When you start lamenting the wait time until Season 3 of Orange Is the New Black, focus on these less-than-stellar moments to power through.
Now that we’ve binged on Season 2 of Orange Is the New Black, we’ve got plenty of time to kill until it returns next summer. If absence makes the heart grow fonder… well, we’re already pretty fond, so we’re trying a time-honored trick that’s helped us get over many exes: remembering the less-happy moments. Here are some memories to dwell on when you feel like you can’t wait another moment for Season 3.
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1. New inmate, Brook Soso
We get it, we get it: Soso (Kimiko Glenn) is an exaggerated, hippie version of who Piper (Taylor Schilling) was in her first days at Litchfield: naive, innocent and still assuming that the rules in prison would be essentially the same as they were on the outside. But Piper was never this grating! Soso’s constant yammering drove every character around her crazy, and while her weepy breakdown over finally being forced to take a shower was moving (hey, we’re not dead inside), between the hunger strike and the rambling about her best friend, Meadow, we were totally on Team Piper when she finally snapped and broke out the terrifying threats, not to mention Team Nichols when she found an alternative, albeit dirtier, method of keeping Soso quiet.
2. Polly and Larry’s hookup
Polly’s never been the greatest friend to Piper, and Larry may be the reason the “NotAllMen” hashtag exists, but this season, they sunk to new lows. Sure, Piper cheated on Larry with Alex (Laura Prepon), and he’s got every right to be mad. But sleeping with her married best friend who has a newborn son? Well, that sure upped the ante. The more Polly and Larry convinced themselves they were living out a star-crossed lovers fantasy situation, the more gross their affair became. When Piper eventually left poor Pete to take their new baby and build a life with Larry instead, we watched with open-mouthed horror. Piper’s only reaction when they broke the news was disbelieving laughter, and we couldn’t blame her.
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3. Caputo fires Fischer
Susan Fischer (Lauren Lapkus) has always been one of the few guards at Litchfield with a fully-developed sense of humanity. She sees the prisoners as people first, inmates second, and while “prison guard” was never the greatest career choice for someone with a soft heart, the guard staff needed someone like Fischer around to temper the more brutal moments. When she finally found enough courage to stand up to Caputo (Nick Sandow) and his too-strict prisoner discipline system, he snapped and fired her in front of all her co-workers. It was a gesture that had more to do with Fischer’s lack of interest in Caputo as a romantic possibility than her job performance, and while it wasn’t as brutal to watch as Poussey getting beaten in the shower, the look of devastation on her face made it one of the season’s more depressing moments.
4. Natalie and Caputo get down and dirty
Let’s face it: Natalie Figueroa (Alysia Reiner) was never one of our favorite characters. She was scheming, cruel, manipulative and embezzling an obscene amount of the prison’s funds in order to keep her husband’s political campaign afloat. We were glad to see that some justice was finally served and she was ousted from her position as assistant warden. Still, it was enough that Caputo finally scored the victory over her that he’s been craving for two seasons. Was it really necessary to cap the moment with Natalie trying to get herself out of trouble by fellating him? Things didn’t have to get quite that demeaning.
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5. Larry appropriating Piper’s life… again
It always seems to come back to Larry in the end. After selling Piper out on NPR last season, not to mention his overly-florid “Modern Love” column that focused almost exclusively on how her prison sentence affected his life more than hers, Larry apparently didn’t feel that he’d sunk low enough. This season, he asked Piper if she’d be his prison mole, gathering information on the inner workings of Litchfield so that he could write a brutal exposé… which was an idea that he stole from another writer. “You’re the moon, Larry,” Piper sneered, pointing out that all he knows how to do is reflect someone else’s light instead of generating some of his own. His romance with Polly might be cringeworthy, but we say that Piper’s better off without him and his entitled whining.
Orange Is the New Black Season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.
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