by June Jeong, opinions editor

*Warning: this review contains major spoilers for the 4th season of OITNB*

Regina Spektor knew what she was doing when she wrote OITNB’s theme song, “You’ve Got Time.” (“Stay awake. In the dark, count mistakes. The light was off but now it’s on, searching the ground for a bitter song.”) Every episode of the show has started with this song playing in the background, while a bleak montage of inmate’s weary but resistant eyes are displayed.

The song is unsettling and thought-provoking, but if you’re an OITNB fan, it’s familiar by now. Since there are already four seasons, it’s easy to forget the message that the theme is trying to convey: it’s incredibly difficult to survive this type of confinement. Inmates are overwhelmed, brutalized, and dehumanized in their “cages,” fighting to remain themselves. 

If it isn’t already obvious, this season, and the entire show for the matter, isn’t meant for the faint of heart; it will devastate you. Don’t watch it when you’re feeling emotionally vulnerable or unstable, especially this season. I binge watched the entire fourth season in three days, and though I couldn’t put it down, some scenes were so distressing that I felt a lasting ache in my stomach, hours after I finished the episode.

And in this season, a variety of characters emerge as new inmates and guards enter Litchfield. Part-Martha, part-Paula inspired Judy King, proves herself to both defy and live up to the privileged celebrity type. King faces repercussions of a scandal when footage from the 80s surfaces of her putting on a racist puppet show. On the other hand, King tries to act humble and befriends many, but her kindness is only limited to when it’s not at her own expense. At the end of the season, we see King turn a blind eye to what happens to her friend, Poussey, despite Yoga Jones’ insistence to inform the public the truth about what happened. 

And just when I thought that no fictional guard could ever be suckier than Pornstache, OITNB introduced us to Piscatella and Humphrey. When Piscatella isn’t angrily and unnecessarily barking at the inmates or allowing his guards to do whatever they want, he’s trying to dethrone Caputo as the head of the prison. Piscatella is generally despised by everyone but the equally terrible officers who work under him. His subordinate, Humphrey, initially seems to be a normal dude, but he later proves himself to be a creepy psychotic with disgusting tendencies, forcing Maritza to eat a baby mouse alive by gunpoint, and getting off on forcing Suzanne fight Kukudio.

The show has also rotated its main character panel, allowing some characters to transpire and others to withdraw. We get to see how Doggett deals with her trauma; she begins the season in a disturbed state, worried that other inmates around her rapist (Donuts) are in danger. What progresses is incredibly confusing and gray. She recognizes that he is a rapist and an abuser. He raped her. Yet they slowly become drawn to each other again, and they come to a reconciliation that I’m still having a hard time understanding and accepting. We also see Sophia struggling under and after a period of solitary confinement, Lolly’s relationship with Healy, her schizophrenia, and her heartbreaking relocation to the psych ward, and Blanca’s story as an impassioned revolutionary.

All this (and more) leads to an unexpected riot. The inmates are agitated after Poussey’s death, and they want blood. Daya, grasping a gun in her hand, yells at Humphrey to get on the floor, cursing at him, while the other inmates cheer for her to finish off the corrupt guard by shooting him between the eyes. Daya’s dazed eyes suddenly shift, becoming hard and intense, and the scene closes.

One thing about this season bothers me immensely, however: the death of Poussey. Poussey Washington was my favorite character. Portrayed with a genuine heart and a million-dollar smile by Samira Wiley, Poussey was an emotional light to OITNB, and she was adored by all fans. She was an incredibly intelligent, trilingual, beautiful LGBTQ woman of color. And the thing is, I’m not even annoyed by the fact that the writers chose to kill off a main character; it’s a television show, not reality. Characters will die. But why is it that the LGBTQ one always dies, especially when they’re a person of color?  Using the classic trope of killing off the cheerful lesbian for the sake of a faultily built plot of racism and a couple of cheap tears was honestly detestable. Some critics argue that the writers killed Poussey to draw attention to the Black Lives Matter Movement, but having her die in the same way Eric Garner did (being choked to death) is an insult to his death and to all the black lives lost by police brutality. The fact is, there are so many people who don’t know or care who Eric Garner is. And there are people who haven’t heard of or are anti Black Lives Matter. But are these people going to watch a white man kill a black woman on the fourth season of OITNB and finally get it for the first time? Not likely.  

The point is this: racism is real, and the writers of OITNB have done a decent job for the past few seasons in portraying racism in numerous ways. Did this show need to sacrifice one of modern television’s few black lesbian characters in order to teach a few incredibly uninformed people a ‘lesson’ about racism that they should already know by now? How can we call this type of scene enlightening? It wasn’t. It was exhausting and suffering-inducing to watch, especially for people of color.

Despite this, the message the show relays is so important, and that’s why I keep watching it. It’s that, though our society will always have a crime, (so we still need a form of punishment for disobeying the laws), our current criminal justice system is severely flawed. As OITNB illustrates, moral absolutism is unjust and too simple. People are gray. There aren’t many shows out there that scrutinize and depict humanity in such a raw and unforgiving way, all the while maintaining an effortless and irresistible humor. OITNB doesn’t demand anything, but rather, it shows us what we normally don’t want to see. It asks us to take a moment and, in the words of Regina Spektor, to “remember all their faces, remember all their voices.” The world is filled with 7 billion people, walking different paths and living divergent lifestyles, but each human face has a story behind it. As humans, though in various degrees, we all make deplorable mistakes, especially when bad circumstances that we’re in motivate us to do so. I think it’s important to remind ourselves that despite the decisions we’ve made, we’re still worthy of remembrance.