For fans of the breakout BBC America series Orphan Black, the wait for a new season has felt particularly painful, given the world’s recent realization that the series is amazing and Tatiana Maslany is the shit. Every couple of weeks we’re bombarded by a new friend who’s finally taken the plunge into the depths of the Clone Club and come out an avid fan of the sci-fi drama series. And though the series has given us visual hints and clues into the machinations of next season, today we’ve been given some verbal insight into season two, and it comes by the way of Sir Francis Bacon.
And going the canonical text route isn’t a new thing for the series. For those that are unaware, last season’s episode titles were all taken from the evolutionary text On the Origin of Species by none other than Charles Darwin. Now that the origins have been explained — albeit roughly — it’s time to get to work. The Plan of The Work, in fact: the Bacon text from which the season two episodes will get their title dues.
And Huffington Post has reported that the first episode of the upcoming new season’s title will be “Nature Under Constraint and Vexed,” pulled directly from the aforementioned work of Bacon. Published in 1620, Plan of The Work broke down the plans for The Great Instauration, laying out the framework for his own methodology. It is in the third part of the Plan that the phrase is found, in a section dedicated to natural and experimental history. The section reads as follows — and note that when he says “she” he’s referring to nature:
For first, the object of the natural history which I propose is not so much to delight with variety of matter or to help with present use of experiments, as to give light to the discovery of causes and supply a suckling philosophy with its first food. … Next, with regard to the mass and composition of it: I mean it to be a history not only of nature free and at large (when she is left to her own course and does her work her own way), — such as that of the heavenly bodies, meteors, earth and sea, minerals, plants, animals, — but much more of nature under constraint and vexed; that is to say, when by art and the hand of man she is forced out of her natural state, and squeezed and moulded. … Nay (to say the plain truth) I do in fact (low and vulgar as men may think it) could more upon this part both for helps and safeguards than upon the other; seeing that the nature of things betrays itself more readily under the vexations of art than in its natural freedom.
The title makes sense given where we left things off at the end of season one: to say the clones are vexed and under constraints is an understatement: Kira's gone missing, Cosima's sick and perhaps deathly so, and Alison has gone ahead and killed someone with a scarf, all while pro-clone Rachel Duncan is touting some contract as a way to give the women their freedom, which, ha. Obviously, April 19th cannot come soon enough. Hurry up, time!
