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Orphan Black

As Orphan Black begins its fifth and final season this month, the time to mourn is nigh. Not only will the end of the BBC America sci-fi series mean the loss of an incredibly imaginative, intelligent show full of ridiculously talented writers, actors, and crew, it also means the loss of potentially the best LGBT couple ever to appear on television — and yes, I’m talking about Cosima Niehaus (Tatiana Maslany) and Delphine Cormier (Evelyne Brochu). After all, a world without the pairing, lovingly dubbed Cophine, is not one any of us should want to live in. I certainly don’t.

To say that the relationship between the two women, both brilliant scientists and spirited personalities in their own rights, has been easy would be a lie. In fact, it’s messy, complicated, and painful. At times, it’s required the kind of sacrifice that is unbearable to watch, let alone imagine two people going through. It’s passionate, impatient, and at times impossible. Cosima and Delphine share the kind of love most boring TV romances could only dream of creating, effortless and larger than life — and a true gift to viewers of any sexuality.

Introduced back in season one, Delphine was Cosima’s beautiful, effervescent immunology “classmate” who was actually her monitor, assigned by Leda to track known clones and report on their activities and whereabouts. While most monitors are unaware of why they’re tracking their subjects, Delphine was a notable exception given that she was working closely with Aldous Leekie on what she felt at the time was a noble pursuit towards genetic perfection in the name of Neolution.

Of course, things got a little more complicated than anyone planned when Cosima and Delphine fell in love, setting off a series of events that would prove dangerous and change the course of Neolution and human cloning in unimaginable ways. Together, the women have explored Cosima’s nature as a clone as well as the health problems Cosima faces because of it, illnesses which have become progressively worse over the past four series. They have come together and broken apart again on numerous occasions, not because of a lack of love or desire to be together but because both women understand that sometimes the greater good must take precedence over the individual. And yet, they always come back together in the end.

Perhaps one of the most wonderful things about the relationship between Cosima and Delphine is how utterly simple it is in a world of endless complexities. While media often portrays lesbian couples as angst-ridden and problematic — one woman is always either struggling to come to terms with her sexuality or decides she’s not gay at all, she just hadn’t met the right guy yet — Cophine’s union is untroubled by such primitive and cliché concerns. Both women are secure in their love for one another and are entirely unapologetic about it, regardless of how anyone on the outside feels (though thankfully, no one seems to have much of a problem with it — just as it should be). Cosima and Delphine’s problems are much larger and completely unrelated to their sexuality.

Refreshingly, their relationship is never watered down for the sake of remaining palatable to straight audiences, nor is it played up and hypersexualized for the sake of seeming “edgy.” Make no mistake — Cosima and Delphine’s connection is intellectual, emotional, and yes, sexual. The latter element has been celebrated throughout the series in some of the most lovingly gentle, passionate, and even sensual scenes possible without ever verging on pornographic or too male-gazey, an issue which is all too common in same-sex love scenes on TV and in film. Instead, these scenes punctuate the seriousness of their everyday lives — lives in which Cosima’s mere existence and Delphine’s promise to love her and her sisters equally and do everything she can to take care of them carry some potentially fatal stakes — with a fierceness and a beauty that’s an absolute joy to watch.

It’s difficult to determine whether to contribute Cophine’s appeal to the writing or the performances from Brochu and Maslany. The most obvious and likely answer is that it’s a combination of the two. Not only are the scripts for the characters compassionately written, they’re also achingly and frustratingly honest even when other, more cliché storylines or dialogue might be more tempting to write and easier for the viewer to digest. The insistence on this level of authenticity is rare and it’s done the individual characters and their relationships a great service by breathing a hard-wrought life into them. Maslany and Brochu play these hardships beautifully, with an intensity and yet a level of quiet introspection which is frankly rather mesmerizing.

Perhaps the most special thing about Cophine is that no moment the characters share on screen feels forced or cheap; every interaction is well-earned and every element of their ever-deepening relationship feels the natural progression of a couple who, while constantly under threat from outside forces, find solace in one another and faith to keep going one more day. It isn’t ever easy, but for Cosima and Delphine, there’s nothing more worth it than each other.