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Orange is the New Black: Blood Donut

Watson: "This don't make us even."
Piper: "Okay."

Geez. SHU must be freaking awful.

Janae Watson's aggressive, angry attitude has made her appear tough and hardened, but appearances are deceptive. She was a high school track star with an athletic scholarship and colleges fighting over her, and she made a mistake. Did she do it to impress the guy in the flashback? Does it matter? It was sad that running faster than everybody else was what got her caught.

Watson is so angry that she can't help lashing out, even though she's obviously even angrier at herself. The best scene in the episode was Yoga Jones trying to talk Watson down, and Watson retaliating so cruelly -- and possibly hitting on the reason why Jones was in prison. That was an omigod moment. Did Yoga Jones kill a child?

It was Piper, or more accurately, Piper's guilt, that ended up making a difference for Watson. Piper went to her first WAC meeting ready to do the job she wasn't elected to do, and discovered that WAC was about eating donuts and not much else. WAC is all for show, and expected to accomplish nothing.

Healy is a huge wedge of sleaze. He got Piper to bring him the cell phone in return for opening the track, but then he went back on his word. When Piper manipulated the nice new guard Susan Fischer into doing it instead, Healy did not look pleased. We also met Healy's wife, and surprise -- she's a mail order Russian bride who can't stand him. No wonder Caputo calls Healy 'Preparation H'. He's a huge wedge of sleaze and an asshole.

Pornstache is even worse than Healy. The way he keeps pressuring Red to smuggle his drugs makes me terribly uncomfortable. She keeps saying no, but she has no power in this relationship. He can do a lot more than just drop food on her floor. I'm worried about Red.

There's also Pennsatucky, who now has it out for Piper, the woman who stole her coveted spot on the pointless Women's Advisory Council. Turns out Pennsatucky had a personal reason for running -- she wants new teeth. My second favorite scene in this episode was Alex threatening to turn Pennsatucky gay in the middle of the night if she didn't shut up about Piper. Even though Alex blew off Piper's overture of renewed friendship, it's obvious that Alex still cares.

And I am still completely uninterested in Larry, who was bitching and complaining because he was out and about and having fun and had to do it alone without Piper. Larry's role in this series feels pointless and tacked on to me. As a love interest for Piper, Alex leaves Larry in the shade.

Character bits:

-- The opener showed Alex and Nicky betting on being able to eat six saltines in thirty seconds. The friendship between the two of them makes me smile.

-- When Watson got out of SHU, she did a thing in the yard. Big Boo thought she was doing a Titanic thing. I'm pretty sure it was a Shawshank thing.

-- Three-D, the guy in the flashback, tried to keep Watson from making the same mistakes that he made with his life. Too bad that didn't work.

-- My third favorite scene in the episode was Taystee trying to figure out the best possible hairstyle to impress the parole board, with the help of Sophia and Poussey. The resulting hairdo looked terrible on her, and no one on the board was white, anyway.

-- Susan Fischer used to pack groceries for a living, and was kind enough to tell Piper that under different circumstances, their roles could have been reversed.

-- Big Boo is in the puppy program. Awww.

-- Caputo is still flirting with Susan, although talking about how dog breed names sound dirty might not be the way to go.

-- I don't think Chang speaks English. And Norma doesn't talk at all.

-- Morello pronounced the word Anguilla "ang-oo-willa".

-- Pornstache picked up on the fact that Bennett was getting some. Bennett came up with an imaginary half-Asian half-Brazilian girlfriend with fake boobs to throw Pornstache off.

-- Flores kicked off the stall door when she discovered her phone was gone. But she wasn't the only one who lost something. Everyone lost the privacy.

-- Larry still hasn't told Piper about his story for the New York Times. Uh oh.

Bits:

-- Piper explained that everyone misinterprets the Robert Frost poem about the road less traveled, and that shit just happens to you and you don't really get to choose. Is that right? I'm not that familiar with Frost.

-- I loved Piper's reaction to the donut.

-- Where was that cell phone getting charged?

Quotes:

Nicky: "You're in touch with your primal self."
Alex: "Yeah, well, my primal self cannot resist a dare, apparently. Which is also how I ended up three broken toes and, briefly, chlamydia."

Pennsatucky: "She's got a surprise coming."
Alex: "Is it a pony?"

Pennsatucky: "Chapman is a Judas Iscariot cozied on up to the high priest Healy and he throws out my votes, my votes that were bestowed on me by my Lord, and gives her all the silver."
Alex: "So in this analogy, you're Jesus Christ?"

Miss Claudette: "Where's my Mexican vanilla?"
Red: "Everything off the books lives like Anne Frank now."

Piper: "My brother had one when we were growing up. It was kinda cute. Actually, he named it Antonio."
Watson: "I saw one that chewed up a baby's face. I named it 'fucking face chewing rat'."

Watson: "Lady, we in a tight ass place and I bench 140. You sure 'technically' is how you want to handle this shit?"

Inmate: "Man, will somebody get this bitch a hamster wheel?"

Piper: "Are you planning a vacation?"
Healy: "If I were, it would be somewhere you drink rum out of a mini volcano."
A mini-volcano? Did I hear that right?

Taystee: "I ain't do nothing."
Poussey: "Me neither, right? We are all just in here because we took the wrong turn going to church."

Red: "I don't do that shit."
Pornstache: "This shit, that shit, blue shit, bat shit, it doesn't matter what you do. It's the doing that makes you dirty."

Sophia: "So you want to look like the black best friend in the white girl movie."
I loved that one. What a perfect description.

Three out of four secret bottles of vanilla,

Billie
---
Billie Doux loves good television and spends way too much time writing about it.

2 comments:

  1. Where was that cell phone getting charged? As someone who continually forgets to charge her phone and, therefore, runs out of juice on a nearly daily basis, this made me laugh out loud. Luckily, fiction doesn't need to worry about such prosaic things.

    My feelings towards Healy are less negative than yours. While I think the man can do truly awful things -- like going back on his word about the track -- there is something about him that causes me to pity him. I would like to see his back story at some point.

    OK, the Frost poem. The most famous stanza is the last one:

    I shall be telling this with a sigh
    Somewhere ages and ages hence:
    Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
    I took the one less traveled by,
    And that has made all the difference.


    Some have interpreted this to mean that we should trod the untrod path, that we should be true to ourselves. Others have theorized that Frost was being ironic -- such as Piper discusses in this episode. That's the wonderful thing about poetry. You can take from a poem whatever you want.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I remember my high school English teacher said that the poem actually means he should have taken the more traveled road and in retrospect realized he just took the less traveled one to be different, but it was stupid.

    ReplyDelete

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