‘Orphan Black: Echoes’ Stars Talk Flashback Love Story & Understanding Why Kira Made Printout

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Orphan Black: Echoes Season 1 Episode 5 “Do I Know You?”]

Orphan Black: Echoes goes back 30 years to explain why Kira (Keeley Hawes) made the printout who now calls herself Lucy (Krysten Ritter), and it’s a love story.

In the flashbacks, Ritter plays Eleanor, a professor who catches Kira’s (August Winter, in the flashbacks) eye. There are clearly sparks, but the romance doesn’t truly begin until after Kira’s moved on to work with another professor, and we get to see it all play out, from the beginnings to moving in together to their marriage to struggles having a kid before they do have Lucas to Eleanor (Rya Kihlstedt, then) finding out she has Alzheimer’s and eventually dying. But Kira couldn’t let go of her wife completely, hence the printout of Lucy.

This episode comes at the midway point of the season, and for creator, showrunner, writer, and executive producer Anna Fishko, it was “really nice” to have “this kernel of truth” at that point “because underneath all of the fun and the big complicated plot, there is this very simple story about love and loss and two women who’ve built a life together and then that slips away.” She calls it “a little bit of a breather from the freight train of the rest of the season, both before and after. And I think it helps inform the story going forward to know that this is why Kira did what she did, and this is who Lucy was to her at a certain point in her life. I think those pieces of information become really important to float the story forward.”

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This love story answers the question that has been prevalent since it was revealed that Hawes is playing the adult version of Kira, who went through a lot because her mother is a clone in the original Orphan Black. Losing Eleanor and her grief “pushes her to this place where she’s lost of right and wrong a little bit to a certain extent, and that she’s really in this moral gray area,” Fishko tells TV Insider. “I thought it would be really interesting for the audience to put this beloved character in a place where she’s not necessarily making the choice that everybody wants her to make. And some people might feel one way about it and some people might feel a different way.”

She continues, “I really wanted the audience to ask themselves the question. If I had that tool, if I could snap my fingers and bring someone back who I loved deeply and who I had lost, maybe I would do it. And other people might feel very differently about that and especially given the sort of past that she’s lived through, I thought it was interesting for somebody who had seen science gone wrong to sort of know in the back of their mind even subconsciously that it was possible to sort of do things a little bit in a slightly shady way.”

Ritter says this episode is one of her favorites, and she enjoyed getting to step into the shoes of a different character at this point in the season. It was about “figuring out how she was going to be a little different, how she was going to move. She’s a professor. She’s in love with Kira. It was an opportunity to just play completely new colors and it was fun. It was almost like going off and doing a little movie in the middle of doing Orphan Black.”

Ritter sings the praises of Kihlstedt and Hawes and the “beautiful job” both did with that moving storyline, and she loved working with Winter. “August was so wonderful, and we had such a great connection and so much fun together on set,” she says. “They were really wonderful to work as well and a completely new flavor.”

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For Kihlstedt, coming in as Eleanor (“the OG,” she says) five episodes into the series, especially since we now know that Ritter and Amanda Fix (Jules) are playing younger versions (printouts) of the character, was about figuring out “how much” of a connective thread there would be. With Ritter playing the younger Eleanor in these flashbacks, “I felt like the best thing I could do was to show up and watch her be as open and available watching her and what she was doing on set and using that as a through line,” Kihlstedt shares.

Now the audience knows why Kira did what she did, as does Lucy, to whom the scientist told her story. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that Lucy’s perspective of Kira has changed—this is her life now, after all. “Finding all of this out for Lucy is challenging because she doesn’t feel like that person. She’s doing her own thing. She has her own life,” says Ritter. “She doesn’t have the same thoughts and the same emotions as is expected of her. And I think that’s a challenging thing, but I think it all sinks in and starts to make sense, and I think that’s why Lucy chooses this life and chooses these women ultimately.”

But the mystery of where Jules came from has yet to be solved because Kira did not print her. “Kira obviously assumed that Lucy was the only printout because she had made a deal that the printer would be destroyed, and Lucy had just assumed that Kira was responsible for the whole thing,” points out Fishko. “So it’s this common ground for the two of them to unite them together in the back half of the season to rally around Jules and also have this common target.”

What did you think of Kira and Eleanor’s love story? Has it changed how you feel about Kira making the printout of Lucy? Let us know in the comments section, below.

Orphan Black: Echoes, Sundays, 10/9c, AMC