CHAPTER 17
Stealing and Swapping Identities
Twins and Clones
“If we’re going to go road-tripping to steal some poor clone’s identity,
then I’ve only got one demand: I get to choose the music.”
—Felix to Sarah, “Ruthless in Purpose and
Insidious in Method,” season three, episode eight
Orphan Black opens with one person stealing the identity of another, a theft facilitated by the remarkable fact that the victim looks exactly like the thief. Sarah Manning steals not only Elizabeth Childs’ identity, but also her boyfriend, her job as a police detective, and her money.
The idea of stealing someone else’s identity is not new. Ditching one’s identity by taking over the identity of a better-situated person appeals to people who fantasize about a do-over in life. Although Sarah seems to be only in her late twenties, her life has taken some wrong turns. She left her daughter, Kira, in the care of Mrs. S one night and then did not return for ten months. She has dealt cocaine and stolen from others (she steals $15,000 worth of cocaine from Vic by assaulting him with an ashtray; she also steals Beth’s purse, savings, apartment, and car). Although she puts up a brave front, by her own admission Sarah has been a lousy mother to Kira. Maybe being Beth Childs seemed easier than being Sarah Manning.
However, having identical clones around gives this theme a new twist. In fact, Orphan Black repeats this device of one sestra impersonating another throughout all three seasons. So Sarah impersonates Beth to help her sister clones; Helena impersonates the deceased Beth at the police station to spy on Sarah; Alison impersonates Sarah to Mrs. S to help Sarah earn back visitation of Kira (even though Kira doesn’t buy it); Sarah impersonates Alison to interrogate Alison’s husband, Donnie; Rachel impersonates Sarah to steal Kira; Sarah impersonates Rachel to steal Dyad’s secrets; Cosima impersonates Alison at a political rally; and Rachel poses as Krystal to escape Dyad (while Krystal, put into a coma by Sarah and Felix, stands in for Rachel).
The sestras must constantly cover for each other by assuming each other’s identities while one of them is off doing the real work of investigating why they were created and who is trying to kill them. But the sestras must also cover up when another Leda has impersonated them without their consent, as when Helena calls Paul as Sarah-playing-Beth and asks Paul to come get her. (Paul, we later learn, did know Beth was a clone, though he did not realize she was dead— and of course Sarah, Alison, and Cosima did not know how much Paul knew at the time.)
Philosophers like to carefully define their terms and to make distinctions. So here we should distinguish between stealing an identity and swapping identities. The first is involuntary and a kind of theft; the second, although it may deceive others, is not theft and presumes voluntary agreement between the two exchanging identities.
So let’s discuss identity theft. What is so bad about it?
Well, we know from our own lives that when a thief uses our credit card to buy things for himself in our name, or obtains a new card for himself using our personal information, it can be quite destructive. In some of the worst cases of such identity theft, victims have been stuck with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt they never incurred.
Stealing someone’s identity is a very serious ethical breach. As the late ethicist James Rachels famously argued, controlling who knows what about us is a key to being a free, autonomous person, which is why the right to privacy is so important. But when someone is impersonating you, you lose all control over how “you” are presented to the world; all your efforts to build your good character can be quickly wiped out by an unscrupulous person. This also explains why identity theft is a crime; it can seriously harm someone’s reputation as well as his or her financial resources.
One infamous 2007 case of identity theft involved then-college student Brittany Ossenfort, whose roommate Michelle became her unusually close friend. Michelle started dressing and wearing her hair like Brittany, which Brittany initially took as compliments. The two lived together like this for a year. But then police called Brittany one day, asking her to bail out “Brittany Ossenfort” from jail on charges of prostitution. After some more investigation, Brittany was shocked to learn that Michelle’s legal name was Michael Phillips and she was transgender.
(A similar situation drove the plot of the 1992 movie Single White Female. In it, the imposter is not a transgender woman but a girl who, mourning the loss of her deceased twin, seeks out roommates like her twin, dresses and acts like them, and then, when disappointed by their inability to replace her sister, ends up killing them.)
Another famous case of real-life identity theft occurred in 2010 when twenty-six Israeli Mossad agents stole the identity of twenty-six ordinary people with clean, unremarkable profiles and, under their names, checked into a fancy hotel in Dubai. A high-ranking officer in Hamas, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, was later found dead in his room in the same hotel, apparently assassinated. One of the people whose identity was stolen, Nicole McCabe, a pregnant Australian woman living in Israel, had a lot of trouble afterward establishing that she had not killed the Hamas leader.
The Evil Twin and Identity Swaps
in Literature and Myth
Literature and mythology abound with stories of an evil twin. When it is obvious that one twin is evil and the other good, the evil one is often identified via a physical difference—a goatee or scar or physical impairment of some sort. Think about how the “evil” Castor clone Rudy has a prominent facial scar, so we can easily tell him apart from “good” Mark, the Castor who marries Gracie. Given the precedent of this idea of a dark double, it’s easy to see how clones—an unnatural version of twins— have come to be associated with things to be feared.
Often, in these evil-twin stories, one twin tricks or kills the other. Possibly this trope dates back to fears about primogeniture, where the firstborn inherited all the land while his twin, born several minutes later, got nothing. In the biblical story of Isaac’s fraternal twins, Esau and Jacob, Jacob (the second born) and his mother conspire to deceive Isaac for Esau’s inheritance. Biblical twins Pharez and Zarah, Jacob’s grandsons, also fought over birthright (one’s hand came out first and the midwife marked it with a scarlet thread, but then the hand was withdrawn and the other twin unexpectedly emerged, leading the twins and their descendants to fight over who was rightfully first). Romulus and Remus, legendary founders of Rome, are feuding twins, and in some versions of the myth, Romulus kills Remus in a power struggle.
Like the story of Esau and Jacob, where Jacob impersonates Esau to trick Isaac into bestowing his blessing on the wrong son, many stories of twins involve one twin assuming the identity of the other—sometimes with permission and sometimes not. Think of The Parent Trap, or Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, where identical boys or girls, usually with very different lives, pretend to be each other by mutual agreement. In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors, mistaken identities of twins (fraternal twins in Twelfth Night and identical twins in The Comedy of Errors) play major roles in attempted seduction, feigned madness, and accusations of infidelity.
In stories of evil twins, it is usually the evil twin who assumes, or steals, the identity of the good twin. The classic literary tale of such an identity theft is The Man in the Iron Mask, by Alexandre Dumas, based on Voltaire’s writings, in which the identical twin of King Louis XIV of France is imprisoned in the Bastille for thirty-four years. In A Stolen Life, a 1946 remake of a 1939 British movie, after a boat accident involving both twins in which one drowns, the evil twin assumes the married life of the good twin.
In another brazen case of identity theft in Wichita, Kansas, a man left his house for a few months to care for his sick mother. While he was gone, another man and his wife moved into his house, used all the resident’s credit cards to buy things, and even visited local police to inform them that the imposter was an undercover agent using the house and not to investigate any complaints of a new person in the house. The imposter and his wife were even able to take out a second mortgage on the house, using the real owner’s documents.
But what happens when the identity thief is a person closely related to you? Your twin rather than a more easily discernable impersonator? The problem has already arisen in criminal cases where it cannot be established beyond a reasonable doubt that twin X did the crime rather than twin Y. In Malaysia in 2009, a judge spared two twins from execution because prosecutors could not prove which twin owned confiscated narcotics.
It’s worth nothing that, had fingerprints of the crime-committing twin been available, being twins wouldn’t have saved them. Contrary to popular thinking, identical twins actually have different fingerprints due to various factors: place in the uterus, random inactivation of the X chromosome, and even scarring. Epigenetics may further distinguish the fingerprints of twins, triplets, or even Leda clones (despite Cosima’s claim early in season one that deceased clone Katja’s fingerprints would be close enough to Beth’s to come up as a match).
Of course, the problem of which twin committed a crime would be compounded if there were twelve copies of you. Let’s say one of your fellow clones, who made less money than you did, often assumed your identity as a rich person, say, by charging things at your country club or using a fake ID with your name and picture on it to enter a health club. For judges and police officers, having twelve versions of the criminal’s genotype walking around would obviously make finding the true criminal much more difficult. Likewise, if all of a set of twelve clones conspired to commit a crime, and deliberately used smoke screens to conceal the identity of the guilty person or confuse the police, the difficulty would increase exponentially.
The Ledas in Orphan Black have the opposite problem. Since the world does not know they are clones, one Leda breaking the law would put all of them in danger— collectively, were their secret to get out and, individually, were any of them caught by the police in place of the actual criminal.
Fortunately, the importance of secrecy makes acts of impersonation less risky. Rachel can’t easily go to the police to turn Sarah in for stealing Dyad secrets; how would she explain how Sarah had done it? And who would guess their suburban neighbor had been impersonated by her identical clone? So it’s a handy plot device, despite the ethical issues— and one that certainly makes for exciting plots, not to mention a wonderful acting showcase for Tatiana Maslany’s ability to play a character within a character.