Orphan Black Reveals Bacon-Flavored First Episode Title

By Nick Venable | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

orphan blackIf you were a particularly detail-oriented fan of the first season of BBC America’s excellent clone drama Orphan Black, then you probably noticed that the season one episode titles all have something in common: each is a piece of a quote taken from Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. This made sense, as viewers were privy to watching these disparate women as they have evolved from the same source DNA, and only the strongest of them have survived to make it to the second season. Season two will also employ similar contextual Easter eggs, only with a different thinker taking Darwin’s place.

While on a Toronto set visit, HuffPost TV managed to wring the title of the first episode from creators John Fawcett and Graeme Manson. The season will kick off with “Nature Under Constraint and Vexed,” which doesn’t have quite the ring of “The Trouble with Tribbles,” but the meaning runs a little deeper. The title is taken from Plan of the Work by Francis Bacon, specifically the third part, “The Phenomena of the Universe; or a Natural and Experimental History for the Foundation of Philosophy.” In fact, all of this season’s quotes will come from Bacon, a multi-talented philosopher and essayist whose approach to the world was from the stance that science should be used to help advance humanity. He was both an experimenter and an investigator, always on the hunt for answers.

Granted, he was a lot more than that reductive description, but those are the elements of his life that inform the creators’ decision to use Bacon’s quotes throughout the season. I admittedly would have been fine with them using quotes about bacon, but I understand this isn’t optimal. Everything that we know about this season involves heightened drama, bigger mysteries, and conflicted characters.

The season will kick off right after the last one ended, with Sarah freaking out over the disappearance of her daughter Kira and adopted mother Mrs. S. She tries negotiating with the Dyad Institute’s home-clone Rachel, but that probably won’t well. Everyone’s drama is getting more intense, from Cosima’s illness to Alison’s guilt over Aynsley’s death, and there are a handful of new characters to bounce off of Tatiana Maslany’s superior acting skills. The latest cast addition is The Killing‘s Michelle Forbes, who joins Treme‘s Michiel Huisman, Suits‘ Patrick J. Adams, and Nikita alums Ari Mullen and Peter Outerbridge.

Sadly, we’ll still have to wait until the show premieres on April 19 to see what’ll happen to these characters. Keep an eye out for the Canadian Screen Awards on March 9, as Orphan Black has received a whopping 14 nominations. But for now, check out the teaser below, along with a Tumblr-ized Q&A with Michael Mando, who is superb as the slimy ex-boyfriend Vic.