Orphan Black: Echoes: 1x05 Do I Know You?
I have to believe that a world with her in it, even if it’s complicated, is better than a world without her.
One of the questions behind the mystery of Echoes is how Kira Manning, daughter of Sarah, the result of a secretive and illegal science experiment that was entangled with a deeply conspiratorial corporate power structure, ended up creating Lucy. Nobody should have been better equipped to comprehend the dangers of allowing a billionaire so much control over her research, and nobody should have been better equipped to consider the ethics of printing an entire human being.
Do I Know You?, so far the best episode of the show, proposes a compelling backstory to comprehend how Kira was pushed to the decision. This is a heartbreaking love story, told gently from beginning to what would have conventionally been the end, had it not been for Kira’s scientific ability to maneuver around death. It makes it clear that Echoes, more than the original show ever was, has an ambition beyond telling a story about agency and breaking free from control: it’s about grief and death, and the meaning that both provide to those left behind, and what happens when the survivors find it impossible to move on, or are provided with a loophole. And I think it is fair to state this from the beginning: it’s not really a loophole, because if following Lucy (and Jules) has taught us anything, it’s that they are individuals with their own paths in life. They are not bound by the identity of their original, and have lived distinctive lives (again, the role of nurture). They are not a copy in the sense of perfect replication of identity – if anything, the blueprint provides them with a range of potential that could spin off into a wide variety of different lives.
A young Kira Manning, maybe in her mid-twenties at that stage (and portrayed fantastically by August Winter, who gives her a shyness and tenderness in this episode that makes me wish they had gotten more opportunities to play her), is falling in love with Eleanor Miller, a researcher who is leading a trial to utilise an existing muscle-spasm drug to stall Alzheimer’s. We’ll later learn that Eleanor has dedicated herself to that research because her mother developed early-onset Alzheimer’s, that after a difficult childhood (of which we’ve seen hints through Lucy and Jules’ shared memory and their mother’s vague statements), she is now living through the trauma of slowly losing her mother. It’s clear that Kira’s feelings are reciprocated – Eleanor is subtle about it, but the episode conveys perfectly how aware they are of each other whenever they’re in the same room. For professional reasons (because she always wanted to get into bio-engineering) and to get away from the distraction, Kira changes to a different programme, but they meet again later, at a function, and without the constrictions of a student-teacher relationship, their love blossoms. Kira says that “she’s hiding most of the time, with most of the people in her life”, but she doesn’t have to with Eleanor, who seems to get her in a way that nobody else does. It’s such a compelling and true portrayal of the serendipity of finding someone, with such an immediate clarity that it is serious and life-changing. Echoes gives us glimpses of their shared life together, especially the profound sense of pride Eleanor feels whenever Kira’s project of printing organs makes progress. They are both brilliant, and devoted to each other, as they move through moving in with each other and discussing children. In fact, it’s Eleanor who encourages Kira to accept funding for her project from Paul Darros – she’s cynical about his motives, but thinks that if his money can affect positive change, she should take it.
Time passes. Kira, who didn’t seem to be sure about having children before, carries Lucas because Eleanor can’t – the repeating phrase of “Do I know you? / I thought you might.”, with different meaning each time, also reminds us that people in relationship grow and change with each other, that their shared life and shared experiences affect them as a unit. Suddenly, it’s 2050 (Eleanor is now played by Rya Kihlstedt, Kira by Keeley Hawes). Kira has moved from her success of printing a human heart to running the Additive Foundation, with Darros’ funding. Ominously, he asks her where her research will go next and enquires about the possibility of printing a whole person, just for the purpose of “unfettered research”, what they’ll “discover along the way”. Deeply disturbed, Kira reminds Paul of how immoral it would be. Her reaction is still in line with what we would expect of Sarah Manning’s daughter, of Cosima’s niece.
The turning point comes when Eleanor begins experiencing the first symptoms of early-onset Alzheimer’s, now at the same age as her mother was when she did. She leaves to go to the pool, the one activity that has consistently provided her solace, and immediately gets lost in a neighbourhood she should know like the back of her hand. Desperate, she tries to find her way but keeps returning to the same point, increasingly distressed and confused. It’s a harrowing depiction of the experience, especially with the knowledge that Eleanor is aware of what will happen next, and what it will do to the people she loves. Kira jumps to hopeful ideas about possible treatments, but Eleanor knows that the drug she developed won’t help. She decides to keep Lucas in the dark because she doesn’t want to interrupt his life the way hers was. It’s a kind of isolation that she imposes on Kira, who is not only losing the one person who understands her, that she’s shared her life with, but is also robbed of the chance to share this burden with their son. Kira asks Josh, her assistant, to help her develop neuron printing, which could help, but the surgery is risky. When Eleanor forgets their son – a whole person, erased from her memory – she decides to go ahead, a decision she has to make alone because Eleanor can no longer meaningfully consent to her own treatment.
I’ve been a fan of Keeley Hawes for a long time (not so much just from Tipping the Velvet, but her performance in Spooks and Line of Duty, both radically different characters from Kira), and the way she portrays Kira’s loneliness and desperation is stunning. The episode has taken such immense care with their relationship, to make it clear what’s at stake, and what it means for Kira to lose that anchor, a life partner that she has shared everything with. The surgery is successfully and Eleanor returns to her own self, as if nothing ever happened – like a deus ex machina, an act of god, a miracle too great to be believed. It reverses the particular cruelty of the ambiguous loss that Alzheimer’s causes, having to grief the loss of a person when they’re still alive, losing bits and pieces over time without any real hope of reversing it. They are “them” again, for a night at least, but when Kira wakes up the next morning, Eleanor is dead.
This whole show hinges on Kira’s motivation, on the moment she wakes up and finds the love of her life dead beside her. It’s palpable, sheer, impossible grief. It overrides any ethical concern she previously held about Darros’ suggestion, because life without Eleanor is impossible. Later, talking about it with Lucy, who doesn’t quite understand, she says that she “lost her, and then lost my way” – but there is a sense here that Kira lost her mind, not just her way – she keeps his mother’s death secret from Lucas, she somehow disposes of the body without a funeral, secretly, she prints Lucy, making a less-than foolproof plan to keep the precise specs of her machine secret from Darros, because she already knows what kind of Pandora’s box she opening. Her only connection to reality is Josh, who adores her enough that he says yes to everything she asks of him, in spite of his own concerns. She tells Lucy that she has to believe in a world with Eleanor in it is better, even if it’s complicated, but Lucy reminds her that she isn’t Eleanor: that the entire venture was foolish because the printing process did not truly capture whatever it is that animates an individual person (I guess for the purpose of simplicity, we could call it a “soul” or “spark”). Lucy is her own person, who has fallen in love with someone else and has had a whole different life. It’s such a compelling moment between these two characters. Lucy is arguing for her own autonomy, to a creator she thinks has acted irresponsibly but without whom she would not exist. Kira is sitting opposite someone who looks exactly like the love of her life 20 years ago, but who is a complete stranger that she is also existentially responsible for. Kira understands that Lucy is not Eleanor, but she is also not telling Lucy the most damning part of the story, because she knows that it is beyond understanding.
Random notes:
I’ve recapped most of this season so far having not watched ahead, but I’ve seen the next episode already – and I feel that Kira’s omission here is very important, it’s sort of a turning point for her character, but it was probably a good idea not to have that included in this episode yet, because it would have taken away some of the emotional impact of the love story itself, or cheapened it somehow as a self-contained thing that exists.
Lucy finds out that the tattoo number is in fact not a copyright or patent, but a replication of a tattoo that Eleanor and Kira got together, the first line of a poem by W.S. Merwin: “Let me imagine that we will come again / when we want to and it will be spring”.
The more important revelation is that Kira has no idea who Jules is, or that she exists. Clearly her plan of keeping Darros from using the machine for his own purposes has failed, and we all know who the weakest link in that equation was.
It’s so interesting to pick up on all the ways in which Eleanor differs from Lucy (the equivalent in terms of different life experiences between these two would be Sarah and Cosima) – in a way, Krysten Ritter’s performance is more subtle. Eleanor is very stable and confident through her career, an anchor that Lucy doesn’t have.
Do we think that Lucy chose her own name based on a vague memory of Lucas?
Very effective music choices in this episode, especially Big Thief’s Change.
I think it’s also very interesting that all three of them – Eleanor, Lucy, and Jules – have the same access to a kind of charisma that seems to create a gravity well of impact on people around them. Eleanor’s flirting with Kira was… something.