The orange is the new black season 1
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Even if it sometimes builds soapboxes and strawmen (Taryn Manning’s Pennsatucky sometimes exists to be a fake-toothed mouthpiece for Ignorant Conservative America), it remains as fresh and interesting as when it began. OITNB has a lot of time but even more to say. And that’s before we get to the other running themes of the show, like the economic side of the prison industry, which gets special attention in a season arc that I won’t spoil here. Even characters who have moved on, permanently or temporarily (sorry, Pornstache fans) are still felt in the plot.
The orange is the new black season 1 full#
If OITNB has a problem at this point, it’s that its world-building is so strong there’s too much material: the episodes tend to run near a full hour and yet feel jam-packed. (Red, for instance, who tells her, “Stop trying to mold the world into the one inside your pointy blond head.”) Meanwhile, it divides time wisely among the show’s vast existing assets: though Alex (Laura Prepon) has returned as a regular, Piper (Taylor Schilling) has become one part in the ensemble, representing a certain upscale-liberal viewer sensibility while giving other characters a chance to push back against it. It points up the show’s greatest strength: it has dozens of characters any of whom you could imagine hoding down a fascinating show on their own. Season 3 expands the picture even more, bringing in yet more characters (including a quasi Martha Stewart figure heading to Litch after a highly publicized trial) and giving flashbacks to several old ones who hadn’t been featured yet–a flashback for Chang (Lori Tan Chinn) opens up a character who’s been an enigma for two seasons. Season 2’s focus on Litch’s race-clique battles helped build the show’s scope if season 1 built empathy for prisoners, season 2 reminded us–both in present tense and flashbacks–that they’re not simply all victims of circumstance but women who have often done terrible things, not always for defensible reasons. And Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” (Uzo Aduba), who invested so totally and needily in Vee, is foundering in her absence.īut the season kicks off less gloomy, and more flat-out funny, than the last year’s. Dayanara (Dascha Polanco) is still very, very pregnant and anxious about what comes after childbirth (“This inside me, it feels like a grenade”), a question season 3 complicates early. Red (Kate Mulgrew) has become a kind of surrogate tough mom to many inmates, especially Nicky (Natasha Lyonne), who tests the relationship. The theme doesn’t apply only to the show’s literal mothers, though. The day is a little escape for the prisoners, and it’s a little imprisonment for their kids. Kids walk in past guards giving warnings they have to punch a piñata with their fists because no one can have wooden sticks in a prison they witness first hand how their mothers are under control, having to come, go and drop to the ground on command. The visit is a party but not a carefree one. Mother’s Day itself, meanwhile, shows what an intimate punishment prison is–in a way, for loved ones outside as well. The prisoners’ society and power structure is adjusting to Vee’s run-in with Rosa’s van at the end of season 2 Caputo is running Litchfield and inheriting all its obvious and hidden problems. (If you’re keeping a calendar, only months have passed since season 1, which ended around Christmastime.) It’s an elegant beginning, drawing a sweep of the huge ensemble and bringing the running stories up to speed. The season opens with the annual Mother’s Day visitation. (Netflix sent critics six episodes of thirteen in total.)
The orange is the new black season 1 series#
In season 3 of the Netflix series (debuts June 12) mother-child connections–actual, potential and surrogate–are everywhere, making, at least in the first half, for a story that’s lighter than the tension-filled season 2, yet richly emotional.