CHAPTER 19

Helena, Freud, Henrik,
and Foucault

“You should not threaten babies.”
—Helena to nannies in Henrik’s compound, “Insolvent
Phantom of Tomorrow,” season three, episode nine

Why do we love Helena? Why are we always so eager to see what she does next? Why is Helena the kick-ass friend we’d all love to have when, like Donnie and Alison, you unexpectedly have to face drug dealers?

We love her because she is a survivor, despite past abuse. In the terms of modern positive psychology, she is resilience embodied. She has been knocked down, but she rebounds. The Castors waterboard her, but she endures. She is tough, an Amazon, with a soft exterior and insides of steel. She can quote Nietzsche: “What does not kill me makes me stronger.”

Helena is a female Jason Bourne, an assassin trained by Proletheans Tomas and Maggie Chen to kill with a sniper rifle, a knife, and her own hands. Like Bourne, when her trainers turn against her, Helena must use her lethal skills to survive.

Helena is a less mature Lisbeth Salander—not a woman of the world and quite naïve about technology, but like Lisbeth someone who will stand up for her sisters, especially to abusive men. If you are with her, she has your back. When she intones ominously, “You should not threaten babies,” we know that neither the women at Henrik’s compound nor the sleazy drug dealers ripping off Donnie know what is about to happen—the soft, purring Ukrainian kitten is about to morph into a ninja-assassin killer who takes no prisoners. Threaten her babies and you die.

Helena is a Ukrainian version of Homeland’s Carrie Mathison. Both Helena and Carrie struggle against their inner demons, refusing to be constrained by social conventions and, despite what others think of them, obsessively pursuing their own goals, often resorting to deception to do so.

If Helena were a Dungeons & Dragons character, her alignment would be chaotic good.

Helena is all Freudian id. She does not hide her passions: for food, for alcohol, for love. She is childlike in her neediness.

Her clone sisters Alison and Sarah serve here as instructive contrasts. In Freudian terms, Alison is the superego of the group, the obsessive-compulsive, suburban soccer mom for whom everything must run on schedule. Helena is her primal opposite. Meanwhile, in discovering her clone sisters and unique origins, Sarah has been transformed from punk con artist to the Ledas’ ego, their prefrontal lobe. Sarah’s strength, bravery, and cunning make her their leader, deftly negotiating between and using the best parts of Helena’s id and Alison’s superego. Sarah soon realizes that Helena is a weapon that she can suppress or unleash: “If you don’t obey, I’ll sic Helena on you,” Sarah tells Dr. Leekie. And Leekie knows she can. Helena is rather like a dangerous beast that Sarah has tamed, thanks to the connection Helena feels to Sarah as her in utero twin.

If Rachel Duncan, raised like the Castor men as a tool for her creators, fits the trope of the evil twin, Helena is only half-evil. “Helena is not a monster,” Mrs. S tells Sarah. “Just trained to be a killer.” Helena has both good and bad in her. She has been damaged, but the love of Sarah, and Sarah’s daughter, Kira, can redeem her.

We also see Helena’s goodness when she plays with children, and more important, protects them—not only the kids of the Prolethean farm but especially Kira and Alison’s two children. These scenes also allow us to see Helena’s childlike immaturity, which is what allows her to relate to children but also indicates that Helena is still unformed, capable of becoming more damaged but also of being healed by love.

It is also instructive to look at Helena and her plotlines in Orphan Black in terms of the twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault, who famously argued that modern institutions such as prisons and mental hospitals exist to control their inmates. For Foucault, the purpose of every institution in the modern State, from the military to elementary schools to the police to colleges to social workers, is to control citizens. Accordingly, such institutions abhor deviance above all else, especially in individuals who do not bend to their control.

We know little of Foucault’s childhood, other than that he described himself as a truant and contrarian. We know he was gay and that his sadistic father beat him. Like Helena with the nuns, Foucault learned to hide his true character and to understand that the world was against him.

For Foucault, all institutions control people and their bodies in four basic ways: spatially, in directing how far apart bodies exist and whether they intermingle; organically, by forcing bodies into “normal” activities and suppressing “abnormal” actions; genetically, by controlling the evolution over time of bodies and their offspring; and combinatorily, in dictating when bodies can legitimately come together.

Take elementary schools. Children who formerly were as active as they desired must learn to be quiet and behave in concert with other children. Those who cannot adapt—say, those with diagnoses of attention deficit disorder—must be sent to a “special” school or given medication to make them conform. Most important, students must learn to obey the teacher, who must be in control of the students or be fired.

For Foucault, knowledge and language function to control, especially in the way they categorize the Other. In his History of Madness, Foucault describes how labels of mental abnormality—labels such as “witch,” “bitch,” “whore,” “crazy,” and “lesbian”—functioned historically to control women in particular. In contrast to real mental illness, which has a biological basis, for Foucault many forms of madness are socially constructed to control deviance. (This work fueled libertarian critiques of psychiatry, especially the 1962 book The Myth of Mental Illness by Hungarian psychiatrist Thomas Szasz.)

In sum, for Foucault, things we take for granted as liberating or natural, such as going to school, having parents, or attending religious services, are actually socially constructed mechanisms for suppressing deviance, controlling individuals, and shaping how sexuality can be appropriately expressed. In the modern world, institutions strive to create pliant, docile bodies that must be trained, observed, and, above all else, obedient.

Topside and the Dyad Corporation’s treatment of the Ledas perfectly reflects Foucault’s conception of the world: Each cloned sister has a monitor to observe her and, if necessary, help these organizations kill her, as happened with the Leda clones in Helsinki.

But we see Foucault’s ideas most keenly in Helena’s story. Helena was raised in a convent orphanage in Ukraine that the official Orphan Black site describes as “oppressive and harsh.” Like prisons, orphanages are often some of the most controlling places on Earth, and in Helena’s orphanage, religion, with its promise of Heaven and threat of Hell, was likely used to manipulate her behavior. The time she spent after, with Tomas and the Proletheans, and then at Henrik’s compound, must have been, in many ways, similar: subjected to religious doctrine aimed at controlling her behavior, and punished (and even physically caged) when doctrine failed.

When Helena and later Sarah are imprisoned somewhere in a Mexican desert in season three, we see more evidence of Foucault’s themes. Everything about Helena is monitored and controlled. But her training and previous institutionalization have prepared her to survive this experience. She notices small things inside her cell. She cleverly hides butter and learns the routine of the guards, down to seconds, then brilliantly plots, waits, kills, and escapes.

Season two’s story line, and the positioning of Henrik as a foil to Helena, has particular resonance with Foucault. Charismatic Henrik and the New World Proletheans take obvious inspiration from religious cults, such as Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple cult in Jonestown, Guyana, or fundamentalist Mormon groups in southern Utah made notorious by Jon Krakauer in Under the Banner of Heaven. So we are not surprised that, when his daughter Gracie opposes him, Henrik’s syrupy words to her about hearing God in the whispered silences turn to sadistic action when he literally silences Gracie for not alerting him about Helena’s escape by sewing Gracie’s mouth shut.

Henrik personifies everything Foucault thought was wrong with religion and hierarchical institutions. These institutions and the men who run them serve to oppress women and minorities, regiment them, control them, and bend them to their will. Everything that Henrik says to Gracie and to Mark, his adopted son, serves to increase Henrik’s power in the social hierarchy. Everything he does to Helena—most obviously, harvesting her eggs and fertilizing them with his own sperm, making him the father of the divinely ordered special children they’ll produce—is calculated to boost this power, too, even at the expense of contradicting his cult’s original ideals.

That is because Henrik, as opposed to Tomas, is not really motivated by religious belief or piety. The compound and its ideology is really all about him. Religion here is just a ruse for controlling other people. That is why, when Gracie opposes him, while remaining true to the cult’s original ideals, she must be punished—and when the punishment does not work, why she must go.

Tomas and Henrik both brainwash their respective Prolethean followers to hear the Eternal in silence, which amounts to accepting everything that Tomas or Henrik want. We know this because, under Tomas, they abhorred anything about assisted reproduction, mimicking the current position of the Catholic Church; that is why they kidnapped Helena, to destroy her as a spawn of Satan. But then Henrik makes them abruptly reverse their position, which is where the “New World” Proletheans depart from Tomas’ Old World cult.

Why? Well, we know that Tomas and Henrik clashed over this belief. We know that Henrik is evil because he not only has Tomas murdered but has Mark do so. Only a leader confident in the silence and complicity of his followers would act this way. Henrik is smug, arrogant, and ambitious, all under a false coat of humility and piety.

We know this type.

Helena is correct when she tells Gracie that Henrik sees young women as his “brood mares.” In his own mind and supreme narcissism, Henrik is the spiritual and physical instrument of God. Henrik tried once to reproduce himself, resulting in a son, Abel, who died shortly after birth. Now God has sent Helena to him, with her special healing powers, and it is only right that Henrik’s sperm should be the male element in the new, divinely ordered Super Beings to come.

Although the Old and New World Proletheans are at opposite ends of one spectrum, ideologically, when it comes to their stance on clones, they both operate the same way: Both groups believe their higher end justifies anything. So the Old World Proletheans train Helena to hunt down and kill her sister-clones. Under Henrik, the New World Proletheans accept Tomas’ murder, the kidnapping and rape of Helena (because forced insemination is, indeed, a kind of rape), the false imprisonment without judge or trial of Gracie in a barn stall with steel bars, and the death or banishment of anyone who stands in their way. After all—and it is worth repeating—Henrik barbarically sews together his daughter’s lips as punishment for opposing him. Afterward, when Helena comforts Gracie, she tells her that the sadistic nuns did the same to her.

The Neolutionists are no different. They, too, believe their higher end justifies their actions, particularly when it comes to monitoring and controlling the Ledas.

For Foucault, resistance to domination takes a plurality of forms, and it is often in resisting such domination that humans become truly free. So Helena, in resisting the control of Proletheans, Neolutionists, Dyad, and Topside, breaks the mold and becomes free. And that, I suspect, is the true reason we love Helena: More than any other character in Orphan Black, Helena is free.