ORPHAN BLACK: ECHOES Recap: The Dog's Honest Truth

As more and more secrets are revealed in Orphan Black: Echoes, the sense that the effects of printout technology have snowballed out of control intensifies. Kira’s (Keeley Hawes) horror at learning the Darros (James Hiroyuki Liao) has not only printed Jules (Amanda Fix) but a teenaged version of himself, Xander (Vinson Tran), spurs her to find a way to course correct in Episode 7, “The Dog’s Honest Truth.”

Already, there have been significant repercussions. Josh’s (Izad Etemadi) suicide, Eleanor 2.0’s (Rya Kihlstedt) affair and Kira’s own psychological spiraling. It all smacks of a collective breakdown of stability and safety and foreshadows a tipping point where a shift of perspective and acceptance of a new normal will be needed.

Eleanor confronts Kira with an aggressive posture. She wears a light blue-grey blouse open at the collar. Kira's back is to the camera on the right side of the shot. Orphan Black: Echoes Season 1 Episode 7 "The Dog's Honest Truth" — Photo Credit: Sophie Giraud/AMC

Orphan Black: Echoes’s “The Dog’s Honest Truth”

Kira returns home, carrying Josh’s laptop, and stops in the foyer to check her reflection for blood splatter. In her head, she hears Josh’s final words and relives the moment he shot himself. She walks into the main house and finds Lucy (Krysten Ritter) and Eleanor together in the kitchen.

Kira tries to tell Eleanor that Lucy doesn’t know the whole story, but Eleanor won’t listen to her explanation. Eleanor dismisses Lucy and tells Kira that Neva (Alex Castillo), Jules’s mother, told her that they took Jules. Eleanor insists that she leave, so Lucy says she’ll take care of it herself. She tries to comfort Eleanor, telling her that things get better despite how she’s feeling at the moment.

Once Lucy leaves, Eleanor demands to know if she’s a printout as well. Kira isn’t able to deny it and apologizes. Eleanor walks upstairs and starts packing a bag. Kira follows and tells her about the illness and how she forgot everyone. She expresses that she was scared when Eleanor died and just wanted her back. Eleanor points out that death can’t be skipped over. The finite nature of life, love and relationships makes them mean something.

She takes her bag and heads downstairs. She scolds Kira for Jules’s creation as well, although Kira protests that she knew nothing about it. Kira begs her to stay, but Eleanor’s incredibly angry and leaves Kira, who breaks down in tears.

Kira looks somber and worried. She wears a black windbreaker jacket over grey pullover sweater. — Photo Credit: Sophie Giraud/AMC

Fix This

In his office, Xander tells Darros how Jules figured out who and what he was. Darros gives him another chance to get Jules onside and make her feel comfortable and safe at the compound.

In her room, Jules wakes up surrounded by the file about Eleanor Miller. She realizes she still has the bottle of nasal spray focus drug in her pocket. She answers a knock at the door and finds Xander outside. She’s not receptive to his apology. He offers to take her to the lab where she was printed. When she asks him how she can trust him, he shows her that he stole Darros’s master key.

Dr. Teller (Marnie McPhail) enters her darkened offices and begins tidying her desk. She jumps in fright when she realizes Lucy is sitting across the room and watching her. Lucy leans forward and places her gun on the table in front of her. She questions Dr. Teller.

Xander brings Jules to the printout lab and shows her the machine. He shows her how he likes to lie in the chamber (with the machine off) and think. He tells her about bardo, the time between a person dying and their soul passing onto their next body. Jules asks if Darros told him that. Xander invites her into the chamber.

Close-up on Lucy. She looks to the right of the shot and is situated on the right half of the screen. Her long black hair falls over her shoulder and blends in with the black shirt she's wearing. The background is a solid dark grey. — Photo Credit: Sophie Giraud/AMC

Dr. Teller tells Lucy that Jules is at the Darros compound and that she’s part of a bigger plan. She describes Darros as an exemplary man. Lucy threatens her with the gun, but she’s defiant because Lucy can’t get to Jules. When she suggests Lucy would benefit from therapy, Lucy backhands her with the pistol butt and leaves.

His Deepest Desire

In the chamber together, Xander and Jules talk about their respective existences. Xander shares that he was printed a little less than a year ago. Jules points out that he’s been in a prison his whole life. She offers him a new experience and tells him to close his eyes and envision his deepest desire. While he’s distracted, she doses him with the nasal spray and jumps out of the chamber, grabbing the master key bracelet as she goes. She closes the lid of the machine to slow him down.

Trapped in the chamber, he flashes back to Darros’s memories of caring for an invalid sister. His face is badly beaten, and she’s concerned for him. He reassures her that he’ll always be there for her. They put in earbuds, and he sings to her. She wears a necklace with a star resembling the Darros Foundation logo.

Using the master key, Jules breaks into Darros’s office and triggers a system shutdown. She also grabs the tiny electronic image scroller she saw before.

Lucy finds Kira asleep on the couch, surrounded by chip bags, cigarette butts, and a mostly empty bottle of booze. She tells Kira about Darros taking Jules to his compound. Kira lets Lucy know that Josh confessed to rebuilding the machine and killing himself. She also tells her that Eleanor’s gone, and if she doesn’t get her meds, she’s going to start to decline. Lucy offers to get Eleanor if Kira can pull herself together and help her fix things.

Coming Clean

Eleanor finds Lucas (Jaeden Noel) setting up chairs for a meeting at the Quaker Center. Meanwhile, at the compound, Tom (Reed Diamond) is trying to get the compound’s security up and running again. Darros breathes down his neck.

Out in the woods, Jules is running for the boundary. Tom and Darros see her on the surveillance camera. When Tom moves to catch her, Darros delays him, saying that if they let her go a bit, she might bring them to Lucy. On a different surveillance camera, they see Xander climbing out of the machine. Darros says he’ll take care of Xander. Tom leaves. Darros notices the missing electronic device.

At the Quaker Center, Eleanor tries to explain things to Lucas, beginning with her being sick the year he started college. As she introduces the idea of Kira’s research, Kira herself is at the original Eleanor’s grave, talking to her about Eleanor 2.0 and how the original Eleanor’s death changed Kira. That change is what pushed Eleanor 2.0 away emotionally. Kira promises she’ll fix it all.

Jules kneels on one knee next to a medium-sized brown dog. She wears a padded wool coat over a grey hoodie and jeans on Orphan Black: Echoes Season 1 Episode 7, "The Dog's Honest Truth." — Photo Credit: Sophie Giraud/AMC

In the woods, Jules finds a dog caught in some brambles. She frees him, and they make friends. They hear the sound of cars nearby.

Nothing Is a Waste

Darros is very disappointed in Xander’s failure to bring Jules into the fold. He decides Xander isn’t capable of being his legacy, so Xander will be given some other use.

Xander leaps to his feet and confronts Darros about their sister’s existence. He asks why he wasn’t told about her. Darros leaves the room.

Jules and the dog follow the road to a charging station. Leveraging some management of the dog’s behavior, she gets the attendant to help her place a call to Criag (Jonathan Whittaker).

Lucy finds Eleanor in the Quaker meeting room. Lucas comes in and finds them. Eleanor introduces Lucy as her younger self. Lucas can’t believe it. He looks at Eleanor and suspects that she’s a printout as well. When Eleanor tells him the truth, he tells them both to leave.

Jules sits next to a scruffy-looking dog on a bench at night. She's wears a grey jacket and black hoodie. Orphan Black: Echoes Season 1 Episode 7, "The Dog's Honest Truth" — Photo Credit: Sophie Giraud/AMC

Craig picks Jules and the dog up from the charging station. Back at the compound, Xander pulls himself together and prepares to run away. A little while later, Tom questions the attendant and learns that Jules had a dog with her.

Lucy and Eleanor sit on a bench together and talk. She asks Eleanor about the shared memory she and Jules have of the bathroom. Eleanor explains that was the day she found her father dead by suicide in the bathtub after slitting his wrists. He was clinically depressed. Lucy’s phone rings, and it’s Jules using Craig’s phone. She tells Lucy to meet her at the Southeast Dockyards.

A Reckoning

In the truth, Jules asks Craig about meeting Lucy. She tells him about seeing the machine that made her. She questions whether she’s real. He tells her about a community of Mormons that lived near where he grew up. When a Mormon girl ran away and became a singer in Reno, he learned it isn’t where you come from that matters. It’s where you’re going that counts. Somewhere behind them, Tom uses the tracker in the dog’s collar to follow Jules and Craig to the dockyards.

Accessing Josh’s laptop files, Kira goes through his video journals about working for Darros. She grabs her phone and calls Emily (Tattiawna Jones) and asks her to meet.

Tom sits along in his car. He has on a dark suit jacket over a light blue collared shirt. — Photo Credit: Robyn Cymbaly/AMC

Tom finds Jules, the dog and Craig. When he stops his car, Lucy plows into him with her truck. Jules congratulates the dog she’s named Slobber Monster. She’d noticed the tracker on his collar earlier and used it to lure Tom to her. Slobber Monster takes off. Lucy and Eleanor get away in the truck. Craig drives Jules to a parking lot, where they meet up with Lucy. Jules gets into Lucy’s truck, and Lucy introduces them.

Back at the dockyards, Tom gets out of the wreck slowly and falls to the ground while Slobber Monster sniffs around him. In a dark diner, Emily waits for Kira. When Kira sits down at the booth, Emily places her gun down on the bench next to her and asks how much Kira knows.

New episodes of Orphan Black: Echoes air on Sundays at 10 pm ET/PT on AMC, AMC+ and BBC America.

Movie Review: KNEECAP

Author
Recent Posts

Come chat!

Diana Keng

Diana lives in Vancouver, BC, Canada, where she invests her time and energy in teaching, writing, parenting, and indulging her love of all Trek and a myriad of other fandoms. She is a lifelong fan of smart sci-fi and fantasy media, an upstanding citizen of the United Federation of Planets, and a supporter of AFC Richmond 'til she dies. Her guilty pleasures include female-led procedurals, old-school sitcoms, and Bluey. She teaches, knits, and dreams big. You can also find her writing at The Televixen, Women at Warp, TV Fanatic, and TV Goodness.

Come chat!