Favorite Characters: Alison Hendrix (Orphan Black)

While I immediately liked Sarah, adored Cosima, and was fascinated by Helena, it took me a while to warm up to Alison (admittedly, it helped a lot when she started interacting with Felix more – as I’ve said, those two are gold together!)  But even though the affection developed more gradually, I’ve come to really enjoy Alison (some Alison-related spoilers.)

As far as first impressions go, Alison seems initially to be the least-appealing member of clone club.  Cosima welcomes Sarah with open arms and a mouthful of technobabble, and at least with Helena, you can’t really look away, but Alison?  Alison is presented to us as a suburban housewife with a stick up her butt who’s short with Sarah anout the whole clone business and, more than anything, feels a little detached from the proceedings. 

However, the layers start peeking through almost right away (Alison improves a lot for me on rewatch.)  She’s brusque and unwelcoming to Sarah, yes, but we quickly see her reasons for that.  1) By the time they meet face-to-face, Alison knows that Sarah has been impersonating Beth, who’s now dead.  Alison can’t share her grief with anyone but Cosima, so those pent-up feelings get directed at Sarah, along with some resentment and distrust along the lines of “how dare she waltz in here and act like she can just be Beth?”  2) Alison takes the rules of clone club seriously, and that involves major secrecy.  It’s true that part of it is down to appearances – whatever would the neighbors think if they knew? – but more than that, it’s about the safety of her family.  She has a husband and two small children, and she doesn’t want anything jeopardizing her life with them.

This last point is also a big part of the reason why Alison often feels off in her own plots.  So much of Alison’s arc through the series is about her attempts to keep her house in order and cling to some semblance of a normal life.  And so, she throws herself into neighborhood potlucks, community theatre, and school trustee elections, because she doesn’t want to be defined by Dyad or Proletheans or whatever insane thing is happening in the clones’ lives – of course, it doesn’t take her long to find plenty of craziness all by herself.  Her sisters (especially Sarah) have a tendency to call her out on this, arguing that she needs to pull her weight more and getting wrapped up in her own stuff is selfish when there’s so much important crap going down, but really, she’s trying to get on with what they’re all fighting for:  the freedom to make her own choices and do what she wants.  It’s also worth mentioning that she helps out more than Sarah gives her credit for.  In addition to providing a lot of money for clone-related goings-on (and clean urine samples to any of her sisters who ask, no explanation necessary,) she steps up when she’s needed.  Whether that’s impersonating Sarah in a pinch, opening her home to Helena, or poking into Brightborn, Alison’s no slouch.

And honestly, Alison spends a lot of time just keeping her head above water.  I know that our introduction to Beth involves her suicide and Helena’s all kinds of messed up from being abused and brainwashed by the Proletheans who raised her, but Alison is a great ongoing example of how the revelation that one is a clone can shake a person’s sense of self.  She has a really hard time reconciling who she is, whether she’s even “real,” and we can see how these doubts fracture the “perfect” suburban life she tries so hard to maintain.  She leans too heavily on pills and alcohol, she feels herself going crazy with paranoia about monitors, and no matter how hard she tries to right the ship, everything seems to keep going wrong.  I appreciate that the show explores this side of things through her character, the difficulty of being a clone even before you get into shadowy conspiracies and assassination attempts.

Relationship Spotlight: The Clones (Orphan Black)

Even if I just focus on the main players, today’s posts definitely highlights more characters than I ever have in a single Relationship Spotlight before.  If you’re wondering what spurs me to attempt such an undertaking, I refer you to the picture above.  I’m pretty sure there are few problems which can’t be solved with “clone dance party.”  (Some spoilers ahead.)

There’s a lot to love about Orphan Black, but without a doubt, my favorite part of the show is the assortment of ever-growing relationships between the sestras.  For most of them, their lives were only recently upended by the realization of what they are.  They used to glide heedlessly through what they assumed was an ordinary existence:  soccer moms and students, convicts and cops.  Then, each of them experienced a total paradigm shift when they discovered that they’re parts of a top-secret, highly-unsanctioned human cloning experiment.  Shadowy eyes are watching them, nefarious groups wish them harm, their DNA is augmented by a synthesized patent sequence, and they find a mysterious illness worming its way through their genes.  That’s far too much for any one person to process and carry alone – no wonder they turn to the only people who can understand what they’re going through.

Forged together in the fire of what must seem like an insane sci-fi story, the sisters cling to one another.  The frequent meet-ups, phone calls, and Skype sessions go beyond their shared goal of sorting through the many questions that surround them.  Sure, Sarah is good at sneaking around and unearthing secrets, Helena can hold her own in any fight, and Cosima knows her way around a laboratory, but it’s so much more than that.  Sarah will pose as Alison to get her out of a bind of her own doing, who will in turn shoo her husband and kids out of the house so she’s ready to fight alongside Sarah if she’s needed.  When Cosima starts succumbing to the illness that threatens them, the others will do whatever’s needed to help her.  There are plenty of characters who will go to extreme lengths for one another, of course – the clones aren’t alone in that regard.  What makes their relationships stand out more is their depth coupled with the relative youth of their associations.  Less than a year out, and their concern for each other trumps basically anything else.  Their sisters come before romantic partners, before old allegiances, before work, and before personal safety.  Sarah falls out hard with Mrs. S when it comes out that S sold out Helena, and Cosima makes it clear to Delphine that if she puts Dyad ahead of Cosima’s sisters, they’re done.

The fact that they’re not just sisters but clones makes their bonds go deeper even aside from all the sci-fi craziness happening to them.  Although each woman is so different, to some extent, she regards all of the others on some level as extensions of herself.  It’s why Helena, Alison, Cosima, and Rachel almost feel like Kira is, not just Sarah’s daughter, but theirs, too.  It’s why Felix and Mrs. S. have taken them all in as something of a surrogate family.  It’s why, despite Helena and Rachel’s sins against their own, none of the others can bring themselves to take either out.  Helena is being brought closer and closer to the fold, and her tentative relationships with her sestras is helping to cut through her destructive programming at the hands of the Prolethians.  And while Rachel has wreaked all kinds of detached havoc on their lives, I think there’s a part of her, somewhere (very deeply buried,) that longs for the same, to have the kind of family that the other clones have found in each other.  The show can get bogged down in its ever-evolving mythology, but when it focuses on the women at the heart of the series, it hits home every time.

Relationship Spotlight: Felix Dawkins & Alison Hendrix (Orphan Black)

I love that Felix takes so well to the idea that his foster sister is actually a clone.  He develops a separate familial dynamic with each of Sarah’s more prominent “sisters,” and, surprisingly, none is stronger than his bond with uptight soccer mom Alison.  This is a relationship that snuck up on me, but I’ve come to realize that any episode with Alison-Felix interaction is just that little bit better.

The proceedings get off to an inauspicious start when Felix, serving as Sarah’s back-up during an early clone encounter, is almost shot by Alison after she catches him outside her house.  She’s high-strung and justifiably paranoid, and he’s completely freaked out by his first actual clone sighting; so far, his only knowledge of Sarah’s apparent doubles has been secondhand, but now, he sees the indisputable evidence standing in front of him with a handgun. 

Even without threats of bodily harm, Alison is the clone that, on the surface, seems the most unlike Felix.  There’s his history and habit of mutual law-breaking with Sarah, and I defy anyone to dislike the brilliant, wonderfully vibrant Cosima, but Alison’s life couldn’t be further from his.  She’s a prissy suburban housewife who needs everything “just so,” and he’s a hard-partying artist who’s the biggest believer in his own fabulousness.  One of my favorite laughs from season 1 comes when Sarah pulls Felix in to babysit Alison’s kids, freeing Alison up for Clone Club-related goings-on, and Felix immediately wants to dress both of the tots in drag; Alison’s reaction is one for the ages.  All in all, not exactly a surrogate sibling match made in heaven.

Somewhere along the line, though, Alison and Felix grow incredibly close.  As things unravel, she gets much worse at pretending nothing’s wrong, and while her ensuing meltdown damages her relationships with her husband and friends, as well as her standing in the community, I think Felix sort of admires the mess that she really is.  He likes seeing the perfect, anal-retentive veneer fall away and finding the frantic, impulsive woman underneath, and she in turn realizes that Felix is enormously loyal to those who’ve won his affections.  I’m not gonna lie, their shared fondness for booze and pills is a real ice-breaker, but it quickly goes a lot further than that. 

Soon, strangely, almost paradoxically, they become one of the most unexpected pairs on the show.  Alison’s world is imploding, and she leans increasingly on Felix for help (he jumps in as bartender when a neighborhood potluck descends on her house while she’s tied up with particularly-insane clone business,) company (they share anti-anxiety meds after she locks herself in the bathroom at her intervention,) and comfort (she tells him massive secrets without fear of judgment.)  They still have their culture-clash (really, more like class-clash) moments – when Alison stays at Felix’s place, he’s fantastically horrified to discover she’s scoured it from top to bottom – but generally, he’s 100% in her corner, and she rates him miles above all her two-faced suburban friends.  There’s a moment in season 2 when Sarah is in colossal, life-and-death trouble, and Felix is obviously there for her, but despite all the craziness going down, he still worries about Alison’s well-being.  With Sarah, it involves conspiracies and assassins, but with Alison, it’s community theatre, and he still feels bad about leaving her without his support.  It’s so inconsequential, but it’s important to her, and Felix knows that and wants to be there for her.  That’s love, people.