Orphan Black first graced our screens in 2013 when Sarah Manning (Tatiana Maslany) realizes she has multiple sister clones (sestras) following the death of a girl who looks just like her. It ran for five seasons until 2017. The show has jumped forward in time to 2052 and is back for a sixth season called Orphan Black: Echoes.
“It was really the producers of the original show and AMC who came to me. They wanted to reboot the show,” showrunmner Anna Fishko tells Creative Screenwriting Magazine. The fan base persisted for years and it was time for a follow up.
“Obviously, it’s complicated to bring back something that was so beloved and do it in a new way that felt fresh and interesting,” continues Fishko. The process began with identifying the elements of the original show that audiences most cared about. “I think those conversations informed what we did and how we built the story from the ground up.”
The creators wanted to satisfy a new audience, but also attract new viewers who weren’t required to be overly familiar with the first season.
“We wanted a clean entry point, but we also wanted to make sure that we were putting those Easter eggs in there for the fans of the original show and finding a way to create that feeling of found family and that same kind of sisterhood. We wanted to find ways to talk about similar themes about identity, science and society.”
Anna Fishko. Photo by Todd Williamson/ AMC Network
There were many discussions on which characters would be carried over into the new season as well as which new ones will be introduced, such as Lucy (Kristen Ritter). For starters, Sarah Manning wouldn’t appear in Echoes. That immediately changed teh dynamics. Her character is replaced with Kira Manning (Keeley Hawes). Kira was a little girl in the original series.
“We talked a lot about about what might have happened to her in the intervening years between the end of the original show and where we find her in the new show. Then we let that inform how she might have continued relationships with some of these characters from the original show that we wanted to be able to bring back because people love them so much.”
Pop And Fun
Orphan Black: Echoes presents as a sci-fi thriller. Fishko mentions that it also has a little more “pop and fun” to elevate it.
The genre demands extensive plotting and world building. “Many of the key plot points are deliberately pulled out of the character elements. It was important to know where I was going, because there are so many plot twists. I had a very specific end point that I was trying to get to. And I knew a little bit about what was going to happen in the middle,” states Fishko.
“Keeping everybody’s motivations clear and understanding what they’re hiding, what the audience knows and doesn’t know about them is tricky,” she mentions.
A solid outline was written for the entire season. Anna Fishko wrote the pilot on her own to show network executives. She also wrote a format document, a 15 – 18 page bible of the big story arcs in the season. She later pitched the season in more granular detail to illustrate how the story was going to work.
When the show was greenlit and a full writers’ room was opened, the writers would work on one episode at a time. They would discuss what was going to happen in every scene before that writer would be sent off to write a comprehensive outline. The outline would then be approved by Boat Rocker Studios and AMC Networks before the writer wrote the script.
Breaking the stories for each episode took roughly about ten days and then another ten says was allocated to writing outlines. After approval, writers were given around two weeks to write their drafts. “Before we would send a draft to the studio and the network, we would probably do at least one or two internal drafts just for the writer.”
After that, there were probably around two drafts and a polish before each script went into production.
Themes
Orphan Black: Echoes illustrates the ethical conundrum of cloning and identity. Fishko is especially interested in this morally-gray area from the characters’ points of view.
“I wanted to make sure that audiences could put themselves in a position of Kira’s life experience to ask what they would do if they access to that cloning tool. If I had experienced this really devastating thing, would I do the same thing? And I thought it would kind of be 50/50.” Echoes prefers to invite debate rather than provide a definitive answer.
Young Kira Manning (August Winter) and Lucy (Krysten Ritter) Photo by Sophie Giraud/ AMC
Anna Fishko reduced Orphan Black: Echoes to a few central questions. “I think the question is what makes us who we are? Is it our physical bodies? Is it our memories? Is it our connections to the people around us? Is it our lived experience? Is it our path that we learn or how we’re perceived by ourselves and by others?”
Orphan Black: Echoes is very female-centric in its characters and that feeling of sisterhood.
“There’s a little bit more of a kind of maternal dynamic in the sisterhood here than in the original, because you get this younger version a of middle-aged, and older version of the same person. This allows for this interesting question, ‘What would I say to my younger self if I had the opportunity to go back and talk to them, and what would I say to my older self once I’d seen the decisions that they’d made?’ muses Fishko.
A key concern in writing Orphan Black: Echoes was working out how certain characters connected to one another.
“There was one episode where we were really trying to figure out how to hide the ball a little bit around one character. And it was really tricky to figure out how to place him in the episode so that we didn’t exactly know who he was for a while, but we also needed him to be able to interact with the other characters and function for us. It took a long time to figure out how to introduce him and how to play him in such a way that we weren’t shining too bright a light on him.”
Anna Fishko argues Episode 5, titled Do I Know You? is one of the more important episodes where Kira’s research is recognized by neuroscientist Eleanor Miller (Rya Kihlstedt) and billionaire Paul Darros (James Hiroyuki Liao) who explain the background to the cloning and memory loss. “It’s a human story of love and loss. It anchors the story with something that feels real and personal. That makes all of the fun of the rest of it a little more nuanced.”
“That’s probably the reason why it’s right in the middle of the season is because it feels like the core of the show on some level.”
Final Thoughts
Anna Fishko believes that the most successful writers are “carefully observant of the world.”
“I think it’s very important to take the time to build the characters. That can often result in people feeling like the story isn’t moving quickly enough. But I feel that if we don’t care about the characters, we’re not going to care whether they live or die.”
“If we don’t understand them, or connect with them, in a human way deeply from the beginning, then it doesn’t matter if they’re in a zombie apocalypse, a sci-fi show or in a period piece. They won’t feel real to the audience.“
