“Nobody gives a shit about old ladies. We remind everybody they’re going to die.”
One of the recent major focal points of the season has been the elderly and the places they occupy in the prison society. The sad truth is that they simply don’t occupy much of a place, as we saw in the season’s coldest moment in “Comic Sans”, and they’ll continue to be marginalized by the prison system in general.
Rosa, as we see in “Appropriately Sized Pots”, was a bank robber who thought she had it all, who was living the high life and getting drunk off the thrills. One little thing, though: a curse seemed to follow her around, her various boyfriends succumbing to less than pleasant fates; the one who was able to skate free was the one who didn’t take stupid–in terms of robbing a bank, of course, which is already inherently stupid–risks like she did.
Now, she’s old and she can feel her life slipping away. The cancer is depriving her the chance of going out in a blaze of glory, of reliving that thrilling time in her life, and that hurts. She knows her time has come, but she still clings onto those memories; they’re especially on her mind when she’s goofing around with the teenage cancer patient sitting next to her (his name is Yusef, according to the Internet). We can see what made her such a good bank robber: her attention to detail, her smarts, her ability to pull off a heist of sorts in such an enclosed area. We can also see that she’s connecting with Yusef, and the cancer remission for him feels just as real to her. Finally, she can find some glimmer of hope in this messed up world, and as she’s wheeled away, you can see the pain of the curse starting to lift itself off of her. The longing for adventure can be satisfied–partly, at least–by the knowledge that he’s living.
At the beginning of the episode, the bitterness and anger that pours out of her is aimed at Healy, who’s definitely becoming one of the more sympathetic characters on the show. Don’t get me wrong, he can still be a huge asshole; however, as we can see through his monologue to Piper, he genuinely wants to help the inmates. Part of it is just to satisfy his own desire to be wanted and useful, but hey, it’s something that I can get behind. Everyone has dreams, but they’re all in this prison, and they have to make do with what they have.
So, Healy tells Piper that she will take her furlough and that she will see her dying grandmother, everyone else’s opinions be damned. However, Piper finds out that she’s too late; her grandmother’s already passed. People die, and each and every person in this prison has someone they weren’t able to see pass on. They were in Litchfield then, and here they are now.
GRADE: B+
OTHER THOUGHTS:
-I really love the advice Nicky gives to Fischer. You can’t be bogged down by something like Litchfield, because there’s so much other stuff to do. This conversation also ties in nicely with the themes of the episode, involving the elderly and longing for adventure/love/whatever.
-With this episode ramping up the privilege angles, the parallels between Soso and Piper become even clearer (if you didn’t know already). Soso’s refusal to shower is her holding onto what she can of the outside world, because showering seems to make her prison stay permanent.
-Vee and Red, yada yada yada.
-So, there’s also a Rosa in Brooklyn Nine-Nine. I’d like to see the two hang out.
-Again, wonderful work by Taylor Schilling, this time with her reaction to her grandmother’s death.
-Pornstache returns. We’ll see how that turns out…
Photo credit: Netflix, Orange Is the New Black
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