CHAPTER 4
“These Crippled and
Distorted Men”
The Island of Dr. Moreau and the
Scientists of Orphan Black
In Orphan Black, the key to many mysteries about the Leda and Castor siblings will presumably be found in the notes of Rachel’s father, scientist Ethan Duncan, who, with his wife, Susan Duncan, originated Project Leda.
Before he kills himself—rather than allow Dyad and Topside to exploit his secret knowledge—Ethan Duncan gives Kira an illustrated copy of H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau. Later, in reading to Kira, Cosima opens the book and, seeing that Duncan has scribbled between the lines and in the margins, understands that the book contains a secret message. At this point in the series, Duncan and Mrs. S. have turned over to Rachel (and Dyad) his Project Leda files on old floppy disks, but the mass of data about the DNA of the clones, especially about their synthetic DNA, is encrypted with a code that Duncan had memorized but not written down. The copy of Dr. Moreau that Duncan gifted to Kira, Cosima believes, contains a Rosetta Stone for unlocking the code.
In the same way, dear reader, the writers of Orphan Black give us many clues to understanding the motives and methods of its scientists by making The Island of Dr. Moreau so prominent in the series. It is almost as if the series is saying to us, “If you want to understand what’s going on, read this book!”
Of course, Orphan Black contains other literary references. We are told that Helena is pursued by Dr. Aldous Leekie, who says that Helena is his “white whale,” a clear reference to the equally obsessed Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick. Also, although Brave New World is not mentioned by name, references to it run throughout Orphan Black. Although Leekie’s last name is likely a reference to the famous family of paleontologists, Louis and Mary Leakey and their equally famous scientist son, Richard (Louis’ work was especially key in establishing human evolutionary development in Africa), his first name, Aldous, presumably refers to Aldous Huxley, noted author of Brave New World.
Interestingly, Edward Prendick, the narrator of The Island of Dr. Moreau, mentions that he had “spent some years at the Royal College of Science, and had done some researches in biology under Huxley.” That “Huxley” would be Royal College of Surgeons professor and biologist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), notoriously known as “Darwin’s bulldog” for his passionate advocacy of Darwin’s views on how humans evolved from lower primates. Aldous Huxley is Thomas Henry Huxley’s grandson.
Still, The Island of Dr. Moreau is the most conspicuous of the show’s literary references. Especially in season three, we constantly hear of it and its secret message, the code that Duncan wrote around its text. But of course Duncan, and the show’s writers, chose the book to begin with for good reason—another secret message. The Island of Dr. Moreau is a classic—probably the classic—book about mad scientists experimenting on humans.
Indeed, the story foreshadows many modern issues about scientists and human experimentation, which is amazing because it was published in 1896, one hundred and twenty years ago. It is the mother lode of Scientists Gone Wild, the tale to which all subsequent novels and movies about creating human-beast abominations, cyborgs, and all scientific things queer, weird, and yucky owe a debt.
In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the noted scholar of myths Joseph Campbell taught us that, in the stories we tell, certain themes recur again and again. We try to live according to analysis and facts, but we respond to myths; narrative and story are what give meaning to our lives. In science fiction, one such iconic theme is the mad scientist—and it is The Island of Dr. Moreau’s prototypic version of this figure to which modern-day incarnations, Orphan Black’s Drs. Leekie, Nealon, and Coady included, refer.
Written by H. G. Wells, the timeless author who also wrote The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, and The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau tells the story of English physician-scientist Dr. Moreau, who fled London after his experiments there created scandal, and settled on a remote island in the Pacific Ocean, where he conducts experiments to transform live large mammals, such as monkeys, pigs, and leopards, into humans. Narrator Edward Prendick’s suspicions are first aroused when he encounters the “crippled and distorted men” who help unload his dinghy. The men are swathed in bandages and act as if they were “jointed in the wrong place.”
Then servant M’ling waits on Prendick, and Prendick notices that M’ling has Spock-like, pointed ears and eyes that glow in the dark (a prescient echo of the genetic modification of plants and fish today that can make them luminescent).
Dr. Moreau, Prendick later learns, has created a collection of half-human, half-animal creatures he calls the Beast Folk, whom he has brainwashed into accepting the Law, a code of behavior he has handed down to them (much as Henrik hands down laws for the women and men of his compound). The animal-humans are not allowed to run on all fours, eat raw flesh, or drink water with their lips to the ground. Unfortunately, the Beast Folk have an unfortunate tendency to revert to being animals.
When one of the Beast Folk, the Leopard Man, is caught hunting rabbits and eating them without cooking them, the Beast Folk hunt him down, capture him, and return him to Dr. Moreau for punishment—more hideous experiments. (In eerie anticipation of infamous Nazi physician Josef Mengele’s later experiments, Moreau surgically fuses parts of animals together, the way Mengele fused identical twins together back to back. Like Mengele, Moreau is indifferent to the screams of his victims, regarding their suffering as an unfortunate by-product of his necessary experiments.) When Prendick tracks down the Leopard Man, rather than return him to Moreau’s lab for more hideous experiments, Prendick—as Helena does with the Castor male Parsons in the metal halo vise—kills the Leopard Man to end his suffering.
One of the most important concepts of modern bioethics is the need for special protections from overly ambitious scientists for vulnerable research subjects. Such subjects include “captive populations” in prisons and mental institutions, cognitively challenged adults, and especially babies and children. In Orphan Black, as in The Island of Dr. Moreau, we see this need reflected in the way innocent creatures are originated in strange ways and then later studied, manipulated, and even killed for the research.
H. G. Wells saw The Island of Dr. Moreau as a cautionary tale about the horror of experimentation on live animals, especially without anesthesia. But over time, the novel has come to symbolize something different: first, the arrogant physician or scientist who is so obsessed by his project that he loses all ethical sense; and second, the horrors of crossing natural kinds, of mixing things that should not be mixed—of creating human cyborgs, “humanzees,” and other abominations. Both these themes should sound familiar—they precisely echo two of the chief fears that arise in discussions of cloning, which we discussed in chapter three, and also appear in Orphan Black’s depictions of scientists.
The first theme of Dr. Moreau finds its purest expression in Dr. Coady, “Mother,” the chain-smoking Native American scientist who oversees the clones of Project Castor (casting that brilliantly sends up stereotypes of evil white male scientists and nurturing Native American women in tune with nature). Coady believes her horrible means are justified in the name of improving humanity by ridding it of genetic diseases. Only here, The Island of Dr. Moreau meets Homeland, because big, clandestine government agencies fund her secret projects.
(Herein lies an age-old debate in applied ethics: When, if ever, does a noble end justify a horrible means? So many people justify so many terrible acts this way that you wonder if Kant wasn’t right to say, “Some things are just forbidden!” One also hears Josef Stalin murmur in the background, “If you take a long enough view, anything is justified by the victor.”)
Dr. Coady’s suspension of ethics is enabled by something else she and Project Castor share in common with Dr. Moreau: privacy of location. Moreau’s forbidden experiments are conducted on a rarely visited island in the Pacific Ocean, far away from the prying eyes of society. Like soldiers waterboarding alleged terrorists under orders on a tip of the island of Cuba at Guantánamo Bay Naval Station, Moreau experiments outside the legal jurisdiction of his home country, England. Similarly, in Orphan Black, Dr. Coady changes Project Castor for the worse in a facility in what seems to be a remote part of the Chihuahuan Desert in Mexico.
This second theme of Dr. Moreau, the horrors of combinations that violate nature, is one we see in a different form in another, even more famous piece of science fiction literature, named for another iconic scientist: Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein—the physician-scientist who trespasses natural boundaries— and his creation still haunt us today. As in The Island of Dr. Moreau, we empathize with the vulnerable creatures, often persecuted and misunderstood, while recoiling against the mad scientists who violate nature. (Though, ironically, Shelley faults Dr. Frankenstein not for creating this new being but for rejecting his “son” as too grotesque and not seeing his inner moral worth.) It seems to be the destiny of the mad scientist’s creation to seek its creator’s love; both the Beast Folk and Dr. Coady’s “sons,” the Castor clones, do the same, and with as much futility. Even cold Rachel Duncan, who was created as an experiment by her father, Ethan, seeks his approval when she finally meets him. We wonder, when at the end of season three we learn that Rachel’s mother, Susan Duncan, is still alive, whether Rachel will seek her love, too.
Hubris, in Greek mythology, is an interesting vice, a bit like the vice of pride in Christianity, but also different. Hubris involves an unnatural trespass of the natural order and is often used to describe one’s attempt to go beyond his or her natural place and be like the gods.
The classic example is Icarus, whose inventor father, Daedalus, makes him wings of feathers and wax. Icarus ignores his father’s warning that he should fly neither too high nor too low because the Sun’s heat would melt the wax and the sea’s dampness would make his wings too heavy—a warning specifically phrased “be aware of your hubris”—and he flies too high. When the wax on his wings melts, Icarus plunges to his death.
In Orphan Black, as well, death is the universal price of hubris, and accordingly, the fate of the show’s arrogant, nature-defying scientists is quite frequently death. We see this, too, in other fiction—in books and movies such as Jurassic Park, the scientist who clones a mammal, considered an act of scientific hubris, must be killed by his creation, usually in his own lab or built environment. So Ethan Duncan commits suicide in front of his clone daughter, Rachel, in an institute dedicated to advancing his work, and Aldous Leekie dies after being expelled from the Dyad Institute by his adopted daughter, Rachel. So Henrik dies in flames in his own compound at the hands of Helena, after he impregnates her with his half-clone child. So Dr. Moreau is ultimately killed wrestling with a puma on which he was experimenting.
There is one other key similarity between the scientists we see in Orphan Black and Wells’ Dr. Moreau. Common to Drs. Moreau, Leekie, and Coady is impatience with the slow pace of scientific discovery and the even slower pace of evolution.
The first living cells with a nucleus emerged on Earth about two thousand million years ago. Over the next fifteen hundred million years and billions of reproductions, vertebrate animals evolved. Primates, the ancestors of humans, emerged seventy-five million years ago. It then took another sixty-three million years for the first humanlike hominins to evolve. Our species of the genus Homo, Homo sapiens, emerged a half million years ago. Some evolutionary biologists further distinguish Homo sapiens sapiens, a subspecies of Homo sapiens, emerging two hundred thousand years ago, with Neanderthal humans emerging one hundred thousand years ago. “Modern humans” emerged thirty-eight thousand years before the birth of Jesus.
The evolution of humans, in other words, took a long time. Billions upon billions of us were born and had children— some poorly adapted to harsh environments, some better adapted—and those who were able to produce the most children passed along their genes.
Orphan Black’s Neolutionists, the scientific organization behind Projects Leda and Castor, whose beliefs resemble those of a real-world group called transhumanists, champion the use of science to improve humanity. Their “self-directed” human evolution attempts to bypass the clumsy, agonizingly slow process of evolution.
Moreau would fit right in with the Neolutionists. Like them, and like the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century (which we discuss later in detail), Moreau was impatient with the pace of natural evolution and he used his experiments to see if shortcuts could be found, especially through surgery. Olivier’s (surgically transplanted) tail, which Helena cuts off late in season one, perfectly fits this Moreauian nightmare.
Cloning humans, as with Dr. Moreau’s experiments, allows for control that is lacking in nature. In evolution, billions of acts of creation must combine with hundreds of millions of failures to produce one exceptionally superior dairy cow or (shall we say it) Nietzsche’s Übermensch, a superior human. But with cloning, scientists can select the exact genotype they want to recreate and then add or subtract genes to make a potentially even more superior dairy cow or human, just as Ethan Duncan added or subtracted genes to make the Ledas sterile. For Neolutionists and the rest of Orphan Black’s scientists, cloning presents just one more opportunity to experiment—less viscerally horrifying than Dr. Moreau’s, perhaps, but, as we see in the unexpected side effects of tweaking the Ledas’ and Castors’ DNA, potentially as fatal.