What I’m Watching: Orphan Black

Orphan Black: Season 3, Episode 9 “Insolvent Phantom of Tomorrow” (B+)

It’s no surprise that this show would eventually bring its characters back to England given the network that it airs on, and it feels like an entirely different universe. We’ve seen how Mrs. S has this incredible past with relationships with illustrious people in every corner, but watching her sing in a bar was a completely new experience. What this hour represented was a much more vicious, violent hour than usual, with considerably more fatal bloodshed than we’ve seen in a while. It represents an amplifying of what we’ve seen so far, like the drug dealers who were giving Donnie a hard time but hadn’t actually killed anyone on screen and James Frain’s Ferdinand, who got caught trying to pull one over on Rachel but didn’t seem like a credible threat at the time. Now, Helena, hilariously posing as a sick Allison, lit up when Donnie’s babies were threatened and killed everyone in the warehouse, and Ferdinand took out two of Mrs. S’s top contacts. It’s nice to see both Helena and Gracie acclimating as much as possible to their new domestic lives, though it looks like Gracie couldn’t stick it out and is heading right back into the lion’s den. Delphine getting ready to torture Shay was intense, but it does seem like there’s something fishy there even if she wasn’t the one who took the book. The biggest shock of all was the revelation that Mrs. S’ own mother is the Castor original, and she now holds the key to just about everything, provided Mrs. S doesn’t shoot her.