In the five seasons that the science fiction series
Orphan Black
lasted (2013-2017), actress Tatiana Maslany played more than a dozen clones.
As they tried to find out who they really were, they found themselves immersed in an intricate conspiracy in which their lives were at stake.
The production, which revealed to the world the acting abilities of its protagonist and for which she won, among other awards, an Emmy award, became a cult series with a large group of followers.
Its universe is now expanding with
Orphan Black: Echoes,
with episodes every Monday on Syfy.
Another science fiction story that, like the original, explores human identity and pushes current science to the limits.
In
Orphan Black: Echoes
, a woman wakes up with no memory of who she is or anything from her past.
She soon discovers that she is in a place full of cutting-edge technology where, as they explain, human body parts are created with revolutionary four-dimensional printing technology.
“We didn't want to have clones again, we didn't want to do exactly the same thing again.
So instead of exporting the conflict between nature and nurture, we opened it up a little more to the idea of how technology is becoming more and more part of the story of our creation,” explains Anna Fishko, head of the new series. , in a video call interview.
“We ask similar questions about what makes us who we are, but we wrap it with technology, which I think is very relevant seeing where science is today,” she continues.
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With a slower pace than the original series,
Orphan Black: Echoes
focuses, in addition to the scientific section, on the emotions of the characters.
Although it wanted to mark distances from the mother story (in fact, the new one is set in the future, in 2052), there will also be some nods to its origins that its followers will recognize, such as the return of some characters.
But the screenwriter emphasizes the importance they gave to viewers who came to it for the first time to be able to understand everything that was happening.
This added difficulty to the writing task.
“It's always difficult trying to give everyone what they want.
We tried to figure out what things we needed that people loved in the original series and what things people who didn't see it could connect to our story.
And then taking into account what television is like today and making the series have a contemporary tone.
It was complicated,” says Fishko.
Keeley Hawes, in 'Orphan Black: Echoes'.
Although it may seem like fiction, the technology that appears in the series has real foundations.
“We spent a lot of time talking to a scientist at Wake Forest University who runs a tissue printing laboratory and he gave us very interesting information.
They are making incredible advances in printing brain tissue, they print small hearts... I didn't know they had come this far.
They were very interesting conversations but they were a little scary,” explains the screenwriter and producer of the series.
Actress Krysten Ritter (
Jessica Jones
, Breaking Bad
) now plays the protagonist with a role very different from the one Maslany faced at the time.
Faced with the multiplicity of characters that her predecessor played, with very different appearances, accents and personalities and on many occasions with several of these clones on screen at the same time, Kyrsten Ritter can focus on a single character.
She was chosen because of her ability to combine toughness and vulnerability in her expression, in Fishko's words.
“I imagined someone who was a survivor, who had experienced something very difficult and had found a way to build a whole new life.
She has that hardness on the outside and on the inside a vulnerability in search of connection and stability, she wants to find who she is and what her story is,” explains the screenwriter.
In the series she is accompanied by the British Keeley Hawes (
The Durrells,
Bodyguard
) in a mysterious role that is related to the technological part of the story.
Fishko, who has worked on series such as
Fear the Walking Dead
,
Tyrant
or
Do You Know Who He Is?
, assures that for her it is more complicated to take an already created universe to give birth to a new story, as she has done on this occasion, than to invent a fictional world from scratch.
“There are always a lot of people giving their opinion on how you have to treat it.
Also, this time we wanted to figure out how to honor the fans of the original series and the great work they did with it.
And I was dealing with some characters that people have already spent a lot of time with and you have to think about how they have changed in the 35 years they have been in fiction,” the screenwriter completes.
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