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[coppelganger]

〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Sarah Manning
CHARACTER AGE: 28
SERIES: Orphan Black
CHRONOLOGY: The end of 3x07
CLASS: Anti-hero
HOUSING: Random!

BACKGROUND:
Orphan Black takes place in a world identical to our own in every way except one—human cloning is not only possible, it’s been done successfully on a large scale. Unbeknownst to almost everyone on the planet, two sets of clones have been raised to adulthood: Project Leda and Project Castor. Half nature-nurture experiment, half military project, the clones have grown up all around the globe. Project Leda are biologically female and are unaware of their origins, and Project Castor are biologically male and have been raised as a group by the military.

Sarah Manning, our protagonist, grows up in foster care in the UK. When she’s eight years old she’s adopted by a stern but loving woman named Siobhan Sadler, or Mrs. S. At twelve, Mrs. S moves Sarah and her younger foster brother, Felix, from England to Toronto, Canada, where they spend the rest of their adolescence. Sarah grows up a rebel, listening to punk rock, and ends up dropping out of high school. She prefers to get her money via grifting unsuspecting men rather than through actual work, and at age twenty she becomes pregnant by one of her marks and ends up giving birth to her daughter, Kira. Ten months before the series begins, Sarah takes off with her abusive drug dealer boyfriend, Vic, leaving Kira behind with Mrs. S and Felix.

At the start of the series, Sarah is 28 and finally returning to Toronto (with $15k worth of stolen cocaine) to start over with her family. She’s immediately thrown off her plan when she arrives at the train station and witnesses a woman who looks exactly like her commit suicide by throwing herself in front of a train. Sarah impulsively grabs the woman’s bag and learns that her name is Beth Childs and that she has two cell phones, a nice car, and a swanky apartment. Sarah decides to temporarily take over Beth’s life in order to con her bank and withdraw as much cash as she can so that she can start a new life with Felix and Kira.

Right away, Sarah runs into problems when she learns that Beth was a police detective on suspension for killing a civilian and has to convince Beth’s coworkers, especially her partner Art Bell, that she’s legit. “Beth” is soon reinstated onto the force, but Art discovers Sarah’s plan to take as much money as she can and run, and he steals the money from her thinking that Beth is going to let him take the fall for the civilian shooting, which he helped cover up. Sarah’s problems with the cops run even deeper, however, as she realizes that Beth was more than just a long-lost sister.

Sarah is soon dragged into the clone conspiracy when she is approached by a second doppelgänger, a terminally ill German woman who ends up getting murdered within minutes of meeting Sarah, but who, believing she is Beth, begs her for help in contacting a “scientist friend” who will test her blood. Sarah finds the German’s briefcase, which contains the blood samples, and uses birth certificates in a lockbox Beth was keeping at the bank to track down another two clones, soccer mom Alison Hendrix and scientist Cosima Niehaus, who reluctantly allow Sarah into “Clone Club” with the expectation that she’ll continue pretending to be Beth, as they need help from the police force’s resources to find out who is killing the clones off one by one. Soon after, Sarah discovers that the murderer is yet another clone, a Ukrainian named Helena, who spares Sarah’s life once she learns that Sarah isn’t Beth, her intended target.

The three women attempt to solve the mystery of their origins while dealing with their own personal struggles. Sarah has a hard time convincing Beth’s boyfriend, Paul, that everything is normal, and as the clones learn more about who might have created them, they realize that monitors have been planted in all of the clones’ lives in order to report back on their medical and psychological health. Sarah suspects Paul is Beth’s monitor and uses him to lead her to DYAD, the corporation that had a hand in creating the clones, and soon after meets Dr. Aldous Leekie, the man who is nominally in charge of the project.

Leekie wants Sarah to bring Helena to him so that they can “deprogram” her, as Helena was raised by religious extremists called Proletheans who believe that the clones are abominations. However, Sarah learns that she and Helena are, in fact, identical twins who were both born to the same surrogate mother and then separated—one baby to the state, one to the church. Sarah decides not to turn Helena in, but Helena betrays her by murdering the twins’ surrogate mother, and Sarah ends up shooting Helena to save herself and her family.

At the same time, DYAD offers the self-aware clones a contract that stipulates they will be allowed to live freely as long as they continue to offer up their medical information. Sarah is seriously considering signing the contract when she’s contacted by Cosima, who tells her that DYAD has patented the clones’ biology, making anything offered via contract invalid. Sarah returns home only to realize that Kira and Mrs. S have gone missing. Sarah immediately suspects DYAD, specifically Rachel Duncan, a self-aware clone who has been raised by DYAD as the “face of a corporation.” However, it turns out that Mrs. S knows more about the clone experiment than she previously let on, and is keeping Kira hidden herself. Sarah is eventually reunited with her daughter and flees with her and Felix to her old mark Cal Morrison’s isolated cabin, where she reveals that Cal is Kira’s father.

DYAD and Rachel are still after Sarah and Kira—because Sarah and Helena are the only fertile clones, Kira’s biology is invaluable to DYAD. Rachel’s monitor and bodyguard tracks them to Cal’s cabin and attempts to kidnap Kira, but agrees to take Sarah instead. Though Sarah manages to escape, Daniel continues to track her, culminating in a scene where he attempts to torture her for information. Helena arrives and saves Sarah, who had until this point believed Helena was dead, and the twins again attempt to team up, though things are still strained between them.

While this is going on, Cosima has been suffering from the same degenerative illness that was killing the German clone, and Sarah learns that Kira’s stem cells may help in providing a cure. She allows DYAD to harvest Kira’s bone marrow, but while Kira is still in the hospital and Sarah is distracted, Rachel arrives in disguise and kidnaps Kira, taking her to DYAD. Sarah, defeated, surrenders herself to DYAD in the hopes of getting her daughter back. Though the two manage to escape after Sarah shoots Rachel’s eye out with a pencil, no one is safe—Kira’s bone marrow samples have been destroyed by Rachel, Helena has gone missing, and Sarah discovers the existence of Project Castor, who, now that they know about her, are after her as well.

After Kira is threatened by a Castor clone, Sarah makes the difficult decision to send her daughter out of the country with Cal. With Kira and Cal safely in Iceland, Sarah can focus her attention on finding Helena and trying to get the Castor clones off her back. It turns out that Castor have Helena and are using her to try and find a cure for their own degenerative illness. Cosima realizes that the original donors of the Leda and Castor samples were biological siblings, and Sarah realizes that the Castor clones are looking for the project’s original samples in order to try and cure themselves.

She ends up being held captive in the same military complex holding Helena, and together the twins come up with a plan of escape. However, Helena knows that Sarah will hold her back and ends up leaving her behind. With Sarah now Project Castor’s only prisoner, they conduct medical experiments on her that leave her extremely ill; however, she recovers, leading them to believe that Sarah’s (and Helena’s) biology might lead to a cure for both sets of clones. Before anything can be done, Sarah is allowed to escape by Paul, who has been connected to Project Castor the entire time, and though Paul sacrifices himself, Helena has returned for Sarah and the twins escape together.

PERSONALITY:
Sarah is a born runner. She grew up without attachments, being passed from foster home to foster home, until she was adopted at the age of eight, but even finding a legal guardian willing to take her in didn’t do much to change Sarah’s natural inclination to escape, to be on a constant lookout for the next good thing. As a teenager, she ran away multiple times and eventually ended up dropping out of high school in order to travel and live rough—eventually she set her sights on Costa Rica as a pipe dream, telling herself and her younger brother that someday they and Kira would make a new life for themselves there. With Sarah, it’s all about escaping the current situation and achieving something better, whatever it takes. Sarah is street smart and knows how to manipulate people, achieved through a combination of knowing when to stay in the background and when to be assertive.

And she can be very assertive. Sarah grew up an angry kid wanting to punish the world, and that anger has never gone away—not really. She’s as quick to fight as she is to run, and she’s good at it, able to make weapons out of objects that other people wouldn’t necessarily think of as dangerous. She’s even been known to use sex as a weapon and a tool to manipulate others, and it’s implied that she’s been doing that since her early teens. In fact, her use of sex as a way to placate Paul was one of his first clues that something was not right with “Beth.”

The anger she feels isn’t just for other people—she turns that feeling inward, as well. Sarah tends to gravitate toward people she feels she “deserves”: drug dealers, abusers, thieves, and other people who are on the outskirts of society. She refers to her ten months on the run with Vic as time spent as a “parasite,” and their relationship to that of “two colliding trainwrecks.” While Sarah may not act as if she regrets doing things like robbing people or using them in order to get what she wants, she expresses her guilt through more self-destructive behavior, believing that she deserves what she gets. She frequently says that she doesn’t think she’s a good mother, that she regrets many of her past decisions, and that she’s not a good person in general.

Above all else, though, Sarah is incredibly loyal to the people she loves. When the series starts, that number includes only two people: her daughter and her foster brother. After she first meets her fellow clones face to face, she insists to Felix that they aren’t family and that she still plans on escaping with as much cash as she can get her hands on. However, slowly, she learns to let her fellow clones in, as well as Beth’s old partner Art and her estranged foster mother Siobhan, and finds herself forming strong connections with them. Once Sarah trusts someone, she is loyal to them to the point of being willing to sacrifice herself for them. As someone who grew up lacking those familial connections to other people, when Sarah eventually does consider someone part of her family, she loves them unconditionally. This is probably best expressed in the way she now treats her identical twin, Helena—although they started the series as enemies, in season three Sarah spends the majority of her time searching for her lost sister and insists to another character, “It’s not her fault, the way she is. She’s not a monster.”

Once Sarah trusts someone, she begins to open up to them and can be quite physically affectionate, despite her gruff outward personality. When Sarah reunites with Felix after ten months apart, she hugs him tightly and gives him several kisses on the cheek, and although she and her clone Cosima start the series as sarcastic and bickering acquaintances, by the season two finale Sarah is comfortable enough to not only share a bed with Cosima but also to hold her hand and say “I can’t do this without you.” Along with this, she has progressed from saying things like “It’s every freak for herself” about her fellow clones to referring to them as her sisters and saying that she loves them; and she goes from referring to her foster mother as a bitch to calling her “mum” in season three. Upon seeing Beth’s suicide, her first reaction is to manipulate the situation so that she gets as much money as possible, but in season three she speaks about how guilty she feels for “letting” Beth jump. Felix even tells her early in season three, “You can’t put them all under your wing; you know you can’t.” But Sarah wants to try, and this willingness to invest in other people is a major step for her.

Sarah is overall a person with a hard exterior who’s really a softy inside. She uses her physicality and aggressiveness to push people away, thinking she’s not good enough for them, but once they manage to gain her trust, she’s a different person, one with a good sense of humor and a lot of love to give.

POWER:
Camouflage | Blending into the background. Needs to either be focused on, or for her to be feeling strong emotion, to work well.
Object shifting | Can make an object look like another object. Needs focus to work, and can only be done with objects that look similar in size or shape, aka making a $5 bill look like a $100 bill. Only works temporarily; afterwards the object will revert back to its original state.

〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:
[ The video starts on a closeup of Sarah’s face. She’s glancing down to make sure everything’s working correctly and, once she’s sure it is, she moves so that it’s not as close. Anyone watching can see her stooped shoulders and messy hair, the shadows under her eyes. ]

So this thing’s supposed to be like an iPhone or Skype or some shit? What are we supposed to talk about? I mean…

[ She hesitates, briefly glancing off to one side, trying to think of the right words. The right way to explain how she’s feeling. But how do you do that when you’re not sure yourself? The mingled anxiety and relief, the homesickness and longing for her family at the same time she feels… free? Allowed to take a deep breath for the first time in how long? Allowed to just be? ]

Never mind. This is bloody stupid.

[ And with that, she cracks a smile—not all sincere, but something in it is captivating all the same. ]

Anyway. Any of you know where I can get a decent bourbon rocks, let me know, yeah?

LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE: Here!

FINAL NOTES: