This Friday, Netflix is going to drop 13 new episodes of \u201cOrange Is the New Black\u201d in our queues, and we\u2019ll find out if Piper killed Pennsatucky after beating her to a bloody pulp outside a Christmas pageant in the first season\u2019s final episode. If you\u2019ve been reading casting news, of course, you already know.\u00a0<\/span> This Friday, Netflix is going to drop 13 new episodes of \u201cOrange Is the New Black\u201d in our queues, and we\u2019ll find out if Piper killed Pennsatucky after beating her to a bloody pulp outside a Christmas pageant in the first season\u2019s final episode. If you\u2019ve been reading casting news, of course, you already know.\u00a0As […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
<\/span>As with all of the Netflix original shows, many viewers raced through the last season, some binge-watching the entire thing in a couple of days, a factor that worked in the writers\u2019 favor as they stirred the prisoners\u2019 racial, religious, and personal tensions to the point of open war. Litchfield Prison is a place where arbitrary-seeming rules are determined by an absent and invisible Warden, a collection of petty tyrants trade official and unofficial power, and the residents\u2014some of whom are violent or mentally unstable\u2014navigate as best they can with people they\u2019d ordinarily be able to avoid.\u00a0<\/span>
<\/span>According to the show\u2019s creators, that fractious intermixing is meant to simulate something of real life. Jenji Kohan, the executive producer and creator of the show, said in an interview with NPR, \u201cWe talk about this country as this big melting pot, but it\u2019s a mosaic. There\u2019s all these pieces, they\u2019re next to each other, they\u2019re not necessarily mixing. And I\u2019m looking for those spaces where people actually do mix\u2014 and prison just happens to be a terrific one.\u201d\u00a0<\/span>
<\/span>In response, the writers have given us an entire gallery of portraits of deep feeling and frailty: the trans woman, Sophia, who loses access to her hormones while in prison and whose son won\u2019t speak to her; Tricia, a homeless girl with a drug problem who loses her friends in their misguided attempt to get her clean, and who later dies of an overdose; Miss Claudette, a woman who was sold into slavery in the U.S. to pay off a family debt; Taystee, who gets out on parole only to find out she has no family or friends outside of jail and reoffends in order to come back to the only place that feels like home; and Yoga Jones, tortured by the neighbor child she killed, thinking she was shooting a deer. One gets the feeling, watching the show, that each of these characters has been created to show a particular truth about the difficulty of escaping painful and unchangeable circumstances. Culture, race, gender, poverty, family: each pulls with its own type of gravity.\u00a0<\/span>
<\/span>Yet one of the primary vectors of this pluralistic world\u2014indeed, the nominal reason for the cliffhanger of that final episode\u2014has been painted with the crudest brush strokes. It\u2019s a curious thing: in a show meant to portray the richness and diversity of the American experience, why is the show\u2019s only serious religious character a whackadoo murderess?\u00a0<\/span>
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