This is a recap of episode 312 of Orange Is the New Black, a Lifetime movie based on the novel Dolly Dingle, Lesbian Landlady.
After eleven hundred years, Daya is finally having her baby! She’s in labor and it’s excruciating and she doesn’t even have any Tylenol. Everyone’s crowding around giving her advice about breathe like this and squat like that and moan such and such way and eat this can of pineapple. That last one comes from Aleida and so Daya does not accept. In fact, she tells her to skedaddle because she kind of hates her because Aleida kind of tried to sell her baby for commissary gift cards.
I just feel really sick and like super betrayed.
I told you not to get invested in another Ryan Murphy show.
Aleida Flashback! Tiny Daya is playing with a used condom in the backyard, a thing she just found lying around, while Aleida tells her friend there’s a free summer camp for low income families upstate and she wants to send Daya to it. Her friend thinks it’s the worst idea she’s ever heard of because she’s not into accepting charity and she’s also not into Daya’s cultural influences and heritage being whitewashed away (which is a super valid concern; I worked at a camp just like this when I was in high school and college, and that’s exactly how it goes). The condom-as-balloon thing really seals the deal, though, for Aleida.
Back in Litchfield, Red’s farm to table diner is so popular that she’s had to instate a lottery for tickets to attend. The line is basically wrapped around the entire building. Piper and Stella are not queued up because they’re busing sewing panties and talking about how Alex dumped Piper and Piper can’t believe it. Alex dumped her. Alex dumped her. “A sophisticated, powerful criminal mastermind like you?” is a thing Stella says with a straight face. She invites Piper to movie night but Piper says she needs some time to really dig into her emotions and process what happened and take responsibility for her contribution to the demise of her relationship.
LOK JK, like every Slytherin masquerading as a Hufflepuff, she just wants to mope around in public and feel like everything is everyone else’s fault and use other people’s sympathy to amass power. Textbook.
Anyway, that’s what men’s rights are about. Now here’s a thing I wrote about reverse racism.
Will you punch me in the face instead?
Soso’s depression is at its max now that Berdie is gone and she’s back to dealing with Healy. He wants her to take anti-depressants and she figures she’s got nothing else to lose, so why not? Only when she hits up the new MCC doctor, he leaves her alone with a couple hundred thousand pills and she stuffs them all into her pockets, directly.
Pennsatucky and Big Boo are sorting out what to do with Coates. It’s not enough to get Pennsatucky away from him, Boo wants her to get revenge on him. In fact, she wants to rape him right back. Pennsatucky isn’t really feeling Boo’s plan but she also know she’s never going to get a single drop of justice from the system, so if she wants some, she’s going to have to take it. Big Boo’s been saving dog tranquilizers or something from the pet therapy program in season two, so her plan is to stuff Coates full of them and then stick a broom in his ass. Pennsatucky reluctantly agrees.
Make it quick. I have a magazine cover shoot in 20 minutes and a press day for the movie I did with Lily Motherfucking Tomlin.
Sophia is in her salon, minding her own damn business like she always does, when a handful of prisoners waltz in to harass her with the most disgusting, transphobic bullshit. It’s so upsetting. It’s one of the most upsetting things I have ever seen on TV. I watched this episode at the time of the summer when it seemed like one trans woman was being murdered every week. Laverne Cox is one of the very few high profile black trans women we see regularly treated with respect and given a voice on television — along with Janet Mock and now Chandi Moore because of I Am Cait — so watching her get brutalized and abused like this is important because this is real life for so many trans women, especially black trans women, and we need to bear witness to this horrific, inexcusable, perpetual violence so we will accept that it’s happening and stand with our trans sisters to MAKE IT STOP. But goddamn it is hard to watch. I had to pause it like seven times to even get through it. She fights back and it only makes it worse. She fights back and one of the new stupid guards sees her and runs for a supervisor. They really almost kill her.
She finally ends up in Caputo’s office and because she knows her rights and she knows her shit, and she tells him like it is: All these guards need training, half of them need to be fired, the women who jumped her need to go to SHU and if he doesn’t figure out how to make that happen, she’s going to get a lawyer and deal with him with a lawsuit in court. He shrugs his trademark impotent shrug.
I got Vincent Crabbe on BuzzFeed’s Which Harry Potter Character Are You test. Who’d you get?
I don’t need a BuzzFeed quiz to tell me which Harry Potter character I am!
But it was Ginny Weasley.
Aleida and Maria talk about how having a kid is this weirdly addictive thing because they need you for food and shelter but you need them to validate your life and your choices and make you feel like the most important person in the world. Which leads to Aleida flashing back to the first day she dropped Daya off at the upstate summer camp with all the do-gooder teenage counselors who are nice kids but also have exactly zero experience living out their idealism in the hard world. Daya freaks out when Aleida leaves her; she just wants to go back home with her mama! So Aleida Harry and the Hendersonses her, telling her to go on and get out of there and she doesn’t want her around this summer anyway.
And then she goes to her car and sobs and sobs.
Hallway of Regrets and Recriminations
Have you ever noticed how the sun doesn’t even bother shining when I’m not awake?
Alex: Oh, hey.
Piper: I’M FINE.
Alex: Yeah? Because I’ve been worried about you.
Piper: For what reason? Nothing out of the ordinary has happened. I am awesome, as usual, and so is my life.
Alex: Okay, well. Breakup’s still on!
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“Mary Steenburgen is pretty upset, but consoled by the fact that she gets sexier and sexier the older she gets, and is now the hottest 62-year-old woman on earth.”
I am always so proud of how many jokes can still be made even when this show doesn’t let the light and heavy parts have any elbow room ever. And this one is pure gold.
Omg…Sophia…one of the strongest characters on television imo, the shit she goes through is real
That image of Black Cindy running to get Red’s corn saying “I am so good at praying”, is the best. You are a great missionary for Lesbian Jesus, Heather! (in the old fashioned sense of Missionary)
I finally finished this damn season the other day, y’all! Great recap, as always, thank you :)
I have mixed feelings about Aledia. Granted I know she’s not the greatest mom in the world and is very immature and irresponsible and neglectful but I like that she’s trying to make amends to Daya in her own way. I never got the vibe that she hated her daughter just that she cares in her own limited way. Also I may get a lot of flack for this but I felt like the transphobia this season was a bit forced I mean no one from the African American tribe stood up for Sophia at all?
I’m… actually surprised there wasn’t more transphobia before now. Sophia doesn’t really have anyone to stick up for her, we only ever really see her socializing with Sister Ingalls outside of her beauty parlor. Connection=protection in prison and Sophia is neutral with most everyone. I do think that the way transphobia was approached this season was out of the blue and shoehorned in, but mostly due to uneven writing.
That is true I was just under the assumption that if anything did go down Poussey, Watson, Suzanne, Taystee and Black Cindy would have her back and yeah the transphobia felt very forced as well as the tension between Gloria and Sophia.
I agree with you Andrea, in that I also felt surprised/dissapointed that the rest of the black girls didn’t have Sophia’s back when push came to shove this season. In fact, going back, one of my only critiques of the SECOND season was that the writers separated Sophia out from the rest of the black girl clique, when she spent most of her meals during the first season with Taystee and Poussey. I felt like they left her without a “prison family” in a way that they hadn’t during the first season. I think you could see the end results of that in season 3, when she had nobody around for her.
I’m not sure if I feel like the transphobia as a whole felt forced, but I did have a hard time believing that none of the black girls stood up for her more prominently.
This is also one of my biggest issues with the writers when it comes to how disconnected Sophia seems to be from the other black girls. And it seems like it’s being done on purpose. In S2, I rationalized Sophia’s absence from that huge storyliine with Vee as being done because Sophia would have been the most vocal about not buying Vee’s shit and the writers wanting Poussey to be that lone person instead for obvious reasons. But what is the excuse for S3. Often times it seems like the only significant relationship Sophia has with anyone in the prison is with the Sister and that was also lacking in S3.
Yes exactly I mean we get one line from Taystee about how Sophia doesn’t cause any problems but that’s it. I just thought it felt forced due to the convoluted storyline that linked Sophia and Gloria together. One of the things that I really like about Sense 8 is that Riley is seen as a character that doesn’t revolve around being transgendered. She has friends and a job and is in a loving relationship and I just wished that Orange is The New Black gave Sophia the same respect. I would have rather just have the writers concentrate on her struggles with trying to raise her son and coping with the fact that her wife is moving on to someone else. Maybe even throw in some romance.
I actually thought the show was really careful from the beginning to show that Sophia didn’t have a tribe, and that the way she forged her space and her safety there was becoming necessary to the inmates — her makeshift salon. It’s always been clear to me that she’s an outlier who keeps her head down and stays out of the conflicts, which is one of the reason that the transphobia (that realistically would happen in prison) lay dormant until Season 3. I think it would be dishonest for the show to ignore the obvious issues for trans women in the prison system.
I think Aleida is a very strong character on the show. She’s a crappy mother and mostly not a very good person, but the show takes care to still show her humanity. Plus, Elizabeth Rodriguez is freaking amazing.
Pst, Andrea, you mean Nomi, not Riley
Oh sorry, my apologizes. I only just started watching Sense 8.
if we start season 4 and daya is miraculously still fucking pregnant somehow i am going to lose it
That would be the funniest thing ever
heather i have never loved you more than in this moment when i saw you use “harry the henderson” as a verb.
All the tears for baby Daya, Daya’s baby and Queen Sophia. They better not let her rot in SHU goddammit! I would throw my pie for her!