ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK CHARACTER PAIRING RANKINGS, EPISODE 6.13, (“Be Free”)

I wasn’t particularly looking forward to the kickball match or the many deaths the show had strongly foreshadowed would happen there, so count me as a fan of the narrative swerve of allowing the girls to just play kickball. It was the only thing that could surprise me at that point.

The show is a dramedy. Has been since the pilot. It exists withing the context of the genre, and should be critiqued as such imo. If you can’t accept that, and insist it should be a serious prestige drama instead, you’re not so much reviewing this show as criticizing it for not being another show, perhaps one you’d…

pretty sure Lorna had a late-term miscarriage; she mentioned she was 7 months along and squealed, “not now!” when she started contracting in the closet. when she was being carried out by the guard she was bleeding quite heavily. (there’s a big blood stain on her pants/abdomen.)

Haha. This season had so many fireworks in the factory that Lorna’s baby (that most cliched of finale rockets) didn’t even get a full treatment.

“I realize the show has zero sense of time and it’s somehow more or less present day despite the fact that Piper’s sentence isn’t over yet, but damnit I’m never going to stop complaining about it, tough cookies.”

You should. It’s very lazy writing on their part, missing an opportunity to explore something of the way…

Yes, thank you! I know it’s a fine line between showing the reality of people’s lives and romanticizing it, but I think it did an ok job of it. If you showed Coates as nothing but a piece of shit all the time to Pennsatucky, it wouldn’t make sense why she would want to keep hanging around him. The scenes like at the…

Myles, you’ve been icky on the relationship between Coates and Pentucky because you see it as an insulting attempt to romanticize a rape victim with her perpetrator/prisoner and guard imbalance of power scenario. For me personally, having been a victim of sexual abuse and rape, I can understand why Pentucky has a…

Did anyone else think Helen’s speech about the damage of an affair was evidence that she knew about Sierra’s indiscretion with Vik? (I got the sense Helen pieced it together from what Sierra said in the car, about cheating with a married man whose wife she really liked.)

My favorite part of this season is that they’ve finally made Piper fun again. She’s been categorically insufferable for so long, I’d almost forgotten why I liked her in the original season.

I was equally surprised, and kind of bummed, that kickball didn’t turn out to be the bloodbath it promised to be.

Predictions for next season:

From my perspective, the narrative “release” of the climax never manifesting is not the same as not arriving at the Fireworks Factory. It’s more akin to arriving at the Fireworks Factory and discovering that it’s been taken over and turned into a botanical garden. You can still have a good time, but it’s definitely…

I actually thought this was one of the best uses of flashback in a while. Not because it told us something revealing about Nicky, as those really contribute in such a manner, but rather it set up why what happened next was so meaningful for her.

This is an odd criticism. We are not supposed to care about Carol and Barb or feel sympathy for them. They symbolize the true difference between a minimum and a maximum prison.

Straight out of a telenovela, right?

I’d agreee the new characters didn’t really pop. We got flashbacks for them all which did little to make me more invested. So Badison is awful? Duerte has always been a user of pretty girls? Barb and Carol killed their own sister. Not really the fascinating backstories we got on other more beloved characters.

I am over this show. It just got too much into the wars and same stuff again and again.

That’s exactly how it felt—like the writers wanted there to be a sexual component to this, decided Nan was too old, and constructed Delphine as a “surrogate” to carry out that part. (You can imagine the brainstorming, like... “What if Nan has a younger protege? Who’s really hot?”)