At the start of this episode, young Taystee (Tasha) is putting on a show for prospective parents, singing Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful” and boasting that she knows the periodic table. She’s overwhelmingly intelligent and self-aware, but due to circumstances and geography she’s undervalued and never really has a chance to shine. When I watch a non-Piper story, I usually leave feeling slightly infuriated about the reasons women are imprisoned in real life, and Taystee’s story drives that feeling all the way home, crashes into the garage, and barrels through the neighbor’s living room. Orange Is the New Black Psych Evaluations The writers are so good they can make a passing comment about our country’s legit problems with the prison system and our imbalanced economy without blinking an eye. Poussey says, “The only people who want to hire felons are already hated by everyone else,” and Black Cindy counters with a diatribe on “the real evil companies” like Monsanto, Halliburton, and big pharma who never show up to job fairs, saying, “The real criminals don’t bother with us small-timers.” This show isn’t even subtle about all of the scripts it’s flipping. When a representative from Philip Morris shows up to the mock job fair they’re holding at Litchfield, they have a deeply philosophical conversation about who would show up to hire felons. My favorite part of the episode came from the underrated and brilliant Black Cindy and Poussey. Their stories give way to a broader slice of humanity, and do more to reinforce the way systemic oppression works on multiple levels.*
I like Piper I just like the other inmates more. What kind of Litchfield is a Litchfield without Piper? She might be the Trojan Horse through which the stories of the other inmates are told, but I honestly didn’t even realize she wasn’t in this episode until the very end. Any comments referring to future events will be deleted. Please keep your comments limited to this episode and those before it.