Orange is the New Black season 5 episode 9 review: Piscatella turns prison into a horror movie
Daya may have turned herself in on the last episode of Orange Is the New Black giving the other inmates a stepping stone towards making real changes at the prison, but what they don’t know is that Piscatella has entered the prison of his own accord (and against the Governor’s wishes) after Red and Blanca lured him in under the guise of CO Humps needing his help. This can only end badly.
Watching Piscatella surveying the scene with the ladies in the prison was creepy enough, but once he was able to find Blanca alone this starts to turninto a full blown horror movie. Not only does he have Blanca captive now but he’s also managed to lure Nicole into becoming a hostage as well. We are not exactly sure what his plan is here since there are four hundred women in the prison. What’s he going to do? Pull each woman into this room one at a time until he’s captured them all? This isn’t a game of Pokemon. After Piscatella gets his hands on Boo, Alex and Piper we realize that he’s trying to take all of the people that are connected to Red in an attempt to lure her out.
With Blanca and Nicole missing for so long Red decides to go hunt them down. After seeing blood in the room where they were supposed to lure Piscatella she realizes that something is really wrong. When she gets a mysterious map directing her towards the missing women she knows that Piscatella is in the prison. Unfortunately, everyone thinks that she’s crazy, so this ends up being a one-woman job trying to take Piscatella down and we’re immediately worried for her. She follows the map to the room indicated and inside she sees all of her friends tied up and gagged. When Piscatella shows up we fear that this showdown is going to end with one of them in a body bag.
When Gloria finally has a chance to talk to the Governor he tells her that he will organize for her to see Benny, but for him to do that she has to release all the hostages. This is a really big decision for Gloria to make considering that she’s going to have 400 women that view her as an enemy if she does this and make her life as miserable as possible once this is over. We know she wants to see her son, but is it really worth what she’s going to have to face? With her son’s health on the line she decides that she’s going to find a way to release the hostages – a decision we expected her to make.
With Daya handing herself over for what she did Taystee and Figueroa are able to get back into their negotiations over the prisoners demands and by talking about prisoner demands really we mean Figueroa trying to manipulate Taystee into handing over hostages. Taystee decides to go and get Caputo to help with the negotiations since Figueroa doesn’t believe that the education program that’s in place isn’t good enough. Is there anyone else out there looking forward to a Caputo and Figueroa reunion? This is been one of our most favorite love/hate relationship throughout the whole series, so this is a moment that we are really looking forward to and it did not disappoint. If anyone’s going to be able to help the ladies get some of their demands met, it’s Caputo.
We don’t want to go too far down the rabbit hole with what happened to Suzanne since it’s incredibly disturbing, but seeing the race hate crime committed against her (painting her face white) was so heartbreaking. Poussey’s death hurt us deeply, but seeing Suzanne hurt and confused over what happened to her broke us.
The theme of this episode felt very much like we were watching some old 80’s campy horror movie. There were a lot of the old school horror tropes going on with creepy phone calls about missing children, bodies going missing, stalkers lurking in the shadows and women getting attacked in the shower. It was super fun as a standalone episode, but it really didn’t fit into the theme of the season as a whole. Episode grade: B+
What did you think of this episode of Orange Is the New Black? Leave us a comment in the box below with your thoughts.