Orphan Black: Echoes Reveals SPOILER’s Backstory

The first season of Orphan Black: Echoes is officially at its midway point, offering a surprising new chapter in the world of the fan-favorite sci-fi series Orphan Black. Set decades into the future, the series has been crafting its own unexpected cloning conspiracy, and in this week’s episode, we learned some massive revelations about one of the series’ central protagonists, Dr. Kira Manning (Keeley Hawes). Spoilers for the fifth episode of Orphan Black: Echoes, “Do I Know You?”, below! Only look if you want to know!

The episode jumps back decades in time to 2030, as a younger Kira Manning (August Winter) is attending college. She begins to develop feelings for one of her professors, Eleanor Miller (Krysten Ritter), even transferring departments so she can’t further complicate their relationship. Over the course of several years, Kira and Eleanor fall in love, move in together, get married, and have a son together. Simultaneously, Kira is ambitiously continuing her research surrounding “printing” human DNA, which could theoretically be used to revolutionize the organ transplant industry. This catches the eye of wealthy investor Paul Darros (James Hiroyuki Liao), who agrees to provide the resources to fully create the printer.

Decades later, Kira’s printer is debuted to the public as a massive success, as Eleanor (now played by Rya Kihlstedt) and their son Lucas (Jaeden Noel) watch on with pride. Darros approaches Kira about potentially using the device to print an entire human being, but Kira is adamantly against it, given her own connection to the history of human cloning. Things get complicated when Eleanor begins to display signs of Alzheimer’s and rapidly loses her memory, causing Kira to find additional ways to save her. Ultimately, Eleanor passes away, which motivates Kira to do something drastic — use the machine to print a clone of Eleanor, from data from one of her previous vital scans. While this clone would be several decades younger, closer to the age when Kira and Eleanor first met, Kira believes that her genesis would give her more time to find a cure for the Alzheimer’s.

Kira prints the Eleanor clone, but the woman has no memory of or fondness towards Kira, and quickly escapes to forge a new life for herself. We now know that this clone is Lucy (Krysten Ritter), whose life we have followed for most of the series thus far. In the present day, we also learn that Jules (Amanda Fix), the teenaged clone of Lucy — and now, of Eleanor — was not printed by Kira. Kira believed that the printer had been destroyed after she created Lucy, and now knows that someone else has it in their possession.

This reveal adds a number of interesting layers to the mythos of Orphan Black: Echoes — for starters, it reveals the “original” woman that Lucy and Jules were based on, a mystery that has been lingering across most of the season. It also complicates Kira’s story, both in Echoes and her childhood during the events of Orphan Black, as her love for Eleanor was strong enough to override her personal feelings and history about the dangers of human cloning.

New episodes of Orphan Black: Echoes air Sundays at 10/9c on AMC, BBC America, and AMC+.