Favorite Characters: Helena (Orphan Black)

The first of what’s likely to be numerous character posts for Orphan Black.  Helena is made up of elements from various types and clichés, but all of these facets piece together to create a really striking character who feels incredibly novel.  Spoilers, both for the character herself and major plot points of season 1, are unavoidable.

We actually start getting to know Helena long before we see her onscreen.  By the end of the pilot, it’s clear that someone is out to get the assorted members of Clone Club, and the mystery of who’s trying to kill them (and why) is a big question in the early episodes.  We meet Helena through some tried and true psycho-killer hallmarks:  creepy calling-cards in the form of Barbie heads made to look like the clone she’s killing, jumbled religious references, bizarre clues facilitating a cat-and-mouse game, and so on.  And once we clap eyes on Helena, more tropes follow.  She’s a bad-ass eastern European.  She doesn’t have screws loose so much as missing altogether.  She has frakked-up religious ideas and practices self-mutilation.  Despite her clear mental health issues, she’s an expert killer who’s as quiet as a ninja.  Plenty of these traits fit her type.

And yet, I’ve never seen a psycho-killer archetype quite like Helena.  At times, she’s almost animal-like, scrounging to get by in the wild and using every possible recourse to survive – watching her determined, untiring efforts to escape when she’s captured is fascinating.  Even when she finds more permanent associations, she still eats like she hasn’t seen food for days and won’t again for weeks.  Her life experiences are tremendously lacking, and in some ways, she’s as childlike as she is dangerous.  Her emotions scatter through her; she’s by turns woeful, raging, icily calm, desperate, bemused, and entirely numb, and there’s really no telling how she’s going to react in any given situation. 

As the show goes on and we get to know Helena, she emerges as something fairly unique – a truly sympathetic psycho killer.  Other shows and stories go down this road from time to time, but I don’t think any of them are written as effectively as Orphan Black writes Helena.  She and Sarah are the two “lost” clones, the ones that slipped through the grasp of their creators, but while Sarah was fostered by a fierce woman who would do anything to keep her safe, Helena first languished in a Ukrainian orphanage and was later discovered by a militant anti-clone cult.  They train her to be their weapon against her own sisters, feeding her their lies and filling her fractured mind with the idea that clones are abominations that mock God and nature.  Her emotional and psychological development is horribly stunted, and within her, there’s such an urgent tug – a longing for something she can call family and such a strong desire not to be an “abomination” that she kills her own and scars her back – that she’s easy prey for the cult.

This also means that Helena is a good candidate for being flipped.  She’s so alone, unloved, and deceived – when Sarah takes her on, Helena responds brutally, lethally, but when Sarah plays up their connection and shows Helena how she’s been used, Helena steps haltingly toward the fold.  She’s still wildly unpredictable and prone to acts of staggering violence, but despite her guarded wariness, she badly wants someone in whom she can put her trust, and inch by inch, she edges toward her “sestras.”