Orange Is The New Black: Appropriately Sized Pots, Review
Miss Rosa is at the center of another emotionally charged OITNB.
Thought that end of the last episode was a tear jerker? Hold onto your hats.
This episode opens with Healy explaining to Miss Rosa that the DOC will not pay for surgery her doctors have recommended. Instead they will continue with the chemo treatments. Miss Rosa tells him to blow it out his ass; he has basically consigned her to die. Outwardly she appears to be resigned to her situation, but in reality she cannot believe she is dying by inches, locked away in the concrete sarcophagus that is Litchfield.
Way, way, waaaaay back in the 70’s, Miss Rosa was a vibrant, beautiful, bank robber. She loved life, the thrill of the chase, and the smell of money. She also loved her boyfriends; despite the fact that they had a terrible habit of dying during heists. One gets shot and another has a heart attack. Yikes! It should come as a shock to no one that she believes she is cursed.
What ultimately lands her in prison was impulse control. She robs a bank that her crew has never seen (let alone cased), and ends up getting caught. Several decades later, she is an old lady literally rotting away behind bars.
But she hasn’t lost her touch. While getting her chemo treatment, she strikes up a conversation with the teenage boy sitting next to her, and teaches him how to case the joint and steal a wallet from the nurse’s station. It isn’t until the end of the episode that we see her hardened façade crack, as she bursts into tears when she thinks the boy has been told his cancer is terminal. Turns out she was wrong; he isn’t another victim of her curse, he is actually in remission. She laughs as the CO wheels her out of the building, $60 from the nurse’s wallet tucked in her bra, and we see the vibrant woman from her youth bubble up for a moment.
Keeping Miss Rosa’s situation in mind, is it any surprise that when Healy (frustrated by his general uselessness) grants Piper’s request for furlough, the rest of the inmates react bitterly? Most of them have requested furlough; either for the death of a parent or the birth of a grandchild. None were ever granted. While Piper understands their frustration, she refuses to apologize for it and tells them that the situation is simple: she loves her dying grandmother and wants to say goodbye. Unfortunately the furlough comes too late; her grandmother has already passed.
Meanwhile, Pennsatucky is still on the outs with the girls from laundry.
Soso, who has been getting noticeably stinkier, is forced by the COs to take a shower (under protest).
Caputo decides to grow veggies in Red’s greenhouse, which gives her just enough forewarning to hide her contraband in Mendoza’s kitchen. Later, Caputo goes nuts and trashes the greenhouse looking for contraband, but finding none. And why did Caputo freak out? Because shit rolls downhill. Earlier, Figueroa freaked out when she stepped in chewing gum while wearing her Louboutins. Contraband. Feeling the pressure, Caputo’s rampage extends to both inmates and COs alike and finally lands on Fischer. His job stress, coupled with his frustrated romantic desire for her boils over when Fischer challenges the new shot quota in front of the other guards. He fires her on the spot.
Which is a shame since she was the only CO who knew that Daya was preggers. And who should Caputo hire to replace the terminally naïve Fischer? No worries, Figueroa has that covered: enter Pornstache, stage right.
Written by
Gerri Mahn wisely invested her money in a B.A. in English Lit and an M.S. in Library Science. She has since used these degrees to speak…