In the library, among the towers of books, we find the chronically depressed, wildly grieving, still-mostly-friendless widow, Brook Soso. Well, we find her and also so does Judy King, still in her best winter jacket.
Soso doesn’t think she can go on, and neither do I, I’m already crying.
King: In this lifetime you will be amazed by what you can get over, darling. Babies get thrown in dumpsters and survive, teenagers crash their cars and break their hearts and OD on coke and they live. Adults get worn down and compromise and fail and they’re still keeping track of their steps on their cell phones. We are so fucking resilient even when we really don’t want to be.
Soso: Uh, I already tried to kill myself once.
King: And you are still here right? It’s not so easy to shake this mortal coil.
Soso: Until someone sits on you ’til you die.
King: Yes, well… yes, there is that.
This moment delivers another flash of clarity (the first being Taystee saying what she said and then punching Caputo in the face) — that yes, babies and teenagers and adults can do things and survive, but Black women with criminal convictions can do nothing, and still die.
Blake and Stratman, thrilled by successfully seizing Frieda mid-peanut-butter grab and locking a few white supremacists in a cage, decide to lock themselves in the kitchen to avoid the uprising.
Nicky and Morello, looking to steal CO Dixon’s key right off his ring to get into the drug box, smash into the TV room where he’s got six white women on the floor fearing another San Bernardino.
As soon as the Ladies of the Floor learn from their comrades that the prisoners have seized the prison and obtained several hostages, the misandrist rage that lives deep inside all women (except for maybe the ones searching for fairy garden ideas on Pinterest) for all of time forevermore is unleashed upon his poor dumb body. Bye!
Daya, though — Daya’s all over the place. She needs a nap, she wants to keep the gun, she doesn’t know what’s going on or how to deal, and Maria’s getting increasingly concerned about how this is gonna play out.
Shit gets real way too fast when Flaca and Maritza start debating what Daya’s nickname will be in Max after she gets sent away for felony murder.
Daya’s possession of the gun gives her a small bit of power she doesn’t seem comfortable wielding, but isn’t ready to give up, especially when everything else feels so out of her control, and has for so long.
Gina, with Luscheck’s not-help, accidentally cuts off the power before finally cutting off the alarm, which means it’ll get dark soon and then what.
Back at HQ, it’s time for Caputo to go live on the iPad. He’s got a brand-new script, way better than the one he improvised in the Season Four finale. Like this one was written by four women of color and will be shot and directed by women of color!
This is Caputo’s chance to do right by their girl, and also Cindy’s gonna have some of that sweet coffee beverage over there, and also Josh is tied up in the corner, which is the perfect location for straight cis white men in a writer’s room.
As Caputo begins reading the script — about how Poussey was kind and a good librarian and didn’t deserve to die — the fury Taystee’s got riding at the edge of her heart loosens a little, her grief pushing its way to the surface of her skin, her face crumpling, almost to tears. But when Caputo won’t read the last sentence — about Bayley murdering Poussey — anger elbows itself back up again and Taystee turns the camera on herself, “She was murdered. By C.O. Bayley.”
Meanwhile, Piper and Alex have found the nice bathroom, where the soap smells like almonds and the lighting is romantic and Piper kinda wants to make out, but Alex wants to dwell further on her #1 Favorite Conversation Topic: that guard she killed!
Piper pleads, “Come on my fingers? They’re so clean!” Alex reluctantly consents to Piper’s wish for them to find a place to be horizontal but before they can give the ladies a sex scene that maybe 30% of OITNB’s viewership is still invested in, a buzzing starts a-buzzin from the room’s occupied stall….
Sophia and Gloria have reached the limit of their medical abilities in the beauty salon and have to load this sack of shit back into the cart and over to medical, where one heroic doctor has been waiting there all episode long to do his scene.
After last season’s unbearable and never-ending torture of Sophia, it’s nice to see her given a job to do that is a job she feels good about doing. It seems to wake her up, just a little.
She may not give a shit about Tommy the Toad-Boy’s life, but she’s gonna save him for Gloria, and it’s a relief that when she tells the doctor he’s gonna need help, and that as a former fire-fighter and EMT, she’s gonna give it, the doctor gladly accepts it. This makes him the first authority figure to apply reason and logic to a situation since the drama teacher who got fired in Season Three.
Well, Alex and Piper are now tasked with the keeping of Linda, who works for MCC, and is determined to make it out of this kerfuffle alive, with her shoes on, ’cause the floor is dirty.
Two threesomes meet at a fork in the woods: Alex/Piper/Linda and Zirconia/Pidge/Luschek. Zirconia and Pidge want her jacket. “It’s an outfit,” Linda explains, to everybody who cares which is nobody. Alex tells her it makes her look boxy. Zirconia also suggests taking the shoes to use as a weapon, not to wear, because “they represent the patriarchy and the oppression of women, and they hurt like fuck.” Ha.
Morello and Nicky have their keys and are back to get some chill pills, after arguing over who’s gonna hold the keys. Morello’s taking her caretaking of Nicky really seriously, now — she’s not gonna let her girl get away. Or let her girl forget that she’s married and therefore cannot make out.
Back in HQ, Watson’s stolen an outfit that gives her a slight Boyz II Men circa 1993 vibe, by which I mean my everlasting crush on her continues to burn like all of the candles leading to the bed in the music video for “I’ll Make Love To You.”
Unfortunately our crew faces some tech issues, like Taystee can’t get the iPad unlocked. Josh finally gives up his password: “number 6, lower case p, capital K, lower case a, b, s.” Aw, what a tender man with body parts. But all those days / weeks / months / years away from technology have left the group stumped for their next move:
Taystee: How do I post it. [pause] Man, WHERE do I post it?
Watson: I got an old MySpace account. Still might work.
Allison: Snapchat. I hear it’s all about Snapchat now.
Josh:[snort]
Taystee: What? Why’d you make that snort noise?
Josh: Snapchat is a closed system and it only lasts a limited time. But if you tweet with a hashtag and a link, Facebook, Instagram, et cetera, really increases your chances of going viral. You’re gonna want a quick, catchy clickbait. Something to really grab the liberal market — that’s who you wanna appeal to.
Caputo: Why are you helping them?
Josh: Because their message still exonerates MCC, so what the hell do I care? Bad apple guard, sympathetic victim, justice will be served. That’s what I’ve been trying to convey since the beginning.
Caputo cuts Josh off to once again relay his unwelcome message that Bayley was just a stupid kid in over his head. For sure, yes, this is the system’s fault, for having untrained unqualified numbskulls and sociopaths running a women’s prison, and for not paying a wage high enough to attract qualified professionals. But Caputo was gonna lose his job anyhow — so he should’ve said that. He should’ve indicted MCC, or Piscatella, or Humphrey. But to make it sound like a simple accident? Nope.
Taystee: He was a kid who killed my friend. My friend who was a person and you didn’t say her name or ntohing about her.
Caputo: I know, and that was wrong, but I was trying to prevent one tragedy from becoming two.
Caputo wants to know their endgame. After all, he thinks, they’ll notice these girls are missing during count — yup, Caputo’s still totally in the dark (GET IT?) regarding the current state of affairs in the prison he may or may not still be in charge of. Black Cindy relishes her chance to deliver the bad news: there’s been an uprising. There will be no count.
“How long can this go on?” he wants to know. “As long as it takes,” Alison assures him. For what to happen?
Taystee: “For Bailey to get arrested. For the guards to get fired. For the food to get better. For classes and better jobs and maybe like basic dignity.”
Caputo says he hopes that aside from that arrest, they get what they want, ’cause he wanted all those things but never could make it happen. Or, he wants all those things but will always prioritize access to sex with hot women over any all of them, at any moment, always and forever, the end.
Daya’s losing it, rocking back and forth, crying in the dark. Maria says she’s gotta pull her shit together or give Maria the gun, but she won’t. Daya doesn’t know what she wants, so she jumps up, yells at everybody, waves her gun around, and runs off.
Dixon and McCullough, hostages in the guard cage, try to reassure each other that help is on the way.
Nicky, having successfully drugged Ange and Leanne (thank you Nicky) has returned her attentions to Morello, who she’s craving with increasing intensity that verges on predatory but hey, this is Litchfield, so, look at these lovebirds!
Sophia and the doctor wheel a patched-up Tommy the Toad Boy into the infirmary. Sophia promptly handcuffs him to the bed, and the doctor questions the necessity of this move. “He brought a gun into the prison,” she says. “We could have been looking at a Fort Hood situation if he had not been disarmed and shot.” He says he thinks they did good work. Sophia agrees.
Another example of good work: Tommy the Toad Boy’s placement in the Litchfield Infirmary Sleeping Chart.
We then return to the world wide web, a magical land of racism and kittens, where the video has been posted to appropriate social media accounts and is ready for prime time. The MCC Board Director sees it:
Piscatella, perched at a gay bar in the Village — he sees it.
Linda’s petrified about her future as somebody’s bitch but Alex would prefer if Linda could take her problems elsewhere.
Piper suggests maybe helping her instead, and Alex suggests maybe not if she wants to get out in three months and also Alex doesn’t wanna be on TV ’cause by the way if you forgot, she murdered a guard? They buried him in the garden which got dug up at some point? Yeah, a guard. Alex murdered a guard. Murdered him. Killed him. But Lolly went away for it, so. But he’s dead now, murdered.
Piper: “She’s so pathetic. She reminds me of me. How I was, but more annoying. And I never wore suits or worked for a big corporation.”
So they toss her some scrubs and welcome her to the club.
The ladies of Litchfield now have Davis, Luschek, Dixon and McCullough all packed into the same guard hut, hands tied. Flores has got the entire place secured — nobody is getting in or out.
Blake and Stratman remain in the kitchen, eating peanut butter out of the jar, as does in the case of a power outage.
Oh right so, all this time, Red and Shelley have been holed up in Piscatella’s office — initially, they were looking for items of theirs he’d confiscated, but they found so much more than they expected. A whole new world, if you will.
So, when Daya shows up to the office, that’s who’s there, and she uses her gun to boot them out of the fine time they’ve been having, just Two women in a tiny room with a binder of unambitious and slightly racist table decoration schemes.
Daya calls her Mom. And it rings three times before voice mail picks up — Daya goes “Mom?” just as she hears Aleida’s voice, but before Daya can start leaving a message, she’s clocked over the head with a statue from Piscatello’s weirdo desk. A black boot steps on the gun.
And that’s that.
In conclusion, Orange is the New Black should add some writers of color to their writing team so they can write episodes of its television program! Heather’s review of Episode Two will be up tomorrow.
