Oh, I get it, you guys are cynical

[akirlu]

Shorter Any Episode of Orphan Black:

Oh, twist! She's an ally!
Oh, twist! She's an enemy!
Oh, twist! She's an ally!
Oh, er, she's dead.

Next episode: No, just kidding. Not dead.

Comments

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Cynicism aside, tell me that you aren't impressed by Tatiana Maslany's acting. Go ahead, I dare you. Gods, she's good.

I haven't finished the second season, yet. The first season was badly marred, in my opinion, by the idea that clones would have the same finger prints. While this is completely nuts, and pretty much anyone should know better, it was exacerbated enormously by the idea that Beth's prints weren't on file. She's a working detective, for fuck's sake. Her prints have to be on file in order to exclude her when they're evaluating crime scene evidence. Arghhhhhhh.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

No, no, Tatiana Maslany is excellent, of course. I just hit points of exasperation with the oh-psych!-here's-another-layer plotting style, and at those points it's watching her that keeps me coming back to it.

And yeah, detectives. Gots prints on file. Duh.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

Um, why wouldn't clones have the same fingerprints? Are fingerprints based on astrological sign rather than genetics?

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Clones _don't_ have the same fingerprints. We know this. Cally and Cassie Soukup do not have the same fingerprints. Fingerprints, like the color pattern of fur in cats, is probably determined by hormonal and/or thermal influences in the womb. Clone a cat, you don't get the same color patterns. (There was a briefly lived cloning company that didn't realize this, evidently. They promised to clone you your dead pet as a replacement, and people were hugely disappointed that the cloned cat -- the case I read about was a cat -- didn't look anything like their dear, deceased pet.) There's been a huge amount of fascinating research being done, these days, into just how incredibly important gestational environment is in how genes are expressed. Heredity is weirder than thought.

However, even if the clones did have the same finger prints, which seems difficult to manage and vanishingly unlikely, the fact that one of the clones was a detective would have _had_ to mean that her finger prints were on file, and there were several important plot points that would have been trashed if that had been the case.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

In fact, my imperfect memory suggests that the first cat cloned was a calico or tortie and that it was already known before that happened that calico/tortie patterns are not genetically determined.

[u-must-b-joking.livejournal.com]

I really did give the show the old college try but people kept being utter jerks, so I bailed. I need a character to hang my emotional hat on or I ...just...can't.