Orphan Black, whose third season begins this week, is the only show on television where you’ll hear this line: “Enjoy your oophorectomy!” The science-fiction series, which airs in the United States on BBC America, is filmed in Ontario and set, oh, somewhere nearby, right about now, in a world where doctors surgically remove the eggs from women’s bodies, freeze them, defrost them, and implant them in the uteruses of other women, or, sometimes, of the same women; sometimes they remove whole ovaries. It depends. The thing is: there are a lot of women. The show’s lush with them. It’s shocking.

Orphan Black stars the prodigiously talented twenty-nine-year-old Tatiana Maslany as a small population of clones. Maslany is the best thing about Orphan Black, with the writing a close second. As revealed in the show’s first two seasons, the characters played by Maslany are the product, or maybe it’s better to call them the progeny, of Project LEDA, a series of experiments conducted in a laboratory in the United Kingdom in the nineteen-eighties by a pair of geneticists named Susan and Ethan Duncan. Their work was illegal, and rather remarkably far ahead of the real-world cloning of Dolly the sheep, in Edinburgh, in 1996. (Over the past several decades, human cloning has been condemned or banned by more than a dozen American states, by many countries, and by the United Nations.) The clones the Duncans created in their laboratory were implanted, as fertilized eggs, into surrogate mothers, and grew up while under secret surveillance by “monitors” employed by the Dyad Institute, a sort of rogue genetics outfit lately headed by an evil clone named Rachel (Maslany), who was raised by the Duncans before their lab was destroyed in a fire that melted the floppy disks containing the genome sequence necessary to make more clones. That said, there’s room to hope that there are more clones still out there, and that Maslany will be able to try out a few more accents, hair styles, wardrobes, and postures. Really, she is breathtaking. Partly, that has to do with her versatility. But it also has to do with scarcity. There are very few good roles for women on television, and Maslany plays nine of them.

Review from New Yorker.com