Sort of like Harry and the Hendersons.
Orphan Black Season 5 - The Final Trip
- Thread starter tomalak301
- Start date
If I'm completely honest, I wasn't that big of a fan of this episode. There were parts of it that were decent, like the Helena storyline and finally meeting PT, but the Sarah storyline rubbed me the wrong way. The way Kira was treated kind of goes against how she's been treated in the past, mainly when it comes to trust and speaking to her as an individual instead of a daughter with a mom knowing what is best for her. I had seen an episode poster which pretty much revealed MK's fate and I was let down by it. In season four I wanted to give her a hug. Here she was brought back to be killed off. Maybe her arc was done, but the death lacked the emotional resonance it deserved.
Maybe next weeks episode might make this episode better. I don't want to talk about the trailer, but it looked like something happened to Kira when Ferdinand originally kidnapped her and Mrs. S.
Maybe next weeks episode might make this episode better. I don't want to talk about the trailer, but it looked like something happened to Kira when Ferdinand originally kidnapped her and Mrs. S.
It is hard to feel sympathy for Sarah right now, considering that if she'd listened to Kira in the first place, MK wouldn't have been killed.
Although what really upsets me is that it's now pretty much confirmed that Kira has psychic powers. I'm so disappointed by that. In most respects, this show's science has been exceptionally solid and plausible, a rarity in SFTV, but psi powers are pure fantasy. There's no reliable, repeatable evidence of their existence and no theoretical model for how they would work. It's jarringly incongruous to have this outright fantasy element thrown into something that's been so credible and well-researched otherwise. Also, it's too much of a TV cliche, the child of one of the series leads being a Star Child with miraculous powers and having a Special Destiny that makes them the center of everything.
I must say -- I never would've expected the screwdriver "lock" on Felix's loft door to hold up as well as it did. I mean, the screwdriver itself wasn't even the failure point!
Although what really upsets me is that it's now pretty much confirmed that Kira has psychic powers. I'm so disappointed by that. In most respects, this show's science has been exceptionally solid and plausible, a rarity in SFTV, but psi powers are pure fantasy. There's no reliable, repeatable evidence of their existence and no theoretical model for how they would work. It's jarringly incongruous to have this outright fantasy element thrown into something that's been so credible and well-researched otherwise. Also, it's too much of a TV cliche, the child of one of the series leads being a Star Child with miraculous powers and having a Special Destiny that makes them the center of everything.
I must say -- I never would've expected the screwdriver "lock" on Felix's loft door to hold up as well as it did. I mean, the screwdriver itself wasn't even the failure point!
I'm pretty much on the same page. Last night's episode was a huge letdown. MK's death made me physically ill, and its Sarah's fault. I'm still not sure why Sarah wanted to run and hide again, other than that's what she seems to do. I really liked MK, and her death was totally unnecessary.
Same thing with Helena and the doctor. I though the doctor was totally confused by what she was seeing, thus the tests. So she was stabbed through the face because Helena confused neonatologist with Neolutionist? Riiiiiight, yeah totally makes sense.
Kira's sudden behavioral change didn't sit well with me either. She's usually understood why they needed to run, so her not wanting to go seemed rather out of character. The psychic thing didn't bug me very much, since she's always been a bit different. From her miraculous recovery, to knowing when bad things were going to happen, to being able to 'feel' all the sestras. We still don't know why LEDA was created. We know Neolution wants to affect human development. Both Sarah & Helena have super healing. Kira is one further step, so its plausible to be that somehow she got psychic powers.
My biggest issue is this seemed like a wasted episode, and they really can't afford to do that at this point. I'm so disgusted by last night's episode that I might just wait until the whole series has aired and catch up then. I'm not sure that there's going to be a satisfactory ending at this point.
Same thing with Helena and the doctor. I though the doctor was totally confused by what she was seeing, thus the tests. So she was stabbed through the face because Helena confused neonatologist with Neolutionist? Riiiiiight, yeah totally makes sense.
Kira's sudden behavioral change didn't sit well with me either. She's usually understood why they needed to run, so her not wanting to go seemed rather out of character. The psychic thing didn't bug me very much, since she's always been a bit different. From her miraculous recovery, to knowing when bad things were going to happen, to being able to 'feel' all the sestras. We still don't know why LEDA was created. We know Neolution wants to affect human development. Both Sarah & Helena have super healing. Kira is one further step, so its plausible to be that somehow she got psychic powers.
My biggest issue is this seemed like a wasted episode, and they really can't afford to do that at this point. I'm so disgusted by last night's episode that I might just wait until the whole series has aired and catch up then. I'm not sure that there's going to be a satisfactory ending at this point.
I agree with it being a wasted episode. As much as I love this show, I've always felt the 10 episode season didn't give them enough time to really let the story breathe. With 8 episodes left, last nights episode took us back to where we were before season 5 began. How are they going to wrap this up with such limited time.
I had to look away from the screen for much of it.
To be fair, she and Siobhan had no reason to trust that this new "friendly" Neolutionist policy was on the level, especially since it's basically being forced on them by people that we know are willing to kill.
Same thing with Helena and the doctor. I though the doctor was totally confused by what she was seeing, thus the tests. So she was stabbed through the face because Helena confused neonatologist with Neolutionist? Riiiiiight, yeah totally makes sense.
This is Helena we're talking about, after all. Heck, at least she just immobilized the doctor rather than murdering her -- that's real progress by her standards.
Besides, even if the doctor was totally innocent, the results of her genetic tests might've fallen into Neo hands and led them to Helena's babies. So she couldn't let the tests be performed.
I think it makes sense. She's not a little kid anymore. She's getting older, and like all maturing children, she's starting to ask questions about her identity and to assert her independence. Her reaction wasn't due to ignorance, but due to having her own convictions that differed from her mother's. She was tired of running, and she had questions about her identity that Rachel was offering her a chance to answer. So she made a choice and she stood up for it. She's not out of character, she's starting to grow up.
There are plenty of ways to be "different" without throwing a nonsensical magic power into a show that's otherwise exceptionally plausible and well-researched for TV science fiction. It's like that Syd Harris cartoon where a professor has a bunch of equations written on a blackboard but there's a part in the middle that says "Then a Miracle Occurs." It just doesn't fit. Rapid healing and exceptional longevity are not out of the realm of possibility as extrapolations of medical science. But psychic power has no basis in anything except folklore, fantasy, and fraud. They're not comparable at all. If you were watching a show in which the villains had invented new high-tech weapons based on sonics or electromagnetics or the like, you wouldn't find it a natural outgrowth of that if they suddenly pulled out magic wands and started casting death curses. It would feel completely incongruous. That's how tossing psi powers in with medical and genetic advances feels to me.
Different here means that the psychic powers were heavily hinted at in the last couple of seasons, and basically confirmed by the sheer number of hints they went out of their way to throw at us. I was as disappointed as anybody here – psychic power are cliché and unnecessary for this show, but I had that disappointment last season, and here it didn't bug me at all. When MK died, something died in me, that was truly awful moment, and not one I could feel disappointment in, so when Kira felt that MK had died, so it just made me feel worse by knowing how Kira felt at that moment.
I liked that episode quite a lot. I agree with right about everything that you said – all of the off-beat stuff that happened here made an lot what of sense, everyone in the show has always been deeply flawed, and everyone is more than justified to be paranoid, so for me nothing really felt off. It was very sad and dark.
Sure, they dropped a ton of hints before, but it was ambiguous enough that I was hoping against hope that there might still be some logical explanation. But now they had her feel a straight-up Great Disturbance in the Clone Force when MK died, and there's basically no ambiguity left after that. So it's the overt confirmation of what I've been afraid of for a while now.
Granted people often have "premonitions" about their loved ones being in danger or dying, and it's just the statistical luck of the draw that sometimes those predictions will be coincidentally similar to actual events. When one such imagined fear happens to come true, people forget about all the other times they imagined something that didn't come true, and that's where the belief in premonitions and clairvoyance comes from. However, in the context of the show, this isn't an isolated instance. Kira's shown a recurring pattern of correctly describing what's happening with the Sestras when she's not around them. By now, it's happened enough times that the odds of it being coincidence are infinitesimal.
One non-psychic explanation that could possibly still work is if Kira is something like the Seers on Dark Matter -- she doesn't paranormally sense events, but rather is hyperintelligent enough to notice all the information available in her environment, deduce patterns that most people can't recognize, and compute probabilities from that. Perhaps she knew enough about the people involved that she could subconsciously predict that MK would stay in the loft, Sarah would go after her, Ferdinand would follow, and everyone involved would act just as they did. But that seems unlikely. For one thing, I don't recall if she knows all the people in question well enough to calculate all that. For another, if her mind did work that way, then she'd probably have predicted MK's death ahead of time rather than "sensing" it when it happened.
The other possibility is if the clones and Kira have some sort of biotech implants like the stuff that was focused on last season, something that creates a wireless link between Kira's brain and the Sestras'. But biotech seems to have been the focus of the rival group within Neolution, the one opposed to the Leda/Castor creators. Also, if it were done with broadcast signals, there'd be all the expected problems with range limits and interference, unless they were tapped into the cellular network. But Westmoreland's island is "off the grid," so I'm not sure that would have let her sense Sarah or Cosima on the island.
Let's not forget about Helena's babies, who are similar to Kira, as we found out. Maybe there is still room for a non-psychic explanation after all.
I don't see the connection between your two sentences. What does Kira not being unique have to do with finding a logical explanation for her powers? It seems pretty clear by this point that the intention of the show's creators is that the biological children of Leda clones are superhumans with both rapid healing and uncanny mental abilities -- though of course the unborn twins haven't yet had an opportunity to manifest the latter. I presume this has been the endgame of Neolution all along, to use the genetic engineering of the clone program to create the parents of a new transhuman species. And unfortunately they've fallen back on the hoary cliche of equating further human evolution with psychic powers (see Clarke's Childhood's End, The Outer Limits' "The Sixth Finger," Gary Mitchell and Wesley Crusher in Star Trek, Stargate's Ancients, etc.).
Not when taken in terms of the show's timeline. More time has passed IRL than it has in the show. According to the producers, seasons 1-3 take place over a period of 30 days to 2 months. Helena is impregnated in season 2, and she's still pregnant now in Season 5. So its been less than a year since we first saw Kira. She's being written more towards the actress' physical age and not the character's age. She's no more than 6-7 years old (maybe 8) by this point. A far cry from the actress who's almost 11. A 6-8 year old who's been through all the trauma Kira has will react much differently than an 11 year old.
If she wanted to stay because Mrs S wasn't coming, that I might be able to buy. But wanting to stay to be with Rachel, really?
I'm not sure what was more heartbreaking, M.K.'s death or Sarah losing the trust of her daughter. 
A bit of a nitpick and I know it was a conceit, but it was awful convenient Ferdinand had both Allison and Cosima waiting by at computer or phone screen to communicate with Sarah the moment she woke up from her long sleep. Perhaps she's deliberately brought out of consciousness, but it still seemed awfully convenient.
A bit of a nitpick and I know it was a conceit, but it was awful convenient Ferdinand had both Allison and Cosima waiting by at computer or phone screen to communicate with Sarah the moment she woke up from her long sleep. Perhaps she's deliberately brought out of consciousness, but it still seemed awfully convenient.
That's the whole point. Sarah has been pushed to the brink of utter desperation that she's gone against her own nature in trying to protect Kira and the result has caused Kira to no longer trust her mother. I found that part of the episode to be very effective and heartbreaking.
I guess it's a matter of perspective. I didn't see her return as "brought back to be killed off," but to show the desperation of the situation. She was sicker than anyone realized and she willingly sacrificed herself for Sarah's fruitless mission. That's bound to have a dire effect on Sarah's psyche, whether or not she comes to her senses regarding Kira's well being. Like Christopher said, if Sarah had just listened to Kira, M.K. would still be alive.
Yeah, I'm fairly disappointed by that revelation for the same reasons. I'm still hoping the show will have a good explanation for its existence and utilizes it well for the story, but I'm still disappointed.
Yeah, that whole thing was a little weird. Ferdinand really strong enough to break through that, even though it wasn't the screwdriver?
Kira's always been more mentally advanced than others of her biological age, and she's visibly undergone considerable physical growth regardless of story time. Given that she's pretty clearly got transhuman abilities, is it that hard to believe that they include rapid maturation? Surely that's more plausible than psychic powers. (It's also another of the standard traits given to fictional superkids, e.g. Elizabeth on V: The Final Battle/V: The Series or Isabelle on The 4400. Although that's usually done to swiftly age the character to adulthood so they can avoid dealing with an infant or child actor more than necessary.)
Oh, I'm sure they had the whole thing set up and made them wait as long as they needed to. Allison was certainly annoyed enough to suggest she'd been kept waiting unproductively for some time.
@Emh and @Christopher
I get what you're saying, and maybe I did read those scenes wrong. I get that Sarah was desperate and maybe desperation makes one act irrational, but like you said:
I'm reminded of the scenes where Sarah talks to Kira right before the blood transfusion in Season 1, or in Season 4 when they are having a great conversation about how Kira feels connected to the Sisters. I wanted that kind of conversation in last night's episode but the scene to me came across as almost abusive. I'm interested to see how things play out though, and like I said, maybe next week's episode will make me reevaluate this week's episode.
I get what you're saying, and maybe I did read those scenes wrong. I get that Sarah was desperate and maybe desperation makes one act irrational, but like you said:
I'm reminded of the scenes where Sarah talks to Kira right before the blood transfusion in Season 1, or in Season 4 when they are having a great conversation about how Kira feels connected to the Sisters. I wanted that kind of conversation in last night's episode but the scene to me came across as almost abusive. I'm interested to see how things play out though, and like I said, maybe next week's episode will make me reevaluate this week's episode.
Well, that's true, it's the 21st century, psychic powers no longer need to be supernatural. Certainly Rachel's psychic powers through her new eye are not supernatural, and also don't bother me or anybody in the slightest. Even non-technological and non-supernatural answers are possible though some crazy genetic engineering, though I think that would be way beyond anything the show has been up to. I say that, because I feel the show writers are going for something that's not technological – it's unlikely all clones have a microchip implanted, and even if all of them did, Kira wouldn't.
A hybrid answer, which I still wouldn't like very much, would be if the clones have undisclosed and unknown to anybody microchips that report data, on a frequency that Kira's weird accumulation of DNA modifications makes somehow sensitive to, and maybe she's clever enough to interpret that. Since no animal can recognise proper radio waves, and there's no way in hell that could happen by accident, that would be extremely far-fetched (but in the real world, more likely than supernatural explanations). Even for microchip-to-microchip, the distances don't make sense either.
There is no explanation for this that would make me like it, I think.
I think we agree that Sarah was in the wrong there. The only way we differ is that I think that was the whole idea. I don't think the writers wanted us to agree with Sarah at that point. These characters are complex and flawed, and sometimes they get things wrong. Sarah's always been something of a screwup; for all that it was her courage and dedication to her family that brought this whole group together and brought them so far, it was her past mistakes that caused her to lose custody of Kira and end up on the run to begin with. So she's not immune to screwing up. She's been pushed really far, she's just come off of being hunted down and badly injured and almost killed, and so she's too damaged and angry to step back and think about things.
Yeah, but if it's technological communication between brains, then it's not psychic, just bionic. "Psychic" refers to a conjectural category of paranormal mental phenomena, things that arise from the "power of the mind" alone rather than a physical cause. It refers to the cause and mechanism behind the power, not the effect.
True. I was talking loosely.
But if the ‘mind’ refers to brain and neurons, and you genetically engineered a biological EM-sensitive synapse (not completely out of question as synapses already pass electrical signals to other neurons) that's part of the brain and somehow uses blood vessels inside the brain as antenna (don't know if plausible, but blood conductivity is quite higher than drinkable water, I hear), that could qualify as psychic. Especially if you demonstrated the phenomena to people before they knew EM communication was possible, they would concur – that's psychic. But they would also probably think your cellphone makes you psychic, so I'm not sure we should take their word for it.
eh, I agree with the criticisms of ep 2. Kind of choppy and a let down. Pointless death. Odd behavior from Kira. Seems slapped together. The preview for next week seemed a step backwards with the excellent but well worn Hendricks shenanigans.
I REALLY wanted them to go into MK's layer of lairness.. from which one never returns..
I REALLY wanted them to go into MK's layer of lairness.. from which one never returns..
Didn't Beth do that with the trailer park though?
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