Orphan Black: Echoes’ Krysten Ritter Explains Why Lucy Feels ‘Very Rebellious’ After Learning Kira’s Story

After Kira saved Lucy from Darros’ goons last week, she promised to tell Lucy everything. About Lucy’s identity. About the boy in the drawing. About who Kira even was. In Sunday’s episode of Orphan Black: Echoes , Sarah Manning’s daughter kept her word.

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Telling her backstory to Lucy, we flash back 20 years to 2030, where Kira is a grad student. Her professor and advisor is a younger version of Dr. Eleanor Miller (played by Krysten Ritter!), who we know eventually became Kira’s wife. Despite Kira’s persistence on staying focused on her work, the chemistry between the women is real. After a holiday party, Dr. Miller reveals that she knows all about Kira’s mom and childhood, and says that her own mother was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. It’s that night where they share their first kiss.

Six months later, Kira is presenting her work — bioprinting organs for patients in need. It’s around this time where she meets Darros, a presumably loaded man who’s interested in funding her work. When we jump back to 2050, Darros begins questioning Kira about taking her printing one step further into cloning. She’s repulsed at first, for obvious reasons. But when Eleanor ultimately gets diagnosed with her mother’s illness, Kira begins to push the ethics and boundaries of her work. After a risky surgery appears to go OK, Eleanor dies, prompting Kira to approach Darros for more funding. She’s ready to dip her toes into the world of cloning against her better judgment.

And thus, Lucy is Eleanor. A younger cloned version. And while her mere existence won’t solve the Alzheimer’s problem, it gives Kira another 20-some-odd years to try and figure out how to slow down brain deterioration in patients who are afflicted with the disease. Despite now knowing the truth, Lucy inquires about Jules. Kira says she disabled the printer and that the tech is gone. “I have no idea who you’re talking about,” Kira replies in shock.

“Yeah, it is the pivotal moment,” Krysten Ritter tells TVLine. “I think it was my favorite episode. When I read it, I felt very affected by it and very affected by Eleanor and dealing with the onset of Alzheimer’s and what that is doing to her, all of it. I just felt like it was very emotional and very moving, very relationship-driven.”

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“I think when Lucy finds out, she feels she’s very rebellious against it,” the actress adds. “She feels it’s so unfair. She didn’t ask for that. She doesn’t feel the way that she’s supposed to feel. She doesn’t remember the things that she’s supposed to remember. So I think it’s frustrating. It’s confusing. I think she’s moved by the love story, but it doesn’t change the fact that she doesn’t feel like her. She’s not her, she’s her own person. I think it’s a pretty challenging place to be. Because of that, I think she has certain feelings for Kira that she doesn’t know what to do with, and I think that’s what we’re always playing with. It’s like nature vs. nurture, and love and how deep does that go? What’s in your DNA? What’s in your cells? It puts Lucy [in] a real place of conflict between this world that she’s getting caught up in and these women vs. Jack and Charlie.”

The offshoot’s layered storytelling and multiple timelines crack wide open with these Episode 5 reveals, which creator Anna Fishko says boil down to “a simple love story.”

“In a lot of ways that was the easiest episode to do because it was just a simple love story and it didn’t have so many complicated plot moves in it,” she says. “It was a straightforward story about two women falling in love and building a life together. I wanted to make sure that we took the time that we needed to really understand their connection and bond so that as Eleanor’s character starts to kind of slip, away in different ways, we really feel that loss and we understand what she meant to Kira. So it was a very lovely ‘pause for a moment’ in the freight train of the rest of the show.”

Thoughts on Episode 5’s big reveals? Any running theories about Jules? Drop ’em in the comments below!

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