Tuned In: ‘Orphan Black’, ‘Buffy’, And ‘Fringe’: Why Science Fiction Is Fixated On Doppelgangers

Tuned In is Junkee’s fortnightly TV column. This contains spoilers of Fringe’s first season, and Lost’s sixth.

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Orphan Black wrapped up another white-knuckle third season on Friday. As the monstrous nature of the enemy revealed itself piece by piece, the army of clones that was fighting it also grew. Our protagonist, Sarah Manning, is repeatedly confronted with a question that plagues us all, even those of us who live outside the realms of science fiction: what would we be like if our lives had been different? If we grew up in a different place, more money, less money, a kinder mother, a closer father. And, if we’d made different choices, who would we have become?

The doppelganger device is familiar to most lovers of science fiction. Star Trek had a Mirror Universe. Superman has Bizzaro World (as does Seinfeld). A handful of Doctor Who episodes have presented Doctor doubles and companion clones. The Vampire Diaries has a crypt-full, often literally.

The much beloved Buffy The Vampire Slayer also used doppelgangers to great effect. Angelus is shaped by the same fixation with Buffy as his souled self, his love twisted into a dark, disturbing force intent on tearing her life apart. In his defense, at the time he has no soul — but who hasn’t used that excuse?

Season five’s ‘The Replacement’ sees Xander split into his worst and best selves, allowing him a tragic glimpse of the pitfalls of unfulfilled potential, as well as at the person he could be without his foibles. In season three’s ‘The Wish‘, Cordelia wishes for a world in which Buffy had never come to Sunnydale, and is transported to a nightmare universe where vampires have taken over the town, the students are picked off one by one, and even then her boyfriend Xander is STILL getting busy with Willow. Buffy, meanwhile, is a remote and unfeeling assassin, grown cold and stone-faced without the love of friends and family to soften her. Each of these incarnations – characters without strength, without protection, without love — tell the story of how narrowly we escape tragedy and its aversion by unlikely events. There’s also a world without shrimp, in which it can be presumed the main characters lead tasteless and joyless lives, albeit ones with substantially less chance of food poisoning.

The under-appreciated and under-watched JJ Abrams series Fringe at first appears to be a fairly generic monster-of-the-week procedural, until the end of the first season reveals the Twin Towers still standing. Walter Bishop’s decades’ old decision to save his son’s life by any means possible has left an unforeseeable scar in the world; a butterfly effect of truly dystopic proportions.

It’s a shame so few people watched Fringe. The show was admittedly as capable of clunkliness as profundity, but with it Abrams reaches the full expression of a theme which was in the air over his island of Lost, but never truly took root in that series: that of the perilous equilibrium of various forces in both our relationships, and our inner lives. The last season of Lost flashes to a world neither forward not backward, but sideways, the characters leading lives uninterrupted, but somehow still marred by their time on the island.

This leitmotif is what carries Fringe forward. In the world in which the story begins, the world is whole, despite the edges beginning to fray and let unexplained evils seep in. In the second universe, the wall between the two worlds is thinner, more prone to breaking; war constantly simmering and threatening to boil over. Tragically though, when we encounter the twin selves of our main cast, they are, for the most part stronger, tougher, happier. Their characters have been built on more solid ground, their lives steadier. In the first world, despite having grown up in a more peaceful place, the lead characters themselves — particularly Walter Bishop and Olivia Dunham — are broken by tragedy. Their souls are held together with threads no stronger than the ones that keep the chaos of the alternative universe at bay.

In the beginning, we see their doppelgangers (blessed with the truly inspired nicknames of Fauxlivia and Walternate) as the enemy, intent as they are on destroying the world that most closely resembles the real one. Their strength is, at first, a challenge that Walter and Olivia must conquer, and one they seem hopelessly ill-equipped to. But as the series progresses, tentative alliances are formed, and likenesses present themselves. Both Walters are brilliant. Both Olivias are kind-hearted. The ties that bind them to those they love and hold their selves together are fragile. But they do not break.

Our clones of Orphan Black — a hustler, a housewife, a chemist, an assassin — have also grown up in a myriad of different worlds that have led their lives to diverge. But as they discover each other, and bond, and realise that they are allies and not enemies, shared traits emerge again. All the clones are tenacious. All are cunning. All love fiercely, and faithfully.

Orphan Black’s clones, Buffy’s replacements, Fringe’s alternative universe doppelgangers: these shows are less about how circumstance changes us, and more about the core of the self, what is essential. The stories of these worlds may well have tried to split these people in two, or more, but the bigger picture is one of people fighting to make themselves whole again.

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The season three finale of Orphan Black is available to stream On Demand now; it airs on SBS2 on Tuesday June 23, at 8.30pm. 

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Maddie Palmer is a writer, broadcaster, TV and digital producer. Her work has appears on The Feed on SBS2, and she talks about TV with Myf Warhurst on Double Jay. She tweets from @msmaddiep.