SELF_AWARE_

ORPHAN BLACK

Answer me this, Professor. Why Sarah? Of all of us, how is it the unmonitored tramp was successful?

i’m back in town. 

well that’s not fair, is it? 

bitch. 

stop the train! 

you look like crap. 

i hit him first this time. with an ashtray. so he’s a little blue. 

you’ve been gone for almost a year. 

i saw a girl kill herself. 

when you’re a poor little orphan foster wretch, anything’s possible. 

i haven’t seen her in like a year.

any second, someone’s gonna ID the body, and it’s game over. 

you’re damn right. 

suddenly you don’t give a damn, i get pissed. 

you’ll probably take off again. 

i panicked. where’s your wit gone? you haven’t called me dipshit all day. 

you don’t have to babysit me, dipshit. 

i know this thing has got you all twisted up, but you gotta forgive yourself. 

i’m having trouble with detail, so i’m not sure i should say anything at all. 

try to separate mistake from result. 

can we get the elephant out of the room? 

the last thing i am is special. 

if that was my boyfriend, i’d jump in front of a train too. 

the whole sad point is nobody would notice if i died. 

let me finish what i started and the i’ll come back for you and her, yeah? 

you’re gonna disappear again? 

you’re already dead. 

it’s gonna be an intimate memorial piss-up. 

you know what, first though, you need a shower and a xanax. 

are you back on the meds? 

call me or i’ll squeeze your bloody bollocks in a vice– 

it was always fight or flight with her. 

i still want us to be together. it can work, yeah? 

someone shot her right in front of me. 

there’s blood everywhere! 

you need to get rid of the body! 

i can’t figure out why she killed herself. 

i have a knife and i will stab you in the face. 

i was mad at you so i decided to blow all the money from your stolen coke on it. 

why are you suddenly dressing like a punk rock ho? 

you’re not ready for this. you need to take more time. 

i can see it’s killing you, but you stopped talking to me months ago. 

i can’t keep waking up every night, checking your breathing, worried you’re mixing your meds, booze, god knows what else – 

i’m not dirty. i just freaked out. 

i told her to freeze. she didn’t. she ran. 

you’re making me nervous. 

they’re gonna start to dig. and if they dig, they find the pills. 

i’ve got to carry what i did. 

do you want a cuppa? 

i think whatever she found out drove her nuts and she topped herself. 

i’ll call back at midnight. 

why would you go in my room? 

rock and roll. 

who am i speaking to?

i’m a few, no familly too. who am i? 

why lord, why me? i never wanted any part of this. 

do i wear a huge ‘kick me’ sign on my back?

hide your ugly face on the way out. 

i had to go to bed, bath and beyond, okay? nobody wants to admit that. 

what the hell did you say to the shrink? 

what are you gonna say to change her mind? 

what’s the difference between a mood stabiliser and an antipsychotic again? 

why do you have to be such a hard-ass? 

i just need you to be my backup, okay? 

you’re gonna shoot me while your kids are sleeping? 

i was running from my own shit. 

she was losing it. like, clinically. 

you’re not supposed to be parked here at night. 

do not shoot me please! 

you point a gun at my brother again and i will kick the living shite out of you! 

last i checked, it was illegal, let alone impossible. 

am i going insane? 

body’s chewed up pretty bad. 

i think that some idiot didn’t realise they were burying a body next to an active quarry. 

do you have a criminal record? 

wasted youth, alright? 

wow… welcome to the trip, man. 

let me see your weapon. 

just give me an hour or two to get up to speed for christ’s sake.

if you ask me about that money one more time, i swear to god, it’s going in the shredder. 

do you know who shot her in the head? 

who’s killing us? 

that’s good. try and keep your sense of humour. 

you think someone’s jerking your chain? 

i should probably get back to my real job now. 

you could rob me blind. 

we’re hoping you realise you can’t run away from this. 

you cannot hide in minimalist furniture! 

i think you’re being a bitch.

how would you like it if i started pulling this schizophrenic hot-and-cold crap on you?

the body dump doesn’t match the professional hit. 

this perp’s got some deep-seated spiritual problems. 

i think he went into one of the abandoned buildings here. 

i should have had your back. 

look, shit happens fast, okay? 

i’m not gonna let you drive me home like an invalid. 

hey, you’re not gonna hug me, are you? 

now can you please tell me what in the hell happened to your face? 

it’s not about revenge.

she was on this killer’s hit list and now i am. 

if she’s not dead, we need to find her. find out what she knows. 

i just need some time to myself. 

name me one homicide ever pinned on a female sniper. 

female killers tend to suffer from chronic detachment. isolation breeds sociopaths. 

you could have killed me, but here we are. 

anybody else feel like they have a target on their back? 

i don’t think you understand the situation here. 

you’re a punk! be one! 

no wonder she wants to leave.

you’re like a completely different person these days. 

it’s this case. it’s a bitch. 

we don’t bring that shit in here, right? 

what’re you gaping at? 

you ever fight a woman? 

they do say, crazy makes you strong. 

if you’re hearing this, you found a body. 

you’re different than the others. 

i think i’m dying. 

i came out the woodwork. where did you come from? 

i’m sorry about this but it’s very important that you keep this a secret. 

well, unleash the doves. world peace must be right around the corner. 

i came back to prove that i could, but i’m not doing anybody any good. 

so the killer is still out there? 

you’d stab me in the eye with a nail file? 

you’re shaking like a leaf. 

there’s the gun you wanted. 

last time i checked, i’m the only one defending us. 

i’m gonna shoot his balls off. 

i don’t leave prints when i burgle. 

she wasn’t messing around, was she? 

you silly bitch, would you get your fanny out of there? 

i’m entitled to a little privacy. 

you were the one who introduced me to punk rock. 

stay in school. 

you bitch! you faked it! how could you goddamn do this to me?! 

are you still concerned about her mental health? 

how’d you do it? 

we were on top of the world! 

we were parasites. 

is every man in your life a complete wanker, except me? 

i’m about to go in and shoot him in the balls. 

this is our chance to get answers. 

i thought you handed in your sidearm. 

well, apparently, i’ve got a stalker. 

i didn’t mean to get all tangled up with you. 

if she really is dead, how do i know you didn’t kill her? 

she killed herself because the man she loved turned her whole life into a lie.

this is a sick test, isn’t it? isn’t it?! 

[reposting this ask as a text post for anon]

I don’t know if this is an original idea at all, but I’ve always thought that there was an important distinction between Cosima saying Rachel was raised totally self-aware and Rachel saying she has been self-aware since she was a child.

“Being raised” a certain way implies that she has always known, that she was never told anything otherwise. “Since she was a child” implies that she was told at some point in her childhood, and I think that makes a huge difference in terms of the effect on her psychological development.

I don’t believe Ethan and Susan ever would have told her (they would have loved her too much; they would have thought they were doing what was best and protecting her from the truth). I think she would have been told by Leekie after the lab explosion, so the knowledge of what she was would always be associated with 1) the trauma of losing her parents and 2) the fact that Ethan and Susan had lied to her for her whole life:

(“the man she loved turned her whole life into a lie”—think of how much that fucked Beth up, and imagine what it would do to a child)

Rachel would always wonder whether they truly loved her as a daughter, or as their prized experiment. And there would be that constant internal conflict between those two emotions, between wanting to hate them and not being able to because they were still her parents, they still acted like they loved her, treated her with warmth—warmth that she would never know again. So this brings us back back to Rachel’s fake memories:

We could explain her adult psychology as being the result of the trauma of losing her parents at a young age and ‘being thrust into the cold, unfeeling, corporate arms of Neolution,’ as I think I’ve put it before. However, while I don’t want to by any means minimize the trauma of being orphaned at a young age, I have trouble believing that that’s all there is to the story. Watching her interactions with Ethan, I can’t help but feel that her animosity toward him extends beyond his sudden (faked) death during her childhood and even his recent return into her life.

Her sense of his betrayal runs deeper than death or abandonment, deeper even than the lie of a faked death. His lie was worse than that. Ethan betrayed his creation, his daughter, in the most visceral and fundamental way possible: he denied her a sense of identity. He took away her reality. He stripped her of her humanity.

She doesn’t remember her childhood because it doesn’t feel real to her. The exact question Ethan asks her is “Do you recall, Rachel, not the memory, but the feeling of how much we loved you?”

Rachel does not remember—and it is precisely this, the feeling of how much her parents loved her, that she does not remember. Their love for her is what her abrupt self-awareness would have called into question. Among other things, probably, but for a young child, that’s what would have stuck with her.

               OK SO at the end of season two, we see rachel’s fall from power when sarah propels a pencil through her eye to escape the dyad labs, but this is way more than just a big up yours from sarah and has affected her more than just being incredibly painful. the science behind this kind of extensive penetrating brain damage really depends on case-by-case bases due to the complexity of the brain itself and the degree of damage. for example, rachel isn’t a full on phineas gage but ascertaining her symptoms suggests a deep(ish) penetration depending on the speed of the propellant (pressurised foam from the fire extinguisher).

rachel is stabbed in the left eye by the pencil and the pencil is probably propelled into the temporal lobe, being one of the lower, frontal regions of the brain, responsible for recognition of auditory stimuli, speech, understanding written and verbal material, facial recognition, taste, aggression, sexual behaviour, and memory, otherwise known as executive functions of the brain and ‘higher’ functions. these are complex and can cause serious damage.

we see a few of these symptomised by rachel’s aphasia, speech therapy, and art therapy, but she seems to suffer for a season and then is back to being the heinous bitch we all love to hate. i don’t think that’s entirely accurate (even despite the neolution eye… there’ll still be damaged brain tissue) due to the huge impact that the temporal lobe has on psychology and basic functions like speech and writing. 

if you look at the anatomy of the brain with relation to the face, behind the left eye is the superior temporal gyrus (STG), medius (MTG), and inferior (ITG). the STG is responsible for the understanding and processing of sounds (due to the presence of the auditory cortex), the processing of emotion and understanding social cues. it makes sense to me that rachel will have difficulty recognising and ‘reading’ people, which makes her job as dyad’s CEO that much harder because trying to form business deals with people she can’t read is… difficult to say the least. (the worst part in all this is how utterly useless she feels, and how frustrated she gets when she can’t communicate due to the aphasia. that’s the worst part for her; lack of communication.) rachel presents symptoms of auditory agnosia.

the MTG sits right behind the eye and would be where the most damage was done, because it has been associated with ascertaining distance, understanding reading and facial recognition. she has poor depth and distance perception as a result of this, and struggles with understanding written words. it wouldn’t surprise me if she struggled with facial recognition (prosopagnosia), for example, when she first saw ferdinand again after the injury, but she’d play it off because he’d see it as weak (that’s another thing for another meta because hoooo boy). 

the ITG is responsible for visual recognition and rachel has visual agnosia as a result of damage to it. this is where she struggles to understand visual stimuli, which we see when she’s tested with images and whether she understands them. she is less affected by this because it was damaged the least. the pencil had an upwards propulsion and damaged more of the MTG and STG. speech aphasia occurs due to the injury of the broca’s area in the inferior temporal gyrus.

we see that rachel suffers from mild paraplegia and this can be as a result of intracerebral haemorrhaging (this is incredibly likely due to the force at which the pencil penetrated: a lot of bleeding would occur as a result of the vast web of blood vessels in the brain and its capillary network). she spent the majority of her time on the island recovering and rehabilitating her ability to walk. we can infer that rachel has ataxia as a result of this trauma.