The rare, brilliant spin-off series

It makes sense that the clone series gets its own clone. Almost seven years after the conclusion of Orphan Blackthe Canadian drama that brought Tatiana Maslany international fame with her portrayal of a small army of human copies, we dive back into the clone universe with Orphan Black: Echoes. The show, which premieres on AMC on June 23, presents a grim technological future dominated by 3D printing technology and monomaniacal scientists bent on perfecting humanity at any cost, and how the clones in Orphan BlackThe new series offers a variation on familiar terrain. Echoes deliberately takes a different path, exploring the metaphysical and ethical puzzles of scientific progress and asking us to attribute human motives to inhumane acts.

It’s Boston in the year 2052: the city’s skyline is adorned with spiraling skyscrapers and honeycomb-like facades, even trucks purr like electric cars, and windmills can be seen on the hills, indicating that we are in the future. A scientist, played with quiet melancholy by Keeley Hawes, works at the Additive Foundation, experimenting with a new technology that can print human organs from scratch.

Sophie Giraud/AMC

But that’s not the only thing she prints. In the opening scene, the scientist comes into contact with a woman suffering from amnesia (Krysten Ritter, the always tough, gruff heroine in a dark jacket and skinny jeans) who can’t remember her name and has no idea she ever had a past – and since this series is the sequel to a series about clones, you can probably guess why. The only flash of memory Ritter’s character, who later takes the name Lucy, experiences comes when she encounters a young teenager named Jules (Amanda Fix) who looks strikingly familiar. Again, you can probably guess why.

In addition to an aged main character, some thematic connections to the original and a few minor characters, whose details we won’t reveal here, who are celebrating their big comeback with age makeup, Echoes has very little to do with the events of Orphan Black. It finds new ways of approaching the same material, but could just as easily be a completely separate entity, given how its characters tend to repeat the same patterns and make the same mistakes. For example, why would said older character participate in cloning experiments when he’s seen for himself what it’s done to all the clones he’s known in the past? Surely one of the many scientist characters in this series would have something pithy to say about cycles of destruction.

Sophie Giraud/AMC

It has a similar agitated feeling as Orphan Black began to come to the fore in the later seasons: the characters are constantly finding and then running away from each other, getting separated, kidnapped, finding each other again, then hiding again. During the more turbulent middle episodes, you just want to lock everyone in a room and force them to talk it all out, if only to move things along. The show is at its best when all the characters are turning on each other, Ritter’s jibes bouncing off Fix’s dour walls, and Hawes is desperately pleading for everyone to have just a smidgen of sense as they navigate the show’s twisted, emotional core.

There’s also the obligatory slightly evil billionaire character who wants to exploit new technology for his own ends, as well as the traditional creepy puppet-pulling organization that the show’s characters are at the mercy of. Many of the sets have an eerie, artificial feel that may not be entirely intentional, but fits well with the show’s ominous tone – especially when people’s living rooms and trailers are literally being picked up and rebuilt in echoing warehouses, as in the image of the Unabomber’s cabin locked in a white-walled FBI warehouse. At any time, a character is in danger of learning that not only have they been living a lie, but that their life as they thought they knew it never existed.

Sophie Giraud/AMC

If the trick of the original series was watching an actress don a series of wigs and multiple wardrobes to play half the cast, then the attraction of the Echoes is to see multiple versions of the same character played by different actresses of different ages. This is certainly easier from a production point of view, and it makes sense for Echoes not just do the same thing again. Where Orphan Black While 2012 focused on fitting different personalities into the same body, the sequel looks more at how these changes take place and how people, as well as our memories of them, change and evolve into new forms over time. Can you copy a person down to the smallest detail, right down to their thought patterns and memories? If you could do that, would they really be the same? And if not, what then?