Relationship Spotlight: Sarah Manning & Felix Dawkins (Orphan Black)

…And just for a change of pace, how about an Orphan Black Relationship Spotlight?  But seriously, this is the last relationship that I really want to talk about from that show, for the time being anyway.  I’ve mentioned both Sarah and Felix before, with Helena and Alison respectively, but their connection with one another warrants a closer look, too.

Unlike the other relationships I’ve highlighted from this show, Sarah and Felix predate the clone revelation.  Both were fostered from a young age by Mrs. S. and taken from their home country, the U.K., to be raised in relative privacy in the show’s non-specified Canadian locale.  When we initially see Sarah with Felix, freaked out from her first out-of-context clone experience, it’s clear how inextricably tied they are.

In some ways, the relationship first established by the show is one in which neither is all that good for the other.  Sarah is forever pulling Felix into her not-aboveboard schemes (not that Felix is an altar boy or anything, but him dragging her into something isn’t their usual dynamic.)  Despite his protests and lectures, he generally goes along with it; however, he’s far from spineless, and particularly in early episodes, he vents his feelings with pissy, passive-aggressive shows of force that are inconvenient for Sarah and drive her up the wall.  She’s of course the one who initiates him into Clone Club, enlisting him to be her lookout, her backup, and her safe-house, and even though Felix soon grows as invested in the whole thing as she is, he’s often the one telling her to stop and think, to not be reckless.  And what’s the typical result?  They both get reckless.

As such, I can see the point that their relationship might be enabling or self-destructive, especially from Sarah to Felix – she rarely considers what he wants or needs, and she regularly expects him to drop everything on her behalf.  (Yes, I know Sarah’s the protagonist, and as a woman who’s recently discovered she’s a clone with an enormous list of enemies, she has a lot more going on right now, but would it kill her to check in with Felix now and then?)  Yet, part of this dynamic is the fact that each will forgive the other pretty much anything.  They take each other for granted (like Sarah making Felix go on the run with her and her daughter and then insisting on calling all the shots and refusing to listen to any of his advice) and screw up each other’s plans (like Felix throwing a fake funeral for Sarah, who’s faked her death, using the money from the drugs Sarah wanted him to sell for her,) but neither takes what the other does personally for long.  They seem to get that they’re both stubborn people with a talent for screwing things up, that something stupid done in anger or desperation shouldn’t be a deal-breaker, and that each needs the other in their corner too much to hold grudges. 

That’s why Felix is the first person Sarah turns to when things go wrong.  It’s why she can’t leave him out of a major operation.  It’s why Felix initially accedes to helping out the other clones so much (as time goes on, he develops fairly strong sibling bonds with all of them, each with its own dynamic, but at first, it’s all for Sarah.)  And it’s even why he can get so mad at Sarah, because he knows she’s in over her head with dangerous people, and he can’t bear the thought of anything happening to her.  Both have had a tough time of it, and to a great extent, they both tend to hang onto the other for support because that’s what they’ve always done.  I’m guessing they always will.

Relationship Spotlight: Sarah Manning & Helena (Orphan Black)

Another Orphan Black post, another relationship – this show really knows its way around character interactions.  I’ve already talked about how much I like all of the clones’ relationships with each other, but Sarah and Helena deserve a separate post of their own.  Definitely my favorite clone duo in the whole batch.  (It’s hard not to talk spoilers with this show, and that ratchets up to basically impossible when Helena is involved, so read at your own risk.)

First of all, these two aren’t just clones.  They’re also twins, split from a single egg and carried by the same surrogate mother.  (Specifically, they’re mirror-image twins; Helena is left-handed while Sarah and the other clones are right-handed, and her internal organs are all opposite the usual side.)  The makes them unique from the others, along with the fact that their mother ran away with them before the mad scientists could get their feelers on the girls.  Sarah and Helena are the lost clones, the two who didn’t grow up under Dyad’s surreptitious watchful eye.

Pretty much from their first meeting, when Helena is still under the thrall of the proletheans and killing clones for them, there’s something special about their connection.  With Helena’s programming, she has no qualms about murdering her other sisters, but she goes out of her way to avoid killing Sarah.  She senses something different; there’s a bond there that she can’t help but cling to.  And despite Helena’s horrific actions all throughout season 1, the thought of permanently taking her out is massively hard for Sarah.  It’s only after some intensely personal betrayals on Helena’s part that Sarah can even consider it.

Obviously, their relationship has enormous growing pains (attempted kidnapping and point-blank shooting will do that,) but they’ve come tremendously far.  For a long time, Sarah’s the only clone who has any meaningful interactions with Helena.  It means she’s the one who has to rush in and try to contain Helena when she goes off the rails, but it also means she’s the only option when Helena is in trouble.  Against every shred of common sense, Sarah finds she starts to care about Helena, recognizing how she’s been used and lied to, seeing how much she craves someone she can love.  And although they frequently backslide – Helena is so volatile that it’s pretty unavoidable – she sets about trying to convince Helena that they can trust each other.  Sarah’s the one to finally introduce Helena to the others, to convince them that Helena is no longer a threat and to assure Helena that they’re all family.

These two are sort of the “action clones.”  Both women are resourceful, often underhandedly so, and they have a knack for getting through tough situations.  Helena likes to think of Sarah as weaker and incapable, and it’s true that Sarah doesn’t have Helena’s scary prolethean training, but ultimately, they work excellently in tandem.  When they’re both imprisoned by one of the ever-growing number of factions fighting of a piece of the clones, they look out for each other and work together to escape.  (True, Helena gets out and leaves Sarah behind, but 1) volatile, like I said, 2) she’d been told lies about Sarah, as she so often is, and 3) she comes back for her in the end.  Baby steps.)  The Sarah-Helena stuff, by the way, is my favorite part of the entire Castor base storyline, and I absolutely love Sarah’s discovery that Helena has been captured and her determination to find and rescue her.  For much of this season, helping Helena has been Sarah’s main focus, and considering all the incredibly awful crap that went down between them in season 1, that’s really saying something.

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.