“Unconscious Selection”
Written by Alex Levine
Directed by TJ Scott
Season 1, Episode 9
Original Airdate May 25, 2013
Re-air date: November 9, 2013
What Happens: The ambulance carrying Kira, Sarah and Mrs. S. rushes to the hospital, and blood can be seen trickling down Kira’s head. In the hospital waiting room, Sarah beats herself up, but Mrs. S. tells her she shouldn’t blame herself. Alison appears at the hospital, saying “I can’t help but feel it’s my daughter in there.” Felix offers up his apartment for Alison to use while they wait for news on Kira’s condition.
A nurse tells the doctor he needs to see something with Kira. Seconds later, he walks out and tells Sarah that Kira’s going to be fine and that she’s a very lucky girl. There’s that word again… At home, a chandelier in Kira’s room flickers and she wakes saying, “She looks like you, she looks like mommy.”
Meanwhile, Helena is slapping herself, shaking on a bed in front of Tomas who tells her to pull herself together. He grabs the letter written by Kira and tells Helena that Kira is valuable. When Helena tries to apologize, Tomas starts hitting her.
At the police station, Deangelis thinks they need to bring Beth back into the station. She argues with Art when the captain asks them what’s going on with the case, that maybe they need a fresh pair of eyes. The captain walks away and Art stands up for Beth, but Deangelis thinks Beth has something on Art.
At Paul and Beth’s apartment (throughout the series they flip flop between calling it an apartment and a townhouse), Leekie informs Paul that he knows the security footage at Olivier’s club was tampered with and that two clones were in the club the night before. Leekie has searched for the lost clone for years thinking only of Helena until he drops the name Sarah Manning.
Alison is in Felix’s apartment doing the only thing she can to cope—cleaning his flat. Felix is rather unhappy at the cleanliness, and asks about the “drug paraphernalia.” Alison’s kids are with her mother, but she asks if she can hang at Felix’s until she finds an apartment. Alison needs to go get some stuff from her home, and asks Felix to be her “wing man.” He hesitatingly agrees, but needs to change clothes and asks Alison to “fetch me something gay.” Great chemistry between these two characters.
Cosima and Sarah chat on their clone phones while Cosima is back in the school lab and Sarah is at Mrs. S’s house. Sarah wants to know if Kira is somehow different because she’s Sarah’s child. Cosima asks if Sarah would send some of her and Kira’s DNA, saying that she’ll following the science.
The doorbell rings, and it is Paul. Mrs. S smiles widely when he enters, but he has bad news—Dr. Leekie knows who she is. Leekie wants to meet with Sarah, and Paul sees this as an opportunity. They both agree it has to be on Sarah’s terms.
Tomas locks Helena in a cage—the animal metaphor is literal now. Clearly, he’s a little disappointed in her efforts to get Sarah, and is angry that Kira slipped away from her.
Cosima’s lab buddy provides her with the DNA reports about the “respiratory disease” she asked about a few episodes back. Delphine enters the lab, asking if she can come over later. They kiss before Delphine leaves.
Sarah kisses Kira goodbye and asks Mrs. S to watch over her. Mrs. S. says she’ll be safe, as she leans on a shotgun. On her way out, Sarah receives a call on Beth’s phone from Art—he says she has one last chance to tell the truth.
Alison and Felix walk into her home only to find Donnie, Aynsley, and a few other neighbors waiting to ambush her with an intervention. Donnie says she needs to stop with the pills and drugs and tells everyone how she abused him. Aynsely, never one to keep quiet, brings up how Alison slept with her husband, Chad. When Donnie tells Alison that it is about more than the two of them and asks if she wants to break up the family, she walks upstairs in tears.
At a rock quarry, “Beth” meets Art, who only gets “two minutes for two years by her side.” Art flashes a photo of Felix, saying Beth was at Felix’s apartment, and that it all comes back to Maggie Chen. “We do what we gotta do,” Sarah says before driving away. She pulls up to a work site whilst on the Clone Phone with Cosima. They are talking about the DNA, and Cosima says they can tell the clones apart by the DNA due to a bar code. This still doesn’t explain how Leekie knows her name, so Sarah asks Cosima what she said to Delphine—she fears that they are one step closer to Kira. Cosima confirms that Sarah is the first and only one of the clones to bear a child. Sarah says she’s about to meet Leekie, who is led into the trailer, blindfolded, by Paul. A strange emotion crosses Leekie’s face when he gazes upon Sarah, perhaps pride or a sense of accomplishment?
Meanwhile, Helena’s still knocking around her cage looking for any means of escape.
Leekie has a lot of questions for Sarah. He needs to know about Helena, and Paul asks him about Tomas. Leekie explains that Tomas is a religious extremist, part of a group called “Proletheans” who oppose the Neolutionists; Maggie Chen was a Proletheans who infiltrated Leekie’s group. Leekie asks Sarah to bring Helena to them so they can deprogram them. Leekie said if she does that, they (Neoloution) will allow the clones to live freely.
At Cosima’s apartment, Delphine walks in to find a deflated Cosima, who looks as if she’s been crying. Cosima pulls up a picture of Leekie’s group on the web that clearly shows Delphine.
Alison has locked herself in her bathroom, and she’ll only talk to Felix. He enters, giving her three “friends” (Aynsley, Meera, and Charity) all a smug grim. Felix tells Alison to “pull her chin up…face the music, eat some humble pie…and live to fight another day.” Alison agrees, and asks Felix to help put on her face.
Back at Mrs. S.’s place she and Sarah and debates what to do about Helena. Sarah is torn between helping Helena and putting a bullet through her head; Mrs. S. says Sarah owes nothing to Helena. Mrs. S. got in touch with her people in England to find more about Sarah’s origins, but they are “…scared. Something is going on over there, too.”
Cosima packs up her stuff and asks Delphine what she told Leekie. Delphine insists she’s kept Kira a secret, and Cosima yells that they need to stay away from the little girl. Both women are crying, and Delphine explains that she’s fallen for Cosima despite having never been with a woman. Cosima angrily replies, “Yeah, well it showed.”
Art visits the train platform where Beth (incorrectly listed as Sarah Manning in the coroner’s report) killed herself, and notices a closed circuit security camera. He checks the security tapes with the transit workers; the tapes show Beth and Sarah meeting before Beth jumps in front of the train. Art walks out looking determined.
Finally, Helena reaches her phone and calls Sarah, who agrees to meet with Helena. Paul and Mrs. S. are of the same mind as Admiral Ackbar—it’s a trap. Up in Kira’s room, mother and daughter are talking. Kira says the accident wasn’t Helena’s fault, and that Helena needs Sarah’s help. Sarah grabs Paul’s gun before heading out the door.
Back at the Hendrix intervention, Meera tells Alison she saw what was going on in the rocking van with Chad, and Aynsley chimes in that Alison has done so much damage to everybody. Alison asks if Aynsley is the one who brought everyone into her house (yes), so Alison thanks her for scrutinizing every detail her life as if she were a test subject, then turns the tables and says maybe Chad was cheating because Aynsley was blowing the roofer. Finally, Donnie kicks out everyone and walks them to the door. Felix is VERY proud of Alison.
Sarah enters the lair of Tomas and Helena with her gun drawn, and finds Helena in a cage. She wants to know if Kira is okay, but Sarah says she’ll never see Kira again. Sarah puts the gun to Helena’s head but can’t pull the trigger, and lets her out of the cage. “You are all I have now,” Helena tells Sarah, before hugging her.
As Tomas enters, Helena pulls the gun from Sarah. Tomas says Helena is the original, and that Kira should be hers. Helena takes turns pointing the gun at her sister and her tormenter. She yells at Tomas “You made me this way!” before attacking him and trying to gouge out his eyes. Sarah puts a stop to it and then locks Tomas in the cage and zip ties Helena’s hands together. Before she can take Helena to meet Leekie, Sarah gets a call from Mrs. S telling her she needs to get home right away, that she’ll explain when Sarah gets there.
At the police station, Deangelis has something to say to the captain about Beth Childs. She shows the two photos to the Captain as Art walks away unhappily. The Captain says they need an arrest warrant for Beth Childs. Art responds, “Beth’s dead. We need an arrest warrant for Sarah Manning.”
Leekie is frustrated that Helena and Sarah didn’t show. Paul apologizes and assures him that Sarah said she’d be here. Leekie calls an unseen woman with a familiar voice who says, “Blood is thicker than you think, Aldous.”
Sarah arrives at Mrs. S’s place and introduces her to Amelia, Sarah’s birth mother. Amelia says she was being watched, and after all this time they found her. She was only 22 in a new country (she is originally from Capetown) when a wealthy couple asked her to be an in-vitro surrogate. Amelia remembers that there were a lot of tests, that the couple wanted “a child unfettered by tradition.” Amelia realized that the “couple” were actually scientists and that the child was in danger, so she fled and had the children in secret—she gave birth to twins and knew she couldn’t keep them, so she gave one to the church one to the state.
Commentary: One interesting twist here in our ninth episode is that Helena and Sarah actually are siblings. Throughout the series, various characters have assumed the clones were sisters. Deangelis and Art in particular thought Beth and Sarah might be twins, when the audience knew that all the versions of Tatiana Maslany were clones. Well, we just learned we didn’t know everything and the reveal worked perfectly, whereas other “secret twin” reveals often come off as lame.
At this point, I think we’ve all taken for granted how fantastic Maslany is while juggling all these roles, but it is still fascinating to see two of the clones having a conversation physically next to each other, as when Alison and Sarah were talking in the car. It was seamless from both the acting perspective and the technical perspective, creating the illusion that there were actually two people sharing a car ride.
Reading the comments on these posts, I realize some have been (rightfully) critical of Alison’s behavior. Yes, she’s been very erratic, acting out, having extra-marital sex, whacking her husband with a golf club, and drugging it up, but she’s had a lot of things going on in her life driving her to these actions, so some kind of break from or her tightly organized life should be expected. That said, the writers have set up Aynsley very well as a foil for her, which leads us to wonder just how close these two women were before we met them; for Aynsley to share with Alison that she had cheated on Chad leads me to believe they were possibly very good friends. However, the venom they have for each other now makes it tough to see them as friends prior to the show. So to see Alison explode on her in a Crowning Moment of Awesome for me was very rewarding, as it was for Felix.
Felix again holds everything together for his Clone Sisters. From supporting Alison to providing great lines like “Fetch me something gay” (which you can now buy on a t-shirt), he continues to be the glue.
That word “lucky” came up often in this episode in regard to Kira, who may end up being the biggest mystery in the series. Clones are not supposed to reproduce, yet here we have Kira. We also don’t know who her father is, as very little has ever been mentioned about him.
Only one more episode this season, folks…
Clone Count (episode): 3 — Sarah, Cosima, Alison, and Helena
Clone Total (series*): No change from last week, still at 6 — Sarah, Beth (deceased), Alison, Cosima, Katja (deceased), Helena
*I’m only counting those we’ve met in a physical sense, not just names on a sheet of paper
Clone Layers: Sarah pretended to be Beth briefly.
Sexy Time: Some kissing between Cosima and Delphine and hints of their entanglement.
Hey, it’s that guy/gal!: All the same players as previous episodes.
Rob Bedford lives in NJ with his wife and dog. He reviews books and moderates forums at SFFWorld, runs a blog about stuff, and contributes to SF Signal. If you want to read random thoughts about books, TV, his dog, beer, and hockey, you can follow him on Twitter: @RobHBedford.
