Hard to believe it’s been only five weeks since I panned the series premiere of BBC America’s Orphan Black.

I’m tempted to admit I was wrong, though technically I wasn’t. I described “a potentially interesting storyline mired in a quicksand of background and setting.” That was true. I was an editor for 16 years – still am, sort of – so clarity and continuity are very important to me.

However, I also wrote: “I might watch another episode because I remember what a mess TNT’s Falling Skies was the first half of Season 1 before its makers got their act together. But without serious, rapid improvement …”

Lo and behold, there was serious improvement – starting in Episode 2. Perhaps the writers simply tried to pack too much exposition into the premiere in order to launch the series’ complicated plot lines. Since Episode 2, the plot pacing has been much better.

As much as I am a stickler for detail, I’ve found that my annoyance about the ambiguity of Orphan Black’s setting has tempered as my appreciation of its creativity – and for the performances by Tatiana Maslany and the rest of the cast – has grown.

Don’t get me wrong: The confusion about the show’s setting remains – and is further complicated by a profusion of accents and lingo – North American, English, Irish and Ukrainian, among others. Anybody can tell that it’s filmed in Toronto. The issue is whether the show’s creators want viewers to consider that the setting.

The best commentary I found on the issue comes from a Canadian blogger who writes under the name D.K. Latta and postulates that the ambiguity is intentional, not sloppy. In an item published May 27 by The Huffington Post (Canadian TV Shows Set in Ambiguousville, North America), Latta writes:

“The filmmakers are working overtime to make it ambiguous. Currency – an obvious ‘tell’ – is often obscured. … The actors keep their hands folded around bills, or it’s kept deliberately out of the frame. Place names tend toward American. The series’ opening scene took place on a train platform with a voice announcing ‘New York’ as the next stop – subliminally planting in the viewers’ mind an American locale. There’s a police ‘lootenant’ (pronounced the American way), when I’m not sure lieutenant is even a common police rank in Canada. And the series deliberately doesn’t name the city it’s in (even when showing municipal documents or city maps).

“None of this is happenstance. These are cynical decisions made by the producers.”

In an April 5 post on the Pulp and Dagger Blog (Orphan Black: The Good, The Bad…and The Canadian), the same blogger asserts that:

“The intention was to make it ambiguous enough that most viewers would mistake it for the United States.”

I’ll buy into the premise that the ambiguous setting is intentional. I’m not sure why. Latta has larger points to make about the Canadian TV- and movie-production business. That’s an interesting topic, but it extends far beyond Orphan Black. I’m just learning to live with the ambiguity.

That is made easier by the creativity and pacing of the plot. Unlike some other shows with complicated mythologies, Orphan Black tends to provide fans with at least one big reveal in each episode. Sometimes it’s a new element to the backstory; other times it’s bringing together characters who previously were ignorant of each other. The mystery is complex enough to withstand those reveals, and the reveals keep viewers from growing frustrated with that complexity.

As I speculated in the earlier post, the show is about clones. Fortunately, they’re not little Hitlers as in The Boys from Brazil, but rather hot-chick clones. The more clones, the more we see of Maslany, the show’s lead actress. She has, by my count, played six roles so far – the scrappy Sarah of the street, suburban soccer mom Alison, scientific researcher Cosima, the feral Helena, suicidal cop Beth and German sniper victim Katja – and played each convincingly. For each clone, she’s had to present a different accent, posture and wardrobe. [UPDATE: Maslany’s challenge was so complex, and her work so convincing, that she earned the 2013 Critics’ Choice Television Award for best actress in a drama series.]

The clones resemble one another closely enough that Sarah has passed herself off as Beth, and Sarah and Alison have posed as each other when circumstances required it. But Cosima recently learned that each has a distinct genetic marker, sort of a bar code. While Alison and her husband adopted two children because she couldn’t reproduce, Sarah gave birth to a precocious daughter named Kira (Skyler Wexler, who played the daughter of Summer Glau’s character on Alphas), who appears able to differentiate among her mother, Alison and Helena.

It was just revealed the Sarah and Helena are twins as well as clones; we don’t know whether they’re genetically identical since Helena hasn’t been tested yet. Helena was brainwashed into believing that she was the original while the other clones were mere copies she had to kill. I had thought Sarah might be the original since she could procreate while the others, so far, couldn’t. If Sarah and Helena indeed are twins, I don’t know what to think.

“We thought clones would be really terrific territory,” writer Graeme Manson told BuzzFeed Entertainment, “for John [Fawcett] as a director, for all the visual, technical challenges, and the fun stuff we do visually with our clone switcheroos and that kind of stuff. And then for me, it was incredibly rich psychological territory. I think the thing we do differently with our clones is we really put the nature/nurture question in the fore.”

That theme is reinforced with episode titles such as “Natural Selection,” “Instinct,” “Variation Under Nature” and “Effects of External Conditions.”

“There was also lots of great clone shenanigans on Battlestar Galactica that I loved,” Fawcett told BuzzFeed. Still, Orphan Black has more of a sense of humor about the clones than BSG did. The show already has mined plenty of laughs from conservative, suburban Alison’s emerging friendship with Sarah’s urban, gay foster brother, Felix (Jordan Gavaris, previously on the Cartoon Network live-action series Unnatural History). Gavaris steals practically every scene in which he appears.

Early episodes also drew some humor from the antics of Sarah’s dim-witted, drug-dealing ex-boyfriend, Vic (Michael Mando). But Vic’s schtick got old quickly, so I hope we’ve seen the last of him.

Viewers learned in the premiere that Kira lives with Sarah and Felix’s foster mom, the Irish-accented “Mrs. S” (Maria Doyle Kennedy, who has appeared in multiple episodes of Downton Abbey, Dexter and The Tudors). Mrs. S appeared only briefly in the first couple of Orphan Black episodes, always wary of letting the irresponsible Sarah back into Kira’s life. Since Episode 4, however, we’ve seen a more nuanced Mrs. S – just as protective of Sarah when she can be, and a source of critical information about the origins of Sarah and Helena.

Each clone but Sarah and Helena is believed to have a minder, somebody close to them who works for the entity behind the cloning. Only two minders have been revealed so far, and both experienced clone sex: While impersonating Beth, Sarah seduced Beth’s boyfriend (and minder) Paul (Dylan Bruce); Cosima later seduced the woman she (correctly) suspected of being her minder, fellow researcher Delphine (Quebecois actress Evelyne Brochu). Heading into the June 1 season finale, Paul appears to be on Sarah’s side while Delphine’s loyalties seem to be confused. Both have been working for Dr. Aldous Leekie (Matt Frewer, TV’s Max Headroom from the 1980s and, more recently, Gen. Bressler on Falling Skies and Jim Taggart on Syfy’s Eureka) an author and scientist who preaches “Neolution,” a philosophy of self-directed evolution. While Leekie has been the highest in the cloning group’s food chain so far, previews of the season finale teased at a new, female character who might be pulling his strings.

Meanwhile, Beth’s police partner, ethically compromised Detective Art Bell (Kevin Hanchard) is working Katja’s murder. (Helena killed Katja with a sniper rifle in the primere; Sarah buried the body in Episode 2 in what turned out to be a construction site – so it was torn to pieces before the police were called.) While Art may have been sympathetic to Beth, he’s under the scrutiny of his suspicious new partner, Angela (Inga Cadranel). And, bit by bit, the two are beginning to suss out the clone scenario, though they’re having trouble believing it.

After a shaky start, Orphan Black has become a compelling sic-fi drama that has earned a committed following. On May 2, BBC America announced it was renewing the program for a second 10-episode season. The only downside is that viewers will have to wait until next year for answers to any cliffhangers built into Saturday’s Season 1 finale.

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Stuart J. Robinson, a college friend of the TV Tyrant, is a writer, editor, media-relations practitioner and social-media guy based in Phoenix.