Orphan Black: Echoes – Season 1 Episode 1 Recap & Review

Pilot

Episode 1 of Orphan Black: Echoes begins in 2050 with Lucy waking up in a living room and seeing a female doctor. She runs a couple of tests but Lucy’s long-term memory is shot and she is disoriented. The doctor shows her the photo of a baby but Lucy can’t remember him. She panics and the doctor sedates her and leaves. Lucy wakes up alone and uses her instinct to break out of the room.

Turns out, she is in an Additive Foundation lab where she finds printed body parts. She finds a half-printed body in pink ink when the female doctor catches her. She tries to explain that Lucy has been modelled after a specimen and is a 4-D printed being. This doesn’t help as a scared Lucy bolts before security can pin her down.

It cuts to 2 years later with Lucy living in the countryside. She works on a farm and lives in a rented trailer. She is having a secret affair with her landlord, Jack who is a retired army medic and is super friendly with his mute daughter, Charlie.

Charlie keeps sneaking into her trailer and going through her things like her gun and her research diary but Lucy finds her endearing. She wants Charlie to know about their relationship as she loves Jack but he is wary since Charlie was severely heartbroken after her mother left. He also can’t seem to learn more about Lucy’s past. 

As for Lucy, all is not well as she keeps having a dream in which her younger self is holding a bloody knife and there is blood on the floor. She is so in a daze, at work, she runs into a car and has to be taken to a hospital. The doctors don’t find anything out of the ordinary which has her relieved. Meanwhile, a worried Jack doesn’t want to be apart from Lucy and asks her to move in with him and Charlie and she is overjoyed.

However, Lucy’s tests catch the eye of a doctor who is under Additive’s payroll and the female doctor is informed. Of course, on the night Lucy is preparing to move out, a bounty hunter finds her as her address was filled in at the hospital. He shines a UV light on her arm which shows an Additive imprint. As Lucy struggles and escapes into the farm, Charlie watches from the window.

Just as the bounty hunter pulls out his gun, Charlie arrives with Lucy’s gun and shoots him. It cuts to a horrified Jack and shaken Charlie being ushered into a safe home while Lucy decides to stop Additive once and for all. 

She arrives at a sober resettlement home run by a Craig who was the one who had found her drugged out after she had escaped Additive. She hopes to find them and tell them to leave her alone which she does by using the bounty hunter’s sim card to find his last location.

Meanwhile, Additive’s security detail is run by Tom who believes that Lucy shot his bounty hunter and so she is defective, dangerous and a liability. He wants to kill her but the female doctor who is also Additive’s director stops him. She is later seen tearing up as she calls a woman but only gets to voicemail.

Back to Lucy, as she loiters around the building where the bounty hunter was last seen, she sees a young girl who looks exactly like her when she was young. Surprised, she bumps into her and sees that the young girl is listening to Lucy’s favourite song – Bowie’s Janine. Both also share a suture mark on their wrist. She notices a bodyguard and takes the young girl hostage.

While the girl is clueless about the situation, Lucy tries to get intel from the bodyguard as she wonders if the girl is also printed from the same model as she is. With the bodyguard being unhelpful, Lucy runs off with the girl.

At the end of Orphan Black: Echoes Episode 1, the female doctor calls “Aunt Cosima” as she is worried she may have done something bad. It cuts to her desk where she has photos of Orphan Black characters – Cosima, Siobhan, Felix, Sara and baby Kira. This means that the female doctor is grown-up Kira, Sara’s daughter.

The Episode Review

Orphan Black: Echoes Episode 1 kicks off with an exciting storyline of Lucy being a clone who has been 4D printed and is being chased by her makers as she tries to learn more about herself while living her life. So far, it is easy to follow but that’s what we said for Orphan Black before it got so complex.

We do have to give a shoutout to the writers for cleverly verbalising the tiny important actions we may have missed. But they do have to be wary about how often they use this trope cause it could just get weary after a point.

We also get some super cool Orphan Black easter eggs, the main one being the fact that the female doctor, one of the main protagonists is none other than baby Kira Manning from the OG show.

And while we may have thought she was calling the original specimen that Lucy is based on in that voicemail scene, it just seems that it may have been a call to none other than her mother, Sara. We doubt that Tatiana Maslany is making a cameo in this spin-off but hey, we’ll take what we can get.