Orange Is the New Black Season Finale Epitomize: She Was a Person

Uzo Aduba as Suzanne

Uzo Aduba as Suzanne. Photo: JoJo Whilden/Netflix

Throughout this flavour, Orangish Is the New Black has told stories about blahs and regret and time travel. Lolly builds a irish potato-powered time motorcar out of cardboard and foil, then she and Healy talk nigh what they would change if they could. In episode eight, members of the Construction 101 class talk about what they might do if the time automobile worked, and an unusually thoughtful Hapakuka says that rather than impale baby Hitler, she'd go back and raise him meliorate, encouraging his creative side. As part of the same chat, Doggett gives Coates an opportunity to say whether or non he regrets raping her — an opportunity he doesn't even recognize until after. In episode xi, Piper and Alex talk about whether they'd want to alter the past. Alex's opinion is fatalistic; their choices don't matter, she tells Piper. They are "doomed to exist together."

This idea — that regret is existent, merely time only moves in i direction — is threaded across season four, and it's also implicit in OITNB'south flashback structure. We can spring dorsum to sentinel what happened in the past, only nosotros can't change annihilation. As Doggett tells Coates, in what is my favorite episode championship of the season, "Toast can't never be bread over again."

The finale uses OITNB's season-long meditation on regret to painful, pointed, lovely effect. In the backwash of Poussey'southward death, we become an extensive flashback that paints a portrait of who she was before her imprisonment. She'southward visiting New York City for the first fourth dimension, and after she gets separated from her friends, she has a magical, surreal, sparkling experience of the city. Poussey gets pulled into some kind of performance-art club in her quest to borrow someone's phone, she gazes warmly at the diverse humanity on the subway, and she hitches a ride with a grouping of Improv Everywhere performers dressed as bicycle-riding Buddhist monks. She'due south immature, embodying that potent mixture of worldly desires and naïveté, and she's a joyful witness to the best that people can be.

But as Litchfield forces us to call up, she's now dead. Lolly'south fourth dimension machine does not work; we cannot become back and undo what Bayley, Piscatella, Caputo'due south neglect, and MCC'due south corporate greed did. It'south fitting that the finale shows u.s. such gorgeous, maddening scenes of Poussey's past, only to render to the present twenty-four hours, where Angie and Leanne decide the time automobile is cursed and tear it to pieces.

Time travel and regret besides play into MCC's corporate response, although the crisis management team would never describe it in such suggestive terms. (Regret, I'one thousand sure, implies some level of legal liability that they would never cop to.) As Poussey's body nevertheless lies prone on the cafeteria floor, Caputo has to meet with the two-man team that arrived to "manage" the state of affairs. They exercise nothing that's actually helpful, of course. They're at that place to find an angle, a style to spin the situation to protect MCC. In macabre parallel, while Poussey dances happily in that charmingly odd nightclub, these men sort through every image they tin can find from her past, searching for something that will transform her into a villain. When they tin can't observe anything, they movement on to Bayley. They're doing exactly what Lolly tried to exercise in her time machine. They're trying to rewrite the past.

And because they are white, privileged, male corporate monkeys, rather than disadvantaged inmates who have been stripped of their humanity, they tin can almost go away with it. Caputo'southward last-infinitesimal script change prevents MCC from functionally rewriting past — merely even then, he'south only stepping in to save Bayley. He has nothing to say most the woman who died.

The MCC crunch-management team aren't dressed in overtly threatening uniforms. They don't drag anyone off a table, torture them, or kill them. Simply their effort to plow back time is, at its heart, an extension of the dehumanizing piece of work Piscatella does at Litchfield. Their efforts to force Poussey's life into their own narrative, to redefine her as a cookie-cutter-shaped villain who will serve their ain purposes, is roughshod. It's identical to the kinds of dehumanizing narratives written past institutionally racist cultures, which eliminate individuality and reshape stories to fit prescribed narratives of criminality, animalism, and worthlessness.

The corporation seeks to write Litchfield's inmates into a story that ignores their individuality, which ways the inmates are the but ones left to stand up upward for their own selfhood and for the selfhood of others. Piper realizes that Alex has been leaving notes all over Litchfield with the proper name of Kubra's hitman written on them. "His proper noun is Aydin Bayat." they read. Alex, who was pursued by a man trying to impale her, is still able to recognize and try to mourn him. "He was a person," she tells Piper. "No one should die without a name."

Suzanne copes with Poussey's death by trying to experience what it must be like to suffocate — she quite literally wants to feel Poussey's suffering. Soso drinks herself into a stupor. Judy Rex, brought face-to-face with the dehumanizing effects of imprisonment for the first time, grabs her corporation-granted opportunity to leave and runs with it. (Glory, it seems, is one of the few guarantees that your humanity will not exist instantly disregarded when you lot put on a prison uniform.) Carmine clutches her family, assigning tasks that will keep them busy and out of the inevitable riot to come. She reads to them from Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, a book Poussey gave her when she beginning started the garden.

Poussey'southward friends are left to sit down shiva, alternately raging and weeping and laughing at the surprising reveal of Alison Abdullah's shockingly red hair. And in however another classically OITNB move, the subplot I laughed at and loved, the i that provided lightness all season — Taystee every bit Caputo's administrative assistant — ultimately slices to the cadre of things. Tentatively, and considering he truly doesn't know, Caputo asks Taystee to describe what happened in the cafeteria. "What are you request me?" she spits dorsum. "If she deserved to dice?!" Poussey did non have a knife, Taystee tells him. She did not deed aggressively in any way. Just even if she did, how could that ever justify her murder? Taystee is furious. "Ain't Zero she could've done that called for that!"

And then, when Caputo offers his meager attempt to mitigate MCC's monstrousness by publicly defending Bayley and ignoring Poussey, Taystee is driven to activity. While Piper and Alex burn down the Aydin Bayat notes (and Linda From Purchasing sits cluelessly in a bathroom stall), Litchfield rises up from each of its racially segregated dorms and goes marching into a total riot. The COs are helpless to stop it. The gun that CO Humphrey brought to prison skitters across the flooring, ends up in Daya's hands, and she aims it at his head. (Daya, whom Gloria promised Aleida to protect.) In the cease, the thing that brings Litchfield to the brink is not concrete violence against one of their own. They riot when MCC tries to erase her from the story.

The story that OITNB tells well-nigh Poussey's decease is not but about Poussey, or about Litchfield. It'south virtually the way institutions everywhere are capable of overwriting and undervaluing individual human life — almost often on the footing of race and gender. But this finale does a cute, humane, generous affair: Information technology refuses to reenact that same erasure in its own narrative. It would take been easy to lose Poussey'south individuality in the larger story virtually what imprisonment does and how institutions bear. It would accept been fifty-fifty easier to let Poussey simply become a martyr to the crusade.

Orange Is the New Blackness does no such matter. Far from allowing Poussey to be lost, "Toast Tin can't Never Be Bread Once again" forces united states of america to think her equally the person she was, both in its flashbacks and in her friends' remembrances of all the means she was unique and loved. Simply every bit "The Animals" ends with the representation of an eye, this finale ends with a matching visual. Equally we reel with the massive injustices and the huge trunk of people clustering in Litchfield'due south halls, ascension up against the faceless evil of a corporate prison determined to see them every bit mere bodies, the final affair nosotros come across is Poussey, in all her loving, irreducible humanity, looking directly at the photographic camera. She'south smile.

OITNB Season Finale Recap: She Was a Person