biopunk science fiction thriller with almost all Canadian actors, many you've seen here and there.  Michael Mando, for example plays  his usual criminal element, as he does in Better Call Saul (which is kind of a nothing show, and now I know why I watch it...because Rotten Tomatoes ratings are 97%/94%). OB, however, is mostly about the clones played by Tatiana Maslany, and the genetic engineering of humans.

I feel especially lazy this Saturday morning, so let me just quote from Wikipedia:

The series begins with Sarah Manning, a con artist, witnessing the suicide of a woman, Beth Childs, who appears to be her doppelgänger. Sarah assumes Beth's identity and occupation (as a police detective) after Beth's death. During the first season, Sarah discovers that she is a clone, that she has many 'sister' clones spread throughout North America and Europe that are all part of an illegal human cloning experiment, and that someone is plotting to kill them and her.

Alongside her foster brother, Felix Dawkins, and two of her fellow clones, Alison Hendrix and Cosima Niehaus, Sarah discovers the origin of the clones: a scientific movement called Neolution. The movement believes that human beings can use scientific knowledge to direct their evolution as a species. 

The movement has an institutional base in the large, influential, and wealthy biotech corporation, the Dyad Institute, which is seemingly headed by Dr. Aldous Leekie. The Dyad Institute conducts basic research, lobbies political institutions, and promotes its eugenics program, aided by the clone Rachel Duncan. It also seeks to profit from the technology the clones embody and has thus placed "monitors" into the clones' personal lives, allegedly to study them scientifically, but actually to keep them under surveillance.

The Orphan Black Family:

In the middle is Kendall Malone, origin of the clones, a chimera (bet you don't know what this means, biologically) and Sarah's mother.

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