The series premiere of Orphan Black: Echoes drops us into the deep end of a world fraught with mystery and danger but does a solid job of introducing the central players of this scientific cat-and-mouse game. Audience members will sympathize with Lucy’s plight while recognizing other factors at work.
The learning curve isn’t hugely steep in the series premiere, but it’s worth paying attention to the key clues that tie Lucy’s world to the original Orphan Black series. While the adventure is new and the alliances may have evolved, there’s a lot of deja vu in the air as well.
Orphan Black: Echoes’ “Pilot”
We meet Lucy (Krysten Ritter) in Orphan Black: Echoes Season 1 Episode 1 when she wakes up to birds chirping in a nearby cage, sunlight streaming in through the windows. A woman’s voice says, “You’re awake,” startling Lucy.
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She (Keeley Hawes) asks Lucy if she knows where she is. Lucy looks around and admits she doesn’t. The woman tells Lucy she’s been through a procedure and might feel disoriented. She asks Lucy to repeat back a list of words to her. Lucy has no problems with the list. She looks at her fingers and notices neon orange residue under her nails. The woman asks her if she knows what year it is. Lucy doesn’t know.
The woman shows Lucy a picture of a baby and asks her if she recognizes the child. Again, Lucy has no idea, but now she’s becoming frustrated. She demands to know who the woman is. The woman asks if she knows her name. When Lucy realizes she doesn’t know, she begins to panic.
The woman tries to calm Lucy, explaining that her procedure hasn’t captured her long-term memory even though her short-term memory seems intact. Lucy continues to escalate. She smashes a lamp on the ground. A man in an orderly’s uniform enters, approaches Lucy, and sedates her. As Lucy slumps to the ground, the woman assures her that no one will hurt her.
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Escape
Lucy wakes up again on the couch, hearing the birds. It’s dark outside the windows, and the lamp she smashed has been replaced. The picture of the baby is still on the coffee table. She picks it up, examines it closely, folds it and puts it in her pocket.
Looking to escape, she tries all the doors and windows, finding them locked. She throws an end table at the window, but it bounces back. She notices a light shining from under a light switch plate. By deconstructing the lamp, she acquires a metal rod she uses to pry off the plate and punch out the wall beyond. Reaching through, she unlocks the door next to the light switch.
Outside the room, she realizes the whole room is a set built in a huge, empty interior space. Hearing voices approaching, she runs across the space to another construction and finds the door unlocked. Ducking inside, she discovers a lab filled with diagrams and models of the human form in pieces and as a whole. She finds a tank filled with pink liquid. Opening the lid, she briefly touches the liquid before fragments of a human form emerge.
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The woman from the room enters the lab. Lucy asks her what this lab is. She reluctantly explains that Lucy is the product of a new technology that can “print” people from a high-resolution scan. Lucy runs away from the woman and finds herself outside the building, looking across the water at a futuristic-looking cityscape of Boston.
Two Years Later – 2052
Lucy drives a car along a road between a wheat field and a wind turbine farm. Parking the car, she lets herself into a mobile home. Lucy counts out some cash and stashes it in a jar in an empty electrical box with other jars of money and a gun. She cuts herself, puts the jar back and has flashes of memory when she sees the blood. The memories include blood on a white floor soaking into white socks and someone holding a bloody knife that they drop.
Coming out of the flashback, Lucy reaches into the electrical box and pulls out the photograph of the baby. When the door opens, Lucy puts the photo back and turns to greet her visitor.
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The girl, Charlie (Zariella Langford), communicates with sign language. She tells Lucy she is almost four minutes late and asks if they can make pizza. Lucy replies by signing that the girl needs to do her homework first, and then they’ll talk pizza. Lucy asks her if she forgot something that morning and pulls out a purple backpack.
The girl tries to snatch it back. The bag drops to the ground and opens. Lucy sees a notebook with an image of the pink liquid tank. She takes it and scolds the girl that she shouldn’t be going through other people’s things. The girl asks what the sketches are. Lucy says it’s research. She swears the girl to secrecy about the notebook.
Outside, they set up a bottle rocket as the girl’s father, Jack (Avan Jogia), drives up and parks his car. The girl runs up and tells him Lucy helped build the rocket for school. Lucy comes over to give him next month’s rent. He thanks her for helping with the rocket and says he’ll take over now.
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Building a New Life
That evening, Lucy eats Spaghetti-os out of a can in her trailer when he arrives, and they start kissing. They have sex in a chair and then move over to her bed. While cuddling, he traces a star-shaped scar on her inner forearm and asks if she truly doesn’t know how she got it. He points out that whoever treated it used sutures. She teases him about his past as an army medic.
When she asks him if he’s willing to tell Charlie about their relationship, which has been going on for almost a year, he points out that Charlie was devastated when her mother walked out on them. Lucy reassures him that she’s never going to leave. He asks Lucy about her life in the city and why she left. Lucy deflects, and he points out that she never talks about it. She admits she hates talking about the past, but she loves him. He gives up trying to learn about her history, and they start kissing again.
More memory flashes of the blood on a white floor. A crying younger version of Lucy takes the stained socks off. The knife bounces on the floor, then reverses and returns to her hand. She stares at herself in the mirror. Lucy wakes from the dream, sitting up beside a sleeping Jack. She goes outside to sit by a fire pit and add to her sketchbook.
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Collision
Out on the plantation, Lucy tells a friend about her dream. Another worker asks Lucy to help fix his truck. As she’s looking at the engine, she gets pink fluid on her hands, and she has a flash of clawing her way out of a membrane after rising from the pink liquid in the tank. Distracted by this, she steps away from the truck she’s fixing and gets hit by another truck. The other workers call for an ambulance.
Lucy wakes up in a hospital bed after being medically scanned. Dr. Palmer (Vicki Kim) is next to her and informs her that they’ve done a full scan and blood work, and she’s fortunate not to have any internal injuries or even a concussion. Lucy asks if there was anything unusual in her results. When Dr. Palmer tells her everything is normal, Lucy inquires if the tests could tell if she’d ever had a baby. The doctor is confused, but Jack arrives to check on Lucy.
He takes her home and tucks her into bed. When she tells him the accident happened because she was tired due to getting up in the middle of the night, he asks her to move in with him. He tells her he loves her too.
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Back on the Radar
The woman from the room stands outside a glass building, smoking a cigarette in the dark of the evening. She gets a call and immediately asks, “Which hospital?” and confirms that the scans match, which means they’ve found Lucy.
A man sits in a car outside the hospital and unwraps a sweater vest. He looks in his rearview mirror and practices smiling. Entering the hospital, wearing the sweater vest, he approaches the information desk and tells them he’s looking for his sister, who was in an accident. He shows them a picture of Lucy on his phone.
That afternoon, Charlie plays on a sprinkler slide while Lucy runs alongside and Jack barbecues. Someone watches them from the trees.
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Attacked
In the evening, Lucy packs up some things. The door opens behind her. She assumes it’s Jack and starts talking to him, but it’s the sweater vest guy, now wearing gloves and a cap. He grabs her, threatening to snap her neck if she screams. He slams her against a wall and pulls her cardigan down to expose her shoulder. Using a blacklight, he reveals a code on her upper arm. He scolds her for thinking she could set up a life for herself. She fights back.
Charlie is playing with her rocket in her room when she notices through her window that there’s a fight going on in the trailer.
In the trailer, the man breaks free. Lucy runs out of the trailer. He follows her into the fields. She uses the mechanized watering drones to evade him, but he catches her and tackles her to the ground. When she kicks him off her, he pulls a gun. Someone shoots him in the head before he can shoot Lucy. Lucy turns around and finds Charlie holding the gun from Lucy’s trailer.
Running Again
At the house, Jack comforts Charlie while Lucy packs a bag with their things. She insists they need to get away because there will be more men like the one Charlie shot coming for them. Jack demands Lucy tell him what is happening. She explains that dangerous people are after her, and she needs to get him and Charlie somewhere safe while she faces her pursuers and gets them to leave her alone for good.
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They argue, and Charlie breaks in, telling them to stop. She runs up to her room. Lucy follows and tells her that she didn’t do anything wrong. The man was a bad guy, and Charlie protected Lucy when he would’ve killed her. She promises Charlie nothing like that will happen again. While packing her stuff in the trailer, Lucy finds the assailant’s phone and blacklight.
Back to the City
They drive into the city, and Lucy drops Jack and Charlie off at the home of one of Jack’s old army friends. She goes to Settlement House to find Craig (Jonathan Whittaker). Lucy tells him they found her, and she needs to face them. He reminds her that when he found her living on the street, high on drugs, she wanted the same thing, and it just got her in trouble. She points out she had no past and wanted to fill the void back then. Now, she has a life and people who care about her. She wants to fight for them.
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She shows Craig the assailant’s phone and tells him she wants to pull GPS data off the SIM card so she can learn who he was working for. Using Craig’s computer, she pulls the location where the assailant started his day.
We Don’t Like Tom
A man and woman wearing suits enter the Additive Foundation building for a meeting with the Director. The labs they pass have vats of the pink fluid Lucy saw in the tank. The ads in the elevator feature the woman from the first room, the Director. She meets them in the conference room, where they debrief the operative Charlie shot. The visitors have concluded that Lucy killed the operative, Jack and Charlie.
The Director protests they don’t know that she’s violent or that there’s anything wrong with her executive functioning. The man, Tom (Reed Diamond), questions if the Director is sure of Lucy’s stability. He points out they’ve been trying to bring Lucy in alive for two years, but since she’s killed one of his men now, they might need to consider other options. The Director thanks him for his input, directs the two of them to update her by the end of the day, and leaves.
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With the tap running in the restroom, the Director crouches in a stall and calls a number. She gets to a woman’s voicemail. The Director leaves a tearful message, saying she’d been thinking of the woman a lot and needed to hear her voice.
Into the Fire
Using the GPS coordinates, Lucy ends up at an apartment building. Waiting outside, she sees a girl (Amanda Fix) emerge, recognizing her as her younger self. She approaches the girl, who gets upset as Lucy continues talking to her. Lucy grabs her arm and sees an identical scar. The girl yells at her and runs away. Lucy realizes one of the people in the crowd is an operative. She chases after the girl. The operative follows and finds Lucy holding the girl at gunpoint. The operative can’t answer Lucy’s questions, and Lucy refuses to give up the girl. She forces the girl into her truck and drives away.
In her office, the Director calls her Aunt Cosima (Tatiana Maslany), identifying herself as Kira. Kira confesses she’s worried she’s done something horrible.
New episodes of Orphan Black: Echoes air Sundays at 9 pm ET/PT on AMC, AMC+ and BBC America.
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