Series’ heartfelt plea for prison reform
The Show: Orange is the New Black, Season 4, Episode 12 The Moment: The time machine Prison inmates Poussey (Samira Wiley) and Brook (Kimiko Glenn) dance without music inside a makeshift cardboard time machine. Their prison is in chaos, overcrowded and under new, nastier management.
“This feels like the most normal thing I’ve done in a while,” Poussey says.
“It feels like we’re in a horror movie,” Brook says.
“The kind you used to watch on sleepovers,” Poussey adds, “where you have to run to your mom at the end, to hug you, tell you it was all made up.”
“My mom wasn’t a big hugger,” Brook says. “My mom was,” Poussey says. (Alert: Major spoiler ahead.) Every now and then, the theme and purpose of a series comes together in a plot point, and this is one of those times.
OITNB is a long, heartfelt plea for prison reform, and this — Poussey’s last happy moment before dying in a chokehold — is an example of what showrunner Jenji Kohan is all about.
This sweet girl, arrested for possession of half an ounce of marijuana, should not be in prison.
There should be a better solution for her.
But as Kohan seeds throughout this season, the system is designed only one way, to grind people down.
It’s gutsy of Kohan to sacrifice a great character to make her greater point.
So in the next episode, when prison manager Caputo (Nick Sandow) defends the guard who killed Poussey, it’s heinous but also understandable. One promising life was wasted. He doesn’t want to waste another. It’s all so hugely sad. Orange is the New Black streams on Netflix. Johanna Schneller is a media connoisseur who zeroes in on popculture moments. She usually appears Monday through Thursday.