Netflix/JoJo Whilden
Ready, set, binge! The second season of Orange Is the New Black is now offically available for streaming on Netflix, which likely means a few of us are going to recede into our couches for the next several days. The more overeager of us are already plowing there way through the episodes as we speak… and who can blame us? OITNB is perfectly bingeable, and Netflix’s best original program (but don’t tell any rabid House of Cards fans that). The premiere episode of the second season is a great re-introduction to the world of Piper Chapman, and offers some satisfying answers to last season’s burning questions.
“Where are we going?”
After leaving audiences dangling with a particularly perilous cliff-hanger, the show zooms a month into the future where a frightened Piper is wisked away from Litchfield in the dead of night with no knowledge of where she’s going and why. Of course, her brain runs in circles, trying to find a reason for her sudden relocation, and the road to her eventual destination is full of hazards and roadblocks. The paranoia is palpable. It’s a great way to open the season, leaving the audience just as confused as she is.
Piper’s “Dark Place”
Taylor Schilling delves deep into Chapman, who has spent months in SHU wondering if she’s a killer and in the fear and confusion of her sudden departure, lets it all go next to strangers in the middle of a flight heading who knows where.
Little Piper
No show in the post-Lost era has used the flashback device as well as Orange Is the New Black. Here, we get a snapshot of a nebbish, little rule following Piper bumping up against one of life’s first hard lessons. Is telling the truth ever a bad thing? Past and Present Piper struggle to answer that question, and unfortunately, things don’t work out well in either scenario.
Yoda the Jedi Master
Carrier cockroaches!? OITNB frequently has us pondering whether some of its more ridiculous moments are actually real, and this is certainly one of them. Do prisoners really trade goods and services through the use of cockroaches? It sounds too out there to be true, but we’d like to believe that there’s a whole delivery system based on insects thanks to genuine human ingenuity.
Pennsatucky’s fate
We now know that Pennsatucky is alive and well, and while that might be good for Piper’s soul, it’s bad for everyone else. It may sound cruel, but our darker sides were kind of hoping the little meth runt finally found her way to the laundrymat in the sky.
Alex’s Betrayal
The premiere episode end with a gut punch. After Piper learns that herself and Alex were brought to the Chicago facility to testify against Alex’s former drug Kingpin Kubra Ballick, Alex convinces Piper to lie on the stand, fearing retalliaton from her former boss. After the hearing, Piper learns that Alex actually did testify against Kubra and is set free because of it. Burned by the Vause once again.
