#ob speculation

season 4 is almost here! naturally, my mind has been buzzing with spec and i felt like i’d share some of it here with you guys since i love spec talk. feel free to chime in with your own theories/opinions :)

so, the topic of this conversation?

helena.

to be honest, i really don’t see them going through with the pregnancy storyline. that seems far too easy and it doesn’t really work narratively. for starters, the timeline of the show is a mess and even with the two month time jump that’s been confirmed at the beginning of season 4, it would still mean that helena is quite early on in her pregnancy (maybe three or four months, couldn’t really be more than that). unless they skip ahead several more months by the end of the season, helena will not be having her baby in season 4 and i really don’t think they’ll jump that far ahead and skip over all of the immediate chaos of sarah’s war against neolution just so we can see helena deliver her baby, which would mean we’d be stuck with a pregnant helena for the entire season. sure, watching helena become domesticated and struggle with her pregnancy would be pretty funny and produce many “awwwww” worthy moments, but that’ll get old really fast, not to mention that we already have alison for comedic relief so turning helena into a comedic, fluffy character would just be redundant. there’s just too much going on in this show and it’s far too fast paced for them to waste time just showing us helena simply being pregnant without really advancing the main plot. (although they did waste time with alison’s storyline and shaysima last season, so maybe i’m giving them too much credit...)

so, what do i think will happen?

i think helena will lose the baby.

yes, this would be heartbreaking and i know i said before that i didn’t want to see helena suffer anymore since she tends to get shit on far more than any of her sestras, but i don’t see any other choice that would really work well with the narrative. if helena loses her baby, it might force her down a dark path yet again, although this time, she has people who care about her to try to bring her back from the edge. let’s say she loses her baby because of external forces (maybe neolution has something to do with it in some way?) — that would bring her back into the fold, force her back into the meatiest part of the plot with a vengeance. maybe we’d see the crazed assassin from season one again? i think that would be interesting. as much as i love helena, her character has yet to truly redeem herself and face her “sins,” so to speak. i feel like helena gets infantilized a lot by the fandom and even by the writers at times. why? well, doing so has its comedic effect and allows us to sympathize with her character, but it’s also pretty problematic in that it erases her sense of agency in all of this. helena is not a child. she may be stunted in many ways, but she is a grown woman and on top of that, she’s incredibly dangerous, unpredictable, and a murderer. i feel like we’re constantly forced to forget this since her acts of violence are often juxtaposed with childish dialogue or situations, but i feel like it’s something pretty important that we need to acknowledge.

it always sort of bothered me how her murdering so many of the other clones hasn’t been addressed. it’s as if she saved sarah from daniel in season two and suddenly, everything was forgiven and she was immediately accepted into clone club. i know that she was essentially brainwashed to kill the clones and that sarah, cosima and alison understand this and forgive her for it, but does that really excuse her actions? absolutely not. hell, she even called rudy out on his shit in the season 3 finale right before he died, when he told her his childhood sob story to try to garner sympathy. he said “we’re just like you, helena.” and what did she say to him? “no. you are a rapist.” she’s able to make the distinction— she’s aware that the horrible circumstances of one’s life do not excuse one’s monstrous behaviour, that even though rudy and the castor clones had horrible and messed up childhoods, it doesn’t excuse what they’ve done. and she distinguishes herself from him. she tells him that he’s wrong, that she’s not like him at all. i felt like this was a pretty insightful moment and it would be a shame if it were to be discarded and forgotten over the course of the hiatus. 

we haven’t seen helena really show any sort of regret or remorse, or even really acknowledge that she’s murdered real people and not “abominations,” as she initially believed. there’s no doubt that she sees the other clones as real people now, as family, so why haven’t we seen her cope with the knowledge that she ruthlessly murdered her own family? if helena really believed what she said to rudy, if she’s really different from him, then she has to face what she’s done and atone, right? she can’t hide behind the excuse of “i was brainwashed by a cult and so i never had a choice in the matter, it’s not my fault at all and i’m not responsible for my actions.” that would make her no different from rudy (who was incapable of accepting responsibility for his actions) and she was very certain in the knowledge that they’re nothing alike. if she’s really different from him, then she has to accept responsibility and begin to make amends. 

i feel like just making helena pregnant and allowing her to have her baby and live a silly, domestic life after everything she’s done and everything she’s been through would be a total cop out, not to mention completely unrealistic considering the tone of the show. we’ve seen helena face down enemy after enemy, from tomas to johanssen to cody and castor. but helena’s greatest enemy has always been herself and we’ve yet to see her really face herself, to have a moment or true introspection. maybe it’s wishful thinking, but i’m hoping we’ll see some of that this season. and since helena’s eggs seem to be imperishable (contrary to what modern science would suggest), maybe even if she loses her current child, she’ll get the chance to have another baby someday— on her own terms. maybe she’ll get to use her eggs and have a baby with someone who actually cares for her, who doesn’t see her as some sort of scientific wonder or whatever. to me, that would be far more rewarding than watching her birth some “science baby” as she’s dubbed it-- a child she was forcibly impregnated with. it would be the ultimate assertion of her agency and i think a more complete arc to her character if she was to have a child by choice after having grown a little more.

another theory i had was that maybe helena does give birth to her child, or rather twins. however, she ends up losing them anyway because she’s forced to give them up and hide them away to protect them. i mean, it would be ironic (and a little cruel) if the twins ended up being separated for their own safety and it would allow her to reflect on amelia’s decision to give up her and sarah. perhaps it would give her a little bit of peace with her own upbringing.

All of her training, all of her drills, all of her shooting at targets and paper silhouettes of human heads had technically prepared her for this moment. Beth knew how to hold a gun, how to aim, how to shoot. But no one had prepared her for how it felt to aim a gun at a living person and just know that she was about to take a life. As she looked Maggie Chen in the eyes she fought hard to tear herself free of these feelings and—