Orange is the New Black: 1x07 Blood Donut.
“What’s your story?”, is a question that Larry, going out on his own for the first time in a long while, worrying that he looks pathetic, single or divorced, is asked by a bartender who’s just bought him a drink. It’s a good question to ask, at the halfway point of the first season, since every episode has given an answer – Piper’s story, Sophia’s story, Nicky’s story, Claudette’s story, Red’s story, and bits and pieces of everybody else’s. If Piper is the Trojan horse of the show that allows the telling of all these other stories that would otherwise never find a place, then Larry’s answer is just as significant – he doesn’t have a story of his own. Larry’s story is Piper’s, it’s the story of Piper going to prison. It’s not just that he feeds off that story (literally, since he is about to write a column for the NY Times about it), but that Piper being his automatic answer when he is asked for his story points at an emptiness in the centre of his life, an inability to give himself meaning, a writer’s lack of competence when it comes to knowing about himself. I’m not particularly interested in Larry as a character, for the most part, he serves exactly that purpose, but it’s an interesting way that the episode is framed.
Blood Donut is Janae Watson’s story, starting when she returns from being in SHU for two weeks, which was indirectly caused by Piper’s screwdriver accident. It’s a story of not fitting in despite desperately wanting to, which contrasts very well with Piper’s journey inside, as she struggles against constantly being singled out for her education and her privilege, mostly by Healy. It provides her with comforts and luxuries others don’t have, like knowing that she will have a home once she gets out, but it also makes it impossible to completely disappear in the community inside prison, to become part of it, which may be the easiest way to pass her time there. Janae, we find out, was an outstanding athlete in school, likely to get scholarships to good colleges, but that talent, and the ambition and drive behind it, also made it impossible for her to fit in with the other kids at school that she so desperately wanted to fit in with, a conflict that eventually leads to a terrible decision when she fails to win the last race – against the police, after a bank robbery.
3D: You’re the real thing, you feel me? Everything we playing at, everything we holdin, you can have it, for real. You wanna fuck that up, that’s on you. I can’t carry that.
The very thing that others consider her privilege, her talents, she sees as a burden, a mark, and she carries that rage into prison. Piper recognizes it, and sees an opportunity to make her time count (right after realizing that the WAC is a useless sham, and failing to be heard by Healy). Rather than high hopes for better education and health care in prison, she proposes that the track is re-opened for prisoners, so that Janae can use all of that anger more productively, and as a way to pay back her debts (and the mere fact that she thinks about barter as a way of paying off her debts shows how far Piper has come since the beginning of the season). She feels guilty about being indirectly responsible for sending Janae to SHU, and Janae tells her that “she isn’t a snitch”, so will never tell that Piper was the one who took the screwdriver; but nevertheless, Piper recognizes that it is something she has to pay off, and at the same time, she learns that there is nothing worse than ratting out her fellow inmates if she recognizes that these rules are what make prison life bearable.
It’s interesting to see Piper in that position again, trying to understand how the system works and then gaming it to her advantage. Once she realizes that Healy will be of no help to her, or asks a price that is no longer willing to pay (she gives him the hidden phone, but refuses to tell him whose it is), she goes to Fisher, who takes the idea with the track directly to Healy’s superior, an outcome that Piper expects since she sees Caputo’s interest in her.
There have been many moments in the season so far that were about the hard-won little freedoms that make life for the inmates bearable, and Piper is starting to understand how it works. It’s a good moment for her, but also an interesting contrast to both Taystee and Claudette, who see an opportunity to find actual freedom, which seems to make accepting still being behind bars harder. Red is an example of someone who has learned to live with the limitations of the system and make the best of it, no drugs, but stashes of actual vanilla, safely hidden away, the privilege to laugh Pornstache in the face when he demands that she help him smuggle in other things, because she feels safe in the niche she’s carved out for herself. But hope is a dangerous thing in there.
Random notes:
It’s a devastating scene, but seeing Janae wind up Yoga Jones to provoke physical violence makes for one the most intense moments of the episode.
Taystee: Everyone says shit to get elected, you ain’t actually gotta do it, that’s politics.
More Nicky/Alex cuteness. I can't help it, it's a thing (also because I mostly think that Alex and Piper are absolutely terrible for each other).
Things between Pennsatucky and Piper are starting to build up, as Pennsatucky’s idea of justice and possibility clashes with Piper’s newfound sense of reality. Pennsatucky thinks that being represented means that her voice will be heard, Piper realizes that WAC is nothing but an empty shell to legitimize Healy, and somewhere along the line, Pennsatucky’s feeling of having had something taken from her grows (for now, the only result is that Alex’ slowly gets more and more pissed off over no longer being able to not think about Piper, and delivering a much-quoted threat as a result).
Piper: The point of the poem is that everyone wants to look back and think that their choices mattered but in reality, shit just happens the way that it happens and it does not mean anything.
Robert Frost interpretation, saying more about Piper than Robert Frost, probably.
Sophia: So you wanna look like the black best friend in the white girl movie?
We also get a bit of an insight into Healy’s happy marriage to an Ukrainian wife and her mother:
Two more years for a green card. Be nice.
You don’t have to fuck him.
It takes that bartender five seconds to decide that Larry is a jerk. Nobody cares that you’re a NY Times columnist when you’re mostly a jerk, Larry.
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