Hello and welcome to the eighth recap of the second season of Orange is The New Black, a show about what happens after the entire cast of Pretty Little Liars finally gets busted.  You might notice that I’m neither your fantasy girlfriend Kate Severance, nor our fearless leader Riese, nor musical heartthrob/ice cream feelings crying cut-offs little dog enthusiast Mal Blum!
Instead you might recognize me, Lizz, from the pages of Pretty Little Liars, or Glee or idk your cousin’s bar mitzvah a few years ago. In other words, we’ll have a variety of recappers filling in for OITNB over the next few weeks, but this episode is devoted to me and my new bff Rosa.
We open we do every episode to the sweet sounds of Regina Spektor and the faces of incarcerated women. You guys don’t know this because we don’t live together, yet, but I actually sing along to the opening theme every single time. I also sing along to the opening of Big Bang Theory but that’s neither here nor there.
We actually open on Miss Rosa sitting in Healy’s office wearing a nightgown, hoodie and a generally unimpressed facial expression.
In case you haven’t been furiously watching all of OITNB without stopping, or even if you have, I will remind you that Miss Rosa is the bad ass who let us know that “No one fucks with cancer.” Those, I suspect, are words to live by.
So Healy tells Miss Rosa that her doctors say she needs a bilateral salpingo oophorectomy which is a fancy way of saying she needs her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed. Unfortunately the prison isn’t going to pay for it.
At this point in the episode I’d like to make a disclosure.
Disclosure: I am a medical student and am therefore very likely unable to discuss prison medical treatment from an unbiased standpoint. To make matters worse I don’t know anything about prison medical care other than that the US Supreme Court has ruled that inmates must be provided with standard of care medicine.
In other words, I imagine that Miss Rosa’s treatment accurately reflects some prisoner’s experiences and doesn’t accurately reflect others. I have no idea.
Healy: I’m your counselor. I’m here to help you through it.
Miss Rosa: There is no through this. I’m going to die.
We flash back to Miss Rosa as a young woman and all do a private little celebration because, is it just me or is this the moment we’ve been waiting for forever and ever? Like forever.
Rosa and her husband Marco sit in the backseat of a car chatting about who has spinach in their teeth. Then Marco hands Rosa a gun. So that’s where we’re at. Marco tells Rosa that everyone is nervous their first time and then they start to enjoy it. We all side eye and whisper “That’s what she said.”
Marco tells Rosa, “We kiss before and we kiss after” before sharing a big sloppy kiss.
So, like then they and their friends proceed to rob a bank. NBD.
Things go south towards the end of their heist, and when Rosa goes to shoot a guard it turns out, womp womp, her gun isn’t loaded. But actually this is great news because instead of this being the end of Rosa’s story and her getting put away for killing a cop or something, she and Marco run off and sit happily in the car. Smelling all that delicious money.
Rosa then suddenly realizes that Marco has a terrible gunshot wound to the back. Do we ever use the phrase “shot in the back” to mean the same thing as “stabbed in the back?” No? Okay just checking to see if there was a double layered metaphor here or something. I guess not.
The two go in for their “after” kiss, which they share before Marco promptly dies.  This is not ideal.
We hop in our time machine back to the 2010s in a little ol’ prison in Connecticut where Caputo is investigating all of Red’s plants in the Official Penitentiary Greenhouse.  Caputo just loves the smell of fresh soil in the morning and wants to have a little space for “his own guys to bust out a little.” Gross.
Anyways Red is not so much wanting Caputo to be in the greenhouse, what with it being her entire base of operation for smuggling fancy things into the prison.
Caputo is all like, “Oh well see you in the AM for the next million billion years BFF Red!” Obviously Red is going to have to hatch a plan in order to end up on top. I mean it wouldn’t be Litchfield without Red hatching a plan. Or really bad food. Ironically you need both.
In the laundry room Baby Brook is telling everyone about how she just loves doing laundry for women. Making things clean and stuff.
This leads Pennsatucky’s former gang to dropping hints to Baby Brook about deodorants and the importance of windows. Pennsatucky breaks the news to Baby Brook that actually, she just really smells. They all think she smells.  While there’s an argument to be made that maybe everyone doesn’t need to spend so much time getting all up in her business to smell Soso, regardless, there is a smell problem.
Soso is pretty mortified. I get that. Guys, promise me you’ll tell me if I ever have a BO problem. Seriously. You have to promise.
Elsewhere, Piper also discusses bathing: specifically the bathing of a senile elderly inmate and the things that may or may not grow in skin folds. That is to say, the Golden Girls are pretty worried about Jimmy following her “Compassionate Release” aka Dump-and-Run.
Piper takes this as an opportunity to — surprise surprise — talk about herself. She tells the Golden Girls her grandmother is dying and how she loves her/will miss her/was inspired by her etc. etc.
Piper: She told me, “Go out and eat the world Piper. Don’t you get stuck at home with some man.” I may have taken that last part too literally.
The Golden Girls have a wealth of knowledge and insight.
Taslitz:Â Your mother sounds like a twat.
Just then, Piper is pulled away into the hallway by Healy who has amazing magical news. She got furlough!! Why? Because favoritism/racism/classism/Healy’s generally confusing character development.
