“These are complicated ladies in a complicated place.”
Perhaps no other line sums up the Litchfield inmates’ situation better than this one. The thing about jail is that it’s viewed as a monotonous cycle, as day in and day out of orange jumpsuits and sullen faces, as a homogeneous blob of people who are isolated from society. And to be honest, that’s true. However, what this show is conveying is the underlying humanity oftentimes overlooked when we talk about jail, the fact that these inmates are complicated individuals who feel the same emotions we do, who have pasts and lives and futures cut short by the walls of Litchfield. Yes, they committed crimes, but that doesn’t rob them of their stories.
It comes as no surprise that the season three premiere uses a Mother’s Day celebration to reintroduce us to these characters. It’s a nationally recognized day that should be filled with happiness and love and connection, but then again, these are complicated ladies in a complicated place. Not everyone is going to feel those same emotions, and the episode uses a mixed flashback structure to convey that idea. I won’t spend too much time on specific storylines in this review because the episode itself doesn’t really do so; it’s more concerned with overarching themes, with the comparisons between people who have mothers and people who don’t, with people who are mothers and people who aren’t, with people who have fond memories of their mothers and people who don’t. It’s a bit overwhelming, but most of the time, it works beautifully.
Take, for example, the episode’s handling of the Pennsatucky flashback and subsequent present day scenes. They’re tied together through the devastating use of Mountain Dew, and what follows is where the real magic happens. Big Boo sits down next to Pennsatucky and her makeshift popsicle stick graves, and she delivers a brutally honest perspective on Pennsa’s situation. “Maybe what was best for your children was wiping them out before living miserable fucking lives,” she says. Harsh, but true. While motherhood retains many of its same elements even when one part of the pair is in prison, there are also fundamental differences: the lack of control, for one. Daya and Bennett are feeling it, Ruiz feels it at the end when her daughter is taken away from her, and of course, it’s one of the ideas behind Boo’s argument. Simply put, things change when a prison wall springs up between two people.
And so, even when everyone comes together for a Mother’s Day celebration at Litchfield, there’s still a palpable sense of loss, of distance. The last ten minutes of the episode are some of the most heartbreaking of the series thus far–Poussey and that Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, holy shit–and the inmates having to get down on the ground once the alarm sounds is a clear reminder of the differences between prison and the outside world. There’s no doubt that being reminded of motherhood–of being reunited with your kids–can bring joy in prison, but there’s also no doubt that these inmates are caught in the system. And once they get out, as Piper says, they’ll have “no money, no job, and no prospects”. They might still have the brightness of motherhood now to bring them hope, but nothing will change the fact that when the prison alarm sounds, the ground is their next stop.
And worst of all, they don’t know what their kids’ next stops will be.
GRADE: B+
OTHER THOUGHTS:
– “It’s empty!” “Oh my god, this is such a metaphor for their lives.”
– “It wasn’t you. It was the system.” Obviously a BS statement from Piper to Alex here. Although I’m not as interested in their storyline as I am in the many others, pieces are already being set up to be knocked down later on in the season. They share an intimate moment in the chapel, but the conflict between them is undoubtedly going to start boiling due to Piper’s major secret, a secret that will inevitably get out. Same goes with Piper and Red.
-Healy’s flashback. Yikes. It’s really hard to watch, to say the least.
-Red cements her smuggling tunnel shut, but another inmate just ends up smuggling drugs into the prison through her baby’s diaper. Shit still happens.
-There’s a new character this season in Counselor Rogers, and she and Caputo have an interesting conversation in this episode. There are conflicting ideas about the Mother’s Day celebration: “fostering the women’s connections to the outside” vs. “maybe they have reasons to forget”. Short scene, but a great way to illustrate the complexity of motherhood in prison.
-It’s going to be interesting seeing Taystee’s and Suzanne’s developments throughout this season. Now that Vee is gone–the mother figure for them last season–things are very different.
-I’m not quite sure whether I have the motivation to review every episode like I did last year, but we’ll see. Maybe.
-The balloon! It’s a metaphor! Don’t you get it?!?
Photo credit: Netflix, Orange Is the New Black
Polar Bears Watch TV 
Not going to read any Orange until I’ve seen it.
Good choice. My post is filled with spoilers anyway, so you shouldn’t read it yet.
I’m two eps into the new season, and…yeah. Not really feeling this show as much as I did in the past. Maybe it’s because of the ever-expanding scope of the narrative that includes more characters and plotlines at the expense of any kind of tight focus or throughline other than the kinda generic (as you quote above), “These are complicated ladies in a complicated place.” That’s obviously true, but I’m still finding fewer and fewer reasons to hit the Next Episode button as the series wears on.
I guess I’m worried that OITNB is starting to suffer from something I call ‘dramatic entropy,’ which a lot of serialized TV shows struggle with once their initial premise wears itself out after a couple seasons. OITNB’s initial premise (pretty blond yuppie adjusts to life behind bars amid a sea of Complicated Ladies like-but-also-unlike herself) drove season 1 before being gradually and effectively sidelined throughout season 2, which was anchored instead by Big Bad Vee’s machinations and Red’s redemption arc. Again, I’m only two eps in, but season 3 so far seems to lack a clear driving force, instead preferring to spin as many plates as possible without regard for any real unifying principle.
Another nail in the diminishing-dramatic-returns coffin is the insistence on retaining the flashback structure, which pretty much always gets played out in just about every show that clings to it for too long: the first half of LOST, Damages (flashforwards, but still), and (I fear) The Leftovers after another season or two. Like LOST, OITNB has the benefit of a large ensemble of characters for whom the writers can fill in backstory, but after spending multiple seasons with these Complicated Ladies, there’s not much more we can learn about most of them that would necessitate a flashback to their abusive childhood or troubled adolescence. A revolving-door cast might help alleviate this, but then you’d run the risk of replacing well-developed and/or fan-favorite characters with ones who aren’t as compelling.
But hey. I’ll still watch episode 3, and probably 4, because my goodwill toward this series hasn’t run out yet. I just sorta feel like the story’s rapidly getting to the point where all the narrative tension is gone and everything’s just running on fumes. And since OITNB season 4 has already been confirmed, I’m doubly wary of continuing to invest myself any further in a show whose peak may already be in the rearview.
I just finished Season 3……it’s a slow burner but worth investing in. I enjoyed it much more than I predicted I would. After a few episodes these ladies were right back under my skin. I await Season 4.