Hello Clone Club and welcome to the final trip. In this week’s installment we are gifted the return of Krystal so let’s get into this, because OH MY GOD SO MUCH IS HAPPENING.
The opening sequence of 5×06, Manacled Slim Wrists, is possibly one of the best opening sequences to happen on TV ever. We have Krystal and her gal pal Brie showing their latest YouTube video to Art and Scott, in which after several minutes of perfect beauty guru satire Brie’s hair falls out and screaming ensues. Art and Scott don’t know what they’re looking at and it’s kind of the best.
At Casa de S, Sarah and S are heeding Delphine’s warning and have no intention of letting Kira go back to DYAD as long as they can help it. Now that Kira and Sarah are on good terms again, Kira is on board with whatever scheme Sarah and S cook up, which in this case involves lying to DYAD.
Can we just take a moment to appreciate the matriarchy in this unit of Clone Club? S is mothering Sarah who is mothering Kira and now that these three are teamed up, with Kira being in on everything and more of an active participant rather than the little monkey they try to hide things from, they are triple the trouble, triple the fun, and triple the feels. I just love them.
When Mr. Frontenac comes to get Kira to bring her to DYAD, she’s in bed with the flu and pukes all over his fancy shoes, so he leaves the #badassladygang alone and heads back to DYAD. Turns out S gave Kira some ipecac to make her throw up and the three of them pull off the stunt seamlessly and stay home together. But can I just say, I hope Kira gets to go back to school someday.
Mr. Frontenac reports to a meditating Rachel that Kira is home sick and she is not happy because “Mr. Westmoreland wants to start Kira’s hormone treatments,” which is one of the many incredibly disturbing lines uttered in this episode. But she lets it slide and just decides not to tell PT, assuming the delay won’t be long, and returns to meditating. I really wonder what about PT inspired the “corporate-raised psychopath” to meditate and what she is meditating on. Rachel seems to really love PT, remember when she kissed him on the cheek last week? That was so gross.
Island Report
Speaking of PT, we also learn that his real name is John and he is not 170 but rather the same age as Susan, so maybe in his 70s? His identity as PT Westmoreland is a myth he used to dupe people into basically being his servants, his underlings, to make himself king of this island and ruthlessly pursue his twisted Neolutionist agenda. It also turns out that the treatment Mud has been giving him is dialysis, and that he is also BLEEDING HEALTHY CHILDREN in order to use their blood for parabiosis.
According to Wikipedia, parabiosis is when two living things share physiological systems; in the past, it has been the basis of studies in which scientists surgically conjoined rats, but there is an ongoing human trial happening right now (#relevant) in California to study the effects of transfusing plasma from young people into old people. Which is exactly what Cosima says PT is doing- taking blood from healthy kids in the village to pump into himself in order to slow aging.
Our brave Cosima is still locked in PT’s basement, and still looking fine in that tux (though I would like for her to be freed please). Mud brings some food down to her while wearing a cowbell as some kind of weird self-imposed punishment and Cosima tries to talk her out of being PT’s “livestock,” to “break the spell,” asking her about where she’s from. Mud admits to being just a girl from Seattle (shoutout to my city!) who was a junkie and ruined everything, and that PT saved her life and showed her “wondrous things.” Cosima tells her that everything he says is a lie, and explains his plan to take more than 1,000 eggs from her 8-year-old niece (now we know how old Kira actually is!) and implant them into surrogates to create experimental children like Jannis. Mud is very torn up about her role in the whole Jannis debacle and blames herself for his death and the death of the villagers he killed, but she refuses to let Cosima out.
Also Aisha is suddenly dead, so. That sucks.
Meanwhile, in PT’s house, Susan is trying to steer PT in an ostensibly more ethical direction, but sorry Susan you’re not the most ethical person. She does seem to be the lesser of several evils though. She tells PT that with Jannis gone, he needs to focus on what’s important- Kira’s LIN28-A mutation. She says Cosima is very important to their plan because with her around, Kira (and by extension her mom) will be easier to cooperate with. PT sneers that Cosima can rot. YOU CAN ROT, PT. Susan reminds him that Cosima saw through him and that his mask is slipping, though she still calls him Percival as she says this.
Susan claims that they still need the myth of him being Westmoreland and if he doesn’t realize that he’s mad. “Was I mad when I started all this?” PT asks. Susan gets heart eyes and tells him no, he was brilliant; he tells her she was magnificent, and I throw up in my mouth a little for the millionth time. “But it was 1962, and you were a woman,” PT continues, “And what I couldn’t get with brains, I bought.”
“With fortune and fiction, that’s how the patriarchy works,” Susan says, and it is the best line of the episode hands down.
PT turns it around and blames Susan for having fictions of her own that she used to push her “crazed ideals,” and then says “You weren’t the only scientist I bought, were you?” He brings out Virginia Coady as a counter to Susan and her ideals. Remember what Cosima said to Delphine last week? “This is what he does, he divides women.” Case in point.
“No friction,” PT says, “No fire.”
Meanwhile, Ira hears that Coady, his “mother,” is on the island and can’t help but want to meet her despite Susan’s objections. He finds her in the med trailer and she tells him she is close to a Castor cure, which he will need ASAP but he doesn’t tell her that. Susan tells Ira that Coady is lying and that the best mind for his cure is Cosima. Obvs.
Toronto Report
Back at S’s house, S and Sarah are looking through some of the information Felix and Adele have sent about DYAD’s money trail. DYAD, headed by Rachel, has been busy, buying up lots of companies in health care and some other “odd” sectors, as S puts it; she wonders if maybe Delphine can give more context to that. But we don’t need Delphine for this particular mystery, because we have KRYSTAL. And guess who calls Sarah right that moment? Well, it’s Art, but he’s with Krystal.
Turns out DYAD has just bought Blue Zone Cosmetics, the company that manufactured the cream that made Brie’s hair fall out, and Krystal once again proves she’s right about *almost* everything. She also calls Sarah Australian and rude which is too perfect tbh.
Krystal also tells the team that she had been seeing the CEO of Blue Zone, Len Sipp (played by Tatiana Maslany’s real-life boyfriend Tom Cullen!), “cultivating him as a source.” She and Brie giggle over how her deep throat is totally hot, which honestly is so fun to watch. But Krystal says that he ghosted her right after “they poisoned Brie’s hair.” In actuality, Brie stole some experimental cream from him at a party he hosted that she and Krystal attended.
Sarah wants to know why DYAD is getting into cosmetics, and S responds that it’s a $700 billion with more research dollars than cancer, which shocks even Sarah. Then Sarah gets an idea I’m totally on board with: she wants Krystal to get Len Sipp to talk, and by Krystal she means herself as Krystal. No one thinks this is a good idea but they go along with it anyway because it’s not the worst idea and also because Sarah’s Krystal impression makes Kira laugh, and this is yet another moment in which the Sarah-Kira relationship sparkles.
Only Krystal has other ideas. She will make Len talk herself. She sets herself up with an earpiece and her phone as a surveillance camera and tells Art and Sarah, who are in a car outside trying to talk her out if this, that she is point and they are backup and to get over it.
The rest of this sequence is hilarious and includes such one-liners as “I’m peeing and then I’m going to kick him in the balls.”
While Sarah and Art watch Krystal repeatedly try to not get sucked into Tom Cullen’s Len Sipp’s seductive game, Brie is in the lab confessing to Scott that she stole this experimental cream but not to tell Krystal because apparently Brie’s stealing is a habit, and this is a point of contention between our gal pals. But Scott calls Sarah and Art to let them in on this and they tell Krystal, who calls Brie a klepto and desperately tries to find another tube of this stuff that Brie has at their place. (They’re “roommates” but I think we all know what that means). Only Tom Len finds it first, and gets mad that Krystal stole it from him, so she kicks him in the balls as promised, pins him to the ground and spreads it all over his bearded face. I swear fealty to you, Krystal.
Turns out the cream is a prototype for a dermal delivery gene therapy system, so that explains why DYAD is branching into cosmetics. TROUBLE.
Burning everything down
On the island, Cosima, Ira, and Susan rope Mud into helping them escape. Mud distracts PT while Susan adds something to his IV drip during his treatment in order to kill him. Ira gets Cosima out of the cage, but he’s glitching badly. He hands her something Susan has given him, because he doesn’t know how much longer he has: the proof that PT isn’t who he says he is, a photo of him and Susan in the 60s, both young. Cosima heads to the med trailer to get the cure with the plan to grab Charlotte, meet Ira and Susan at the boathouse and escape, but she is stopped by villagers who don’t understand why Aisha is dead. Neither do I to be honest, but they blame Cosima because she worked in the med trailer. She tells them all the truth about PT and shows them the picture, and a riot is born. In the chaos Cosima scoops up the cure, finds Charlotte and they head to the boathouse to wait.
Meanwhile Mud has had second thoughts (heavily influenced by guilt and shame + Coady) about hurting/potentially killing PT, so she tells Coady who heads up to save him. When Ira shows up in Susan’s greenhouse to bring her to the boathouse, his nose bleeding, he finds her dead, an IV in her arm. As much as I was a little creeped out by Ira at first, and never trusted Susan, this scene is really moving and made me realize that somewhere along the way I got invested in the Ira storyline.
Outside, the villagers are setting everything on fire. Mud stands in the middle of the chaos and sees on the ground the photo of young Susan and young PT aka John, and the devastation on her face is palpable. Up above, PT watches it all burn. No friction, no fire.
After waiting for a while in the boathouse, Charlotte says she doesn’t think they’re coming. Cosima realizes this is true. Charlotte is afraid of traveling across the water all that way, but Cosima reassures her that they have everything they need, the water is calm and that she grew up on boats, because what can’t Cosima do honestly. So the sisters head off into the darkness.
Back at S’s, Frontenac and Rachel show up to take Kira RIGHT NOW under PT’s orders. Kira goes willingly and tells S not to worry and to tell Sarah that she will continue to write her story. She has a new code name for the island: Wonderland; she also told Sarah that if she has to, she’ll hustle Rachel. All of this code will obviously be important when they need to communicate while others are listening. S looks Rachel in the eyes and says, “A day will come when you will need us.” I’m guessing that day is yesterday, but honestly eff Rachel. I love watching her but I hate her.
Patriarchy-smashing moments
- Krystal taking down Len
- Susan facing off with PT; also Susan trying to cut off the head of the monster by killing PT
- Everything that comes out of Cosima’s mouth, as always
- Villagers setting the entire freaking island on fire
Final thoughts
There is definitely a sense that everything is hurtling very fast toward something really big. I have absolute faith in this show because it continues to deliver with every episode. Even though we are getting some answers, as after every episode, I’m left with a lot of questions.
- Where is Ferdinand and when can he die/get justice?
- Does Rachel know that PT is just a guy named John? She seems to have drunk his Koolaid in an extreme way but who knows?
- Who is S’s other deep throat, if Delphine isn’t the one who led her to Coady?
- WHY IS COSIMA STILL COUGHING. WHY
I’m having a hard time accepting that there are only four more episodes of this show ever, but as long as it’s happening I’ll be here, faithfully recapping and feeling all the things. See you next week, Clone Club.
