'Orphan Black' Season 4 News, Spoilers: Tatiana Maslany Talks Season Premiere, Responds To Reactions To LGBT Character's Death
Canadian sci-fi thriller "Orphan Black" debuted its fourth season on Thursday, April 14, with a surprising episode that was focused mainly on Beth Childs (Tatiana Maslany), the clone whose suicide kicked off the entire series back in the pilot episode. Childs' death paved the way for Sarah Manning (also Maslany) taking on her role in the fight for the Leda clones.
The season 4 opener was a breath of fresh air for loyal "Orphan Black" fans, many of whom have found the previous seasons' frenzied introduction of new characters and increasingly complicated twists and turns downright confusing and overwhelming. Fortunately, the popular biopunk drama/thriller has whisked its fans back to the beginning and taken a step back from season 3's complex overlapping stories.
"Orphan Black" co-creator John Fawcett spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about the decision to shoot a Beth-centric episode, admitting that it was something they had been considering since season 1. But the point at which the concept began to be seriously planned was after fans responded favorably to the idea back in 2013.
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"I remember being at Comic-Con in July 2013 and [I] mentioned the concept of a Beth episode and the room went crazy," Fawcett said.
With Beth's story having been told in the season 4 premiere, could she re-appear again in the current season?
Though Maslany admitted that she is not at liberty to talk about the future of "Orphan Black," she did tell THR, "… It's less about Beth and more a sense of now discovering the origins of things."
"That's a big theme this season. We're back to the mystery of it all and the conspiracy and that search for identity," she explained.
Maslany also recently spoke out about the fan backlash on the season 3 finale death of Delphine (Évelyne Brochu), the on-again, off-again love interest of Cosima, one of the clones. In the season 3 ender, Delphine was shot and presumed dead.
With the recent outcry against the series of LGBT character deaths in various popular shows, what many have deemed to be the networks falling back on the "Bury Your Gays" trope, several "Orphan Black" fans recently took to social media to question the decision to kill off Delphine.
"There's a bizarre focus on the fact that she's bisexual or a lesbian and has been killed off, and that really reduces her to one thing in representing something, as opposed to being an individual," Maslany told The Star.
According to the "Orphan Black" actress and producer, there is so much more to Delphine than just her sexuality and to think about her death as the killing off of an LGBT character is "reductive."
"Orphan Black" airs Thursdays at 10 p.m. on BBC America and on Canadian co-producer Space.
