After a sterling first season, expectations were high for the sophomore season of Jenji Kohan’s female prison drama. Fortunately, Season 2 proved to be just as juicy, sweet, and tart as you’d want it to be. (MAJOR SPOILERS ahead.)
The cast of Season 2 of Netflix's Orange Is the New Black.
Netflix
Orange Is the New Black's stunning second season manages to be ambitiously large and somehow intimate. It's the equivalent of a pointillist painting: From up close each dash and dot has its own individual identity and meaning, but when viewed at a distance, they coalesce into something altogether different and dependent on its parts.
In its deeply complex and magnificent sophomore year, Jenji Kohan's Orange Is the New Black offers a scathing indictment of a broken system, using Litchfield Penitentiary as a stand-in for the failings of society as a whole. As the season progresses and conditions at Litchfield become worse and worse — because of venal officials, embezzlement schemes, force majeure, and general lack of empathy or interest — it becomes clear that these inmates have permanently slipped through the cracks as the most basic requirements of the prison system (keeping these women "safe and clean") are not even being met. (The bubbling up of sewage from the toilets becomes an emblem of the corruption and rot at work here.)
The freedom of choice within the non-Litchfield lives of the corrections officers — even Fig (Alysia Reiner), the mercenary assistant warden, gets some deeper shading this season as her life implodes — appears to be wholly at odds with that of the women the officers are sworn to protect. Healey (Michael J. Harney), who's in a miserable marriage to a Russian mail-order bride, enters therapy to deal with his anger issues and creates a "Safe Place" for the inmates to open up as a way of compensating, perhaps, for his ineffectualness. Joe Caputo (Nick Sandow), the masturbatory administrator, becomes a hero of sorts over the course of the season until he too is seduced by power, opting not to do the right thing or even listen to it, such as when Matt McGorry's Bennett confesses that he got inmate Daya (Dascha Polanco) pregnant. The truth becomes an inconvenience, something to be shrugged off and compartmentalized. It's far easier, then, just to put a Band-Aid on matters, to drag out a nun (Beth Fowler's Sister Jane Ingalls) to make a pre-scripted statement. Caputo sees himself as a savior of these women, but he chooses ultimately to perpetuate the broken system that surrounds them. The prison officials are, in actuality, also just as trapped — by red tape, by bureaucracy, by personal desire, by anger issues — as the inmates.
Alysia Reiner as venal Assistant Warden Natalie Figueroa.
Netflix
And in Season 2, viewers see just how dire things have become at Litchfield. Gone are the days of yoga and free doughnuts. Heroin floods the prison, thanks to the arrival of sociopath Vee (the great Lorraine Toussaint in a tour de force performance); bathrooms fester from raw sewage; a shot quota is initiated; the backup generators are missing fuel; rats circle out-of-date donations during a tropical storm; a hunger strike begins as an attempt to protest the savage use of SHU as a punishment; and Jimmy (Pat Squire), a senile and elderly inmate, is given "compassionate release," dumped at a bus station when she becomes a problem that officials don't feel like solving.
Whereas before there was some semblance of unity, fractures develop not only in Litchfield's infrastructure, but in its interpersonal relationships: Factions form, dissolve, and reform. Best friends Taystee (Danielle Brooks) and Poussey (Samira Wiley) are at one another's throats. Suzanne (Uzo Aduba) becomes violent under the tutelage of Vee, her brutal confrontation with Poussey revealing just how damaged Taystee and her friends have become since Vee arrived. The relationship between Piper (Taylor Schilling) and the devious Alex (Laura Prepon, who appears in four episodes this season) splinters yet again, as does Piper's on-again-off-again romance with Larry (Jason Biggs). The "family" gathered around ex-prison cook Red (Kate Mulgrew) falls apart entirely without her as their anchor, with Nicky (Natasha Lyonne) and the others turning their back on their former protector. Even Pennsatucky (Taryn Manning) falls out with her fellow laundry room meth heads after she gets new, shiny white teeth.
No comments:
Post a Comment