Orphan Black

[IamLEAM1983]

Ohmigod, this show is the bomb. It's like Aldous Huxley and Jason Bourne had sex - with less guns and more head-scratchiness.

So Sarah Manning's this British expat who's stuck in Ford Nation after her Irish caregiver moves to Canadia to try and start over. Sarah and her step-brother Felix are both grifters and would-be artists by nature, but their lack of a serious break turns them into small-time con men. Sarah's Toronto life goes on pretty much as expected - grungy haircuts and Sex Pistols tees included - until she sees a woman who looks exactly like her kill herself in a train station.

Her double was named Beth Childs, as it turns out, and Sarah does what any con lady would do in a situation like this: she grabs Beth's wallet and keys and makes a break for it, figuring out she might find something that could get her an easy break away from Toronto and a happy reunion with her young daughter. Surprise, though - Beth was a police detective, as it turns out, and if Sarah wants to collect the seventeen thousand dollars in cash Beth set aside, she'll need to prove that she - as Beth - is fit for duty. Coincidences had it that Sarah ran into Beth just as she got herself suspended for misconduct during an investigation - a fact that's substantiated by the pharmacist's plethora of meds Sarah finds in her new flat.

Among Beth's possessions was a pink cell phone that served as a link to a third double, Alison Hendrix, a conservative screwball soccer mom from Scarborough, Ontario. She's apparently linked to a fourth clone, Cosima Niehaus of Berkeley U, a super-genius pothead Genetics undergrad, complete with dreadlocks and vague Californian accent. In short order, we figure out that someone is determined to challenge laws, ethics and what's currently scientifically achievable by introducing human clones into the general populace. Someone else perceives them as abominations and is determined to kill them. There's a few other clones, too - but that'd be spoiling too much.

Tatiana Maslany owns the series. Each clone is her own person in the smallest of details, from the clothes to the accent, the world views, facial twitches, mannerisms... This isn't just some screwball comedy offering à la Multiplicity, it's seriously scary stuff that's explored with all the seriousness you could imagine. It's especially considering how the last few years have seen their share of nutsos claim they've either perfected human cloning in practice - or that they've actually carried it out not just to the embryo stage - but to full-term development and birth.

It makes you wonder, seriously: are there seriously practical applications to cloning full human bodies? I know organ cloning is being considered by some as a more ethically acceptable alternative, but we're nowhere close to this yet. It raises old questions along the lines of "Nature VS Nurture".

Say you clone an embryo and have the original and embryo develop at the same time. One lives a life we'll call Life A and the other lives Life B. Both lives are completely different from one another. Are they even the same person, once you reach some twenty or thirty years of age? Genetically, it's a train wreck waiting to happen and an assault on genetic diversity. On a person-to-person level, though, is it all that bad?

So what matters most? Maintaining the genetic pool so we don't start unconsciously inbreeding, or giving good genes a chance and maybe making infertile couples happy?