Some of the best acting on TV is on Orphan Black, a sci-fi thriller on BBC America that will enter its second season in the spring. The series follows streetwise con artist Sarah Manning (Tatiana Maslany) in a plot involving mistaken identity.

On her way home to Toronto after hiding out from a bad-news boyfriend, Sarah meets a distressed stranger on a train platform. The twist: the stranger looks exactly like her. After staring Sarah in the face, she walks in front of the approaching train and kills herself. In shock and confusion, Sarah steals the stranger’s purse and over the next few days, using the wallet and keys inside it, steals her life too.

Sarah’s con game turns into a search for what links her to the look-alike stranger. The doppelgänger plot is blown open when Sarah meets three other identical look-alikes and learns that she is one of several clones, separated at birth and supposedly under the watchful eye of their mysterious creators.