I tend to agree with you on holding off until the finale, so we'll pick up this line of conversation tomorrow.

McCullough and Stratman seem "less awful" - if Caputo or Piscatella had said "What the fuck man, no, don't make people stand on tables!" it would have been over. They're just going along to get along, a much more banal evil than Humphreys.

Bayley was pretty well established as a kid drifting from place to place. Not exactly "disciplined". Same is true of Luschek. Pretty much anyone who had real integrity walked at the end of last season.

Real life does not work that way, and the very specific and very real case they were referencing certainly did not. That's sort of why I think the episode fell short. They wanted to put ambiguity onto a real world event that was totally fucking unambiguous.

I believe I saw a statistic that over half the inmates at the Cook County Jail (Chicago) were dealing with mental illnesses that required medication.

Elsewhere in this comments section there's a direct quote from Samira Wiley on how Poussey's death was meant to evoke BLM for people who may be unfamiliar with it.

a bunch of pipers who wish they were pousseys

Well, if it was the White House?

Morello's illness has often been treated for laughs in a way that Lolly or Suzanne haven't. I almost want to call it "infantilizing", like she's a little girl playing pretend and not a profoundly ill woman who is incapable of having an adult relationship.

I don't think the show is doing that. By default, we're talking about the kind of folks who willingly come to Litchfield to work. They're in a state of arrested development. They're here because nobody else will have them. That's sort of integral to the entire season.

He respects the inmates who try to kill him or hurt him for their honesty. The ones who try to cajole or seduce him he does not. That plus "the guards are always right because this is a tough job" is the skeleton of a character.

I don't think Stratford(sp) or McCullough are necessarily "corrupted" or "evil" per se. Certainly not to the extent that Humphries is.

You may want to delete/edit this comment.

I don't think that's what's being said there at all.

There's basically no way to say "well, let's see their thinkpieces" without sounding like a dick, is there?

I guess my counterpoint is "it's commentary they may not have been fully intellectually prepared to make, given the absolute lack of black writing staff."

I think that's a failing of the season as a whole, that our only options to carry out this sequence (if it even had to be carried out this way) were either the childlike Bayley or a bunch of unused Dexter villains.

One of the major issues I have with this season is that the guards are either thinly-sketched monsters (Humps, Piscatella) or naifs (Bayley). There's no real moral greyness to the guards like there is to the inmates. If it had been someone like O'Neill or Bell, the scene would have read differently as if it had been…

If sucking a man's cock is supposed to be insulting or emasculating, that does sort of imply homophobia in a "only someone who is inferior would willingly do that" way.

To draw the analogy the show wants us to: Eric Garner was KILLED as a result of his selling loose cigarettes on a street corner.