OITNB gets firmly and unerringly back on track in its final season, which is also one of its most ambitious
Photo: JoJo Whilden/Netflix For a while now, it’s felt as though Orange Is the New Black had come off the rails a bit; its performances continued to be great, but pieces of it began to feel unnecessary. At its best it was as compelling as ever, but at its worst in the last several seasons, it was too slow, focused on characters with no particular draw, and telling stories that often went nowhere.
To some extent I still stand by that assessment. Through seasons five and six , the show struggled to balance its narrative need for momentum with the subject matter’s inherent tendency toward stagnation. The show never did ditch much of its original cast; OITNB jettisoned many characters over the years, but its efforts to tell continually compelling stories about the remaining main characters was iffy at best.
The show has always tracked the bigger conversations about incarceration as they’ve shifted over the last decade. With new reporting about the horrors of private prisons, OITNB introduced a new private company to run Litchfield. With stories about the torturous impacts of solitary confinement, OITNB told more stories about the serious harm to characters who got thrown in the SHU.
The rest of the show, meanwhile, tells some of the season’s most brutal, emotionally affecting stories. One of the best belongs to Taystee, played once again by the unbelievably talented Danielle Brooks; after season six doomed Taystee to an unjust life sentence, she spends much of season seven in despair, wondering how to go on living. There’s a surprisingly thoughtful, self-aware arc for former Warden Caputo and his now-girlfriend Natalie Figueroa .
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