Jenji Kohan adapted Piper Kerman’s 2010 memoir, Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison, into a hit series for Netflix in 2013 and it’s become a sort of phenomenon. The series received renowned critical acclaim almost immediately; its first season alone won three out of the twelve Primetime Emmy’s it was nominated for. Orange is the New Black is the most popular, and most viewed show on the streaming service. The success of OITNB allowed it to be renewed for a fifth, sixth, and seventh season in February 2016, months before the June 2016 release of season four.
The show revolves around Piper Chapman, a thirty-something woman who was sentenced to fifteen months at Litchfield Penitentiary for a crime she committed ten years prior. However, the show isn’t just about Piper, it really focuses more on the women she encounters in the minimum-security prison.
OITNB allows the audience to sympathize with these criminals. We understand the challenges of a Russian immigrant who uses mob connections to grow a small business, or a desperate Latin American woman who was being controlled by an abusive husband, or a vulnerable young black girl who was manipulated by a drug-dealing mother figure. They’re really just regular women who made some bad choices or got dealt a really bad hand in life, and we can’t wait to find out more about the lovely ladies of Litchfield.
As we prepare ourselves for serving thirteen hours of hard-time, i.e. a binge-watching session when season five is released on June 9th, let’s take a look back at some of the most memorable moments that have happened in or around “the camp” so far.
15 Hearing Norma
We’ve only heard Red’s buddy speak on a few occasions, because Norma is a partial mute because of a severe stutter. In her flashback episode, “Tongue Tied,” the seventh episode of the third season, it is revealed that in the 1970s, Norma Moon Romano attended a “transformation workshop” led by self-proclaimed spiritual guide, Guru Mack. She fell for Mack because he claimed to understand and connect with her, even though she’s too insecure to speak. Norma joined Mack’s polygamous cult and became one of the many women who married him on the same day. Years later, Mack faced federal charges of fraud and kidnapping and Norma was the only one who remained with him. One day he flips out on Norma, acknowledges that he’s a conman, not a prophet and mocks Norma for “wasting” her life with him. So, she pushes him off a cliff and then struggles to scream “son of a bitch.”
Norma has been heard singing twice, once in a very tender moment when she was attempting to comfort Soso after Poussey’s death in the season four finale, “Toast Can’t Never Be Bread Again.” However, the most we ever hear of Norma is when she shocks everyone in “Can’t Fix Crazy,” the final episode of season one, when she stands in for Suzanne and sings the solo beautifully in the Christmas play. Hopefully we’ll get to hear more Norma in the upcoming fifth season.
14 Murder, Molly’s and Ménage à Trois
In season three, Alex’s old boss Kubra sent a hit man to pose as a guard at Litchfield so he can murder her for testifying against him. Lolly rescues her from the attack and the fake C.O. gets buried in different parts of the garden. His body is discovered in the eleventh episode of season four, “People Persons,” and Litchfield goes on lockdown while they investigate.
Judy King, the criminal celebrity chef, has her own special bunk and receives plenty of privileges, and in turn, her bunkmate, Erica “Yoga” Jones, gets to take advantage of the preferential treatment too. During the lockdown, C.O. Luschek gets put on Judy King watch, which he’s been avoiding since the last time she coerced him to have sex with her. However, this time around, it didn’t take much coercion.
Somehow, King got her hands on some molly’s, aka ecstasy, and Luschek couldn’t resist and Yoga Jones gets in on the fun too. They began to have a trippy, emotional conversation and then bond in an unexpected way that no one really wanted to see. After the high wears off, Luschek and Jones are mortified and very ashamed they just had a threesome, but King doesn’t apologize for her sexuality and goes about eating her breakfast like nothing's wrong.
13 Crazy Eyes’ Flirting Skills
Before she was psycho Vee’s manipulated patsy, or penning sci-fi erotica, Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren, was smitten with prison newbie Piper Chapman. Crazy Eyes is heartbroken when Piper rejects her advances, then in the third episode of the first season, “Lesbian Request Denied,” she gets retaliation by angrily urinating on the floor of Piper’s bunk in the middle of the night.
Ironically enough, the character was only supposed to appear in those first three episodes, but after seeing Uzo Aduba’s amazing performance as the eccentric woman with mental illness, the writers and producers rearranged the script to make her a recurring character.
The critics love Aduba’s performance too; her portrayal of Crazy Eyes made her the first actress to win two Emmy Awards in consecutive years in two different categories. Aduba won for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series in 2014 and in 2015 she won for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series.
We’ve been through a lot with Suzanne. We’ve hated her, laughed with her, felt bad for her, and also genuinely feared her. Through it all, Crazy Eyes remains one of the most compelling characters on the show, and is frequently the source of comedic relief. However, no one can forget her obsession with “Dandelion” and how she decided to mark her territory.
12 Sister Ingalls’ Hunger Strike
Sister Jane Ingalls refused to get involved in any sort of protest, because she retired from the activist life. However, after Caputo finds out about the hunger strike, he confronts Brook, Leanne, Angie and Yoga Jones about their ridiculous demands that were featured in the Big House Bugle, the good Sister finally joins in and decides to whip the protestors into shape. Sister Ingalls brings up Jimmy Cavanaugh, an elderly inmate that suffered from dementia, who was given “compassionate release,” but since she was left to take care of herself at the bus station, Ingalls believes this treatment is “inhumane” and illegal.
In the eleventh episode of the second season, “Take a Break From Your Values,” we see why Ingalls was excommunicated from the Catholic church; she has the spirit of activism deep within her, but she became too much of a narcissist and used protesting as a way to gain validation. “Bad habits die hard,” but now that she’s older and has low blood sugar, she really shouldn’t be starving herself in order to produce change. After she fainted, Caputo forces her to go to medical for force-feeding. As she traveled there via wheelchair, she felt “good” and “blissful,” as she held up the peace symbol on both her hands, she was a “rock star” in that moment.
11 Bennett Ain’t No Hollaback Girl
Daya’s baby-daddy, aka C.O. John Bennett, went bye-bye a while ago. He proposes to Daya and plans on taking responsibility, but backs out after seeing life in the Diaz household. In the third episode of the second season, “Bed Bugs and Beyond,” Bennett visits the man who would be caring for his child, Cesar, Aleida’s boyfriend. The gifting of an old crib was a sentimental gesture, but after witnessing Cesar threaten his stepchildren with a gun to get them to eat leftovers, Bennett was convinced he couldn’t be a part of that family. He hasn’t been seen at Litchfield since.
We were almost certain Bennett would’ve made a triumphant return in the fourth season, and we’re still kind of hoping he comes back in season five, but we really shouldn’t count on it. Even though Bennett was a Corporal in the United States Army, in his flashback sequences we see him disobey orders, act inappropriately, and display cowardice. Most of the inmates believed that he has a prosthetic leg due to a combat accident when he was on duty in Afghanistan, but it turns out he had to get his leg amputated due to an infection from a dirty hot tub in Orlando. He’s just not a responsible dude, and at this point, we don’t want Daya getting back with her former fiancé. However, we still can’t help but love the scene where Bennett and his army pals dance shirtless to Gwen Stefani’s hit song in the desert.
10 The Soso Sing Along
The tree-hugging hippie, Brook Soso is half Scottish, half Japanese, and she first appeared in “Hugs Can Be Deceiving,” the third episode of season two. She talks way too much, which annoys all the other inmates, even the patient and calm Sister Ingalls is irritated by Soso. Between her non-stop chatter about the most obscure liberal issues to stories about friends named “Meadow,” and the fact that she smells because she doesn’t wear deodorant, this leads her to have no friends and feel completely isolated. However, Soso did achieve some moments of solidarity and “girl power”—before her relationship with Poussey, of course.
In episode twelve of the second season, “It Was the Change,” a storm named Hurricane Wanda hit Litchfield pretty hard and caused a power outage. The inmates had to bunk out in common rooms together and Soso manages to get a sing-along going. Of course Soso likes 1990’s alternative angry chick music, so she leads the gang with Meredith Brooks’ “Bitch” and Lisa Loeb’s “Stay.”
9 Red and The Chicken
Galina “Red” Reznikov is an older Russian inmate, who’s portrayed as cold, but matronly. Red is an influential leader at Litchfield and rules the kitchen with an iron fist. She’s normally a very serious woman, but she has a deeply odd obsession with a chicken. In the fifth episode of the first season, “The Chickening,” Piper sees a free-range chicken in the yard and the other inmates tell her that she needs to tell Red, because Red has been on the hunt for this chicken for quite sometime and has been dreaming of making Kiev. Turns out, the chicken is both real and an allegory. It had become a “legendary bird,” an urban myth amongst the inmates, a symbol of impossibility and freedom.
According to Red the chicken appeared to her in a dream wearing a top hat after he magically escaped slaughter. Clearly, it’s the smartest chicken ever, because it would be nearly impossible for it to have survived in the area, let alone make its way through the barbed wire fence. Red cannot wait to eat that brilliant bird “and absorb its power.”
8 Piper the White Supremacist
While trying to regain control of her dirty-panty-business, Piper accidentally starts a race war within the prison population. At one mortifyingly ridiculous moment to watch, a crowd actually starts screaming “white lives matter.” Granted, Piper didn’t think her actions would have that sort of reaction; the girl can’t learn anything the easy way, or she’s just really that stupid. Either way, Maria and the Dominican inmates take it upon themselves to teach Piper a lesson.
With the help of the white supremacists, Piper crossed Maria’s gang, so since Piper is “hella gangster” Maria figures she needs a label in the seventh episode of season four, “It Sounded Nicer in My Head.” As her girls heat the makeshift branding iron over the stove, one of them acknowledges that if a Swastika is backwards “it’s, like, a whole other thing.” They burned the Nazi symbol into her arm so she’ll never forget how she started racially charged gang wars at Litchfield.
7 "Cristoffa"
We’re introduced to Lorna Morello in season one as the first woman at Litchfield who talks to Piper because she was the driver of the inmate transport van. Her character is a very feminine, Italian-American, who’s planning her wedding to a man named Christopher. Little is known about Morello or Christopher, except that Nicky, Morello’s casual sex partner, mocks her that he never visits.
In “A Whole Other Hole,” the fourth episode of the second season, we see a whole different side of Morello. While she waited for Rosa’s chemo to be over, she decided to take a brief road trip to break into Christopher’s home, where she takes a bath while wearing his real fiancé’s wedding veil.
Clearly, Morello suffers from manic episodes and delusions. Turns out, she met Christopher at the post office, they went out for coffee once, and then she proceeded to relentlessly stalk him. Christopher was forced to get a restraining order, which she of course broke. Six episodes later, in “The Mustachioed Shit,” Christopher pays Morello a visit at Litchfield because he knows she broke into his house. He yells at her and tells the entire room that she’s a “psycho bitch.”
Granted she got to wear a veil (made out of toilet paper) at the end of season three, when she married Vince Muccio, but we’ll never forget about her first fiancé, “Cristoffa,” and their unrequited love.
6 New teeth, New ‘Tucky
More than most of the inmates, Tiffany “Pennsatucky” Doggett has probably gone through the most drastic changes, mentally, emotionally, and physically. She went from being the zealously religious, bossy, ignorant, antagonist in season one, to a more accepting well-adjusted person by season’s three and four. This is probably due to her unlikely friendship with Big Boo, but also because Piper knocked out most of Doggett’s remaining teeth and the government funded oral surgery and a brand new shiny set of pearly whites.
After spending time in solitary, Healy meets with her in the second episode of the second season, “Looks Blue, Tastes Red,” to make sure she doesn’t tell anyone that he witnessed the fight she had with Piper at the end of season one. She cut a deal with him for the new chompers and couldn’t have been more ecstatic because her old teeth were rotted from a combination of methamphetamines and Mountain Dew.
We see ‘Tucky’s new teeth in the next episode, “Hugs Can Be Deceiving,” when she’s folding sheets with Leanne and Angie in the laundry room, proclaiming she felt “free as a bird, or more like a snake” needing to “shed that…skin” because it “just didn’t suit [her] anymore.”
5 Becoming Tova
The series has portrayed many stories about religion being used to justify exclusion, manipulation and oppression. However, it is very well known that people become more religious when they are in prison, so naturally OITNB featured this by having one of the most unlikely candidates to find religion, Cindy Hayes, aka Black Cindy, announce her decision to convert to Judaism by shouting “Where my dreidel at?” in the cafeteria during season three.
After budget cuts resulted in the prison food getting even more horrible, at first Cindy pretends she’s Jewish just to get the better prepared, pre-packaged Kosher meals. This tactic caught on and a “rent-a-Rabbi” was hired to question the inmates, because suddenly a lot of them were Jewish.
Turns out, Cindy wanted to convert to Judaism for more than just matzo balls and gefilte fish, she felt at peace with the way the faith allows for skepticism and uncertainty. Cindy pleads with the Rabbi that she is taking this seriously and wants to “keep asking questions” so she can “keep learning and arguing.” Another Jewish inmate, Ginsberg, who is helping her learn Hebrew, convinces the Rabbi when she declares “I don’t know why she’d want to go from a hated minority to a double-hated minority, but she’s for real.”
The irreverent inmate who is known as Black Cindy, takes the Hebrew name “Tova,” and this storyline helps break down the stereotype that all Jews must look a certain way or belong to a specific ethnic group.
4 Miss Rosa Doesn’t Fear the Reaper
One of the most epic moments in OITNB thus far, was the last scene of the season two finale episode, “We Have Manners, We’re Polite.” Rosa Cisneros, known as Miss Rosa, was informed by her doctor that chemotherapy stopped working on her aggressive form of cancer and she only has a few weeks to live. Lorna Morello has a compassionate moment and leaves the keys in the transport van and tells her to “go fast.”
Meanwhile, after various altercations, the sociopathic Yvonne “Vee” Parker is able to escape from Litchfield through Red’s secret garden tunnel. As Rosa makes her way down the road, she spots Vee walking out of the woods and runs her over, stating “Always so rude, that one.”
The former bank robber was now old and cancer ridden, and spent most of her adult life incarcerated, but in that moment she turned back into the passionate woman of her youth who lived for adventure. Ironically, Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” played on the radio as Rosa takes her final drive, and we learn the following season that she drove off the road into a quarry, going out like the badass she once was.
3 Stellaaaaaa!
In the sixth episode of the third season, “Ching Chong Chang,” Stella Carlin makes her appearance when she meets Piper sewing panties for Whispers. She winds up having a thing with Piper, but then double-crosses her by stealing her cash from her side business, “Felonious Spunk.” In the final episode of season three, “Trust No Bitch,” Piper sets her up by planting contraband in her bunk. We briefly see Stella again in the Maximum Security courtyard with Nicky in “Piece of Shit,” the sixth episode of the fourth season.
There’s no denying that Stella left quite an impression on fans. Stella, portrayed by the beautiful Australian DJ, Ruby Rose, incited a storm of girl crushes around the world. Why is it such a big deal? Rose describes herself as “gender fluid,” meaning she identifies as both masculine and feminine. The tatted androgynous star doesn’t conform to conventional beauty standards and fans absolutely adore her for it.
2 Poussey’s Political Passing
Poussey Washington’s character never quite belonged in Litchfield, besides the fact that her crime is now legal in a fifth of this country, the kind hearted young woman was well traveled and educated. That’s why her death at the end of season four was so heartbreaking and shocking, but it also seemed necessary.
A cafeteria protest over constant prisoner abuse gets out of hand, C.O. Bayley tries to restrain Poussey by putting his entire body weight on the 95 lb. inmate and as she gasped “help me,” she accidently dies. Even though her death was fictional (ironically written by Lauren Morelli, who is now Samira Wiley’s wife), it was inspired by the real life death of Eric Garner, the asthmatic African-American Staten Islander who was choked to death by a police officer.
Fans were outraged by the beloved characters’ death, but Wiley, the actress that played Poussey, told The Daily Beast that as an artist “you do have a responsibility to reflect the time that you live in because we are cultural historians…I wish that people’s anger could be directed fully toward…all the tragedies that are happening in real life.”
As poignant and compelling as Poussey’s passing was, our hearts still break for her loved ones, like Taystee and Soso. It was a tragic story due to an incompetent, corrupt system and she will be truly missed at Litchfield.
1 Daya’s Got a Gun
Dayanara Diaz arrives at Litchfield with Piper in season one. There she finds her mother, Aleida Diaz, and has an affair with Corrections Officer John Bennett, who impregnates her, she has his baby in prison, but briefly claims a different guard raped her, and all this other stuff happens to Daya over the course of four seasons.
During the last season, Aleida is released early and vows to get her life together and get the kids back from CPS, but Daya is doubtful. Gloria becomes Daya’s mother figure in prison and warns her to stay away from Maria and her crew, but of course she doesn’t listen.
After Poussey’s death, a prison-wide riot breaks out and C.O. Humphrey draws his gun in the middle of it, but Maritza pushed him, which causes him to drop it and it slides in Daya’s direction. Daya picks up the gun and originally points it at the white supremacists before pointing it at the guards. With her fellow inmates cheering her on, Daya is in a pretty powerful position, and we’re stuck with a cliffhanger; anxiously awaiting to see the results of the standoff.