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With #FarewellOrphanBlack, Clone Club Says Goodbye to a Great Show

Last night was the series finale of Orphan Black, and Clone Club took to Twitter to celebrate and mourn an excellent show that was steadfastly focused on women and sisterhood, dedicated to LGBT representation, and full of weird sci-fi science. It’s incredibly rare to see a show that delivers all three of these things, and so it’s easy to see why Orphan Black won the devotion of so many viewers.

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(Note: While this isn’t a spoilers post, some users did include a few non-spoiler GIFs from the final episode in their tweets, so if you’re a strict “no footage, please” person when it comes to spoilers, best wait ’til you’ve watched the episode.)

As you can see, there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth – and much, much love.

Of course, the official Orphan Black account also got in on the tag.

As the New York Times covered, Orphan Black was never a ratings monster for either BBC or BBC America – but it had #CloneClub, its incredibly passionate, active fanbase. “Their adamant vocal nature was the reason our show was anything — a success — and seen the way it was,” said star Tatiana Maslany, who won an Emmy for her performance(s).

“As we move to a world with skinny bundles and more direct-to-consumers opportunities,” said Sarah Barnett, the president of BBC America, “I think mattering in the kind of ways Orphan Black matters is actually as crucially important alongside [ratings]…It’s not just size. Mattering matters.”

I really love that last quote, even though it comes from an executive talking about her business model. Mattering does matter when it comes to fiction, and I think most creators would rather put together a smaller show that really spoke to its fans and gave them representation and stories they couldn’t find anywhere else, than…say, something like Two and A Half Men. What Orphan Black achieved was lovely and rare and meaningful, and that’s so clear from the fan outpouring.

(Via Twitter and New York Times; image via BBC America/Corriente Latina)

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