Orange Is the New Black 5.04

Litchfield's Got Talent

The gun reappears. Mendoza had it. It drops out of her pocket. There's a scramble for it. Angie gets her hands on it. Angie and Leanne use their newfound power to hold a talent contest. The guards are forced to perform for the inmates. 

Yoga Jones, DeMarco, and the trio of White Pride sisters,  who were locked in the kitchen with Berlin, tie up Judy King. They want to know where her stash of snacks can be found. She insists that there isn't a stash at first but they don't believe her. Judy King tells them that the food is delivered by helicopter to the roof at night. They spend the rest of the episode walking through the prison looking for the landing spot.

Alison Abdullah gets the backstory spotlight. She has a husband and a 10-year-old daughter. She encouraged her husband to get another wife, so he did.

Daya is present when the gun re-emerges. She knows that Mendoza took it. She feels betrayed. She goes outside to the field where some other inmates are hanging out.

Suzanne, Kukudio, and Soso hold a séance for Poussey in the cafeteria, after they hear a noise in the ceiling. Cindy, Watson, and Taystee join them. They are all into it except Taystee who thinks it is stupid.

Red and Flores continue to look for incriminating evidence on Piscatella. They take energy pills to help them stay awake. They eventually find his records. They find a report in his records that says he once killed an inmate. 

Burset decides that she's had enough. She walks out of Litchfield and is taken to the SHU. She wants to know what happened to Sister Jane. Another prisoner tells her that she was given compassionate release after she came down with pneumonia. 

Chapman is worried because she thinks that Linda will reveal that Vause killed a guard. Linda shrugs it off when Chapman confronts her about it. Linda is one of the judges for the talent contest. The other judges are Angie, Leanne, and Ruiz. She's more interested in the talent contest than anything else at that moment.

Josh wins the talent contest. His prize is that he gets to pick the loser. He picks Caputo. Angie and Leanne take Caputo to one of the port-a-johns outside and tape it shut with duct tape after putting him in it.

The episode ends with Judy King almost getting pushed off the roof. She has been dragged up there by the 5 prisoners who have been marching her around. They are ready to throw her from the roof for lying to them when out of nowhere a helicopter appears. 

Thoughts

I am almost 1/3 of the way through the season and they are still less than 24 hours into the story. It is still the first night.

Doggett, Coates, Berlin, Nichols, Morello, Piscatella are not in this episode. Hapakuka and Murphy are in it but only very briefly.

The opening situation got defused very quickly. The guards were about to attack the prisoners when they brought in the food but Caputo screwed that up when he saw Linda.

How did Burset get out of Litchfield? Why didn't anyone look into how she got out?

The backstory spotlight on Abdullah helps to flesh out her character a little bit. Her backstory doesn't really add, for now at least, to her current situation. It does give her something in common with one of the skinheads but neither of them finds that out.

Angie fires a shot into the ceiling. I wondered if maybe it hit Coates. There was a point later in the episode when Red thought she saw something dripping from the ceiling. She was too focused on her task at hand to investigate it. I wondered if that was from Coates. I also wondered if the sound that Suzanne heard was Coates. I half expected him to come falling through the ceiling on more than one occasion.

There is a moment when one of the prisoners wonders if maybe she has seen Linda before. She winds up shrugging it off. I think this may be a bit of foreshadowing. I will be very surprised if Linda doesn't get exposed for what she is.

I think the talent show gag goes on a little longer than necessary or is realistic. The other inmates could have jumped Angie and Leanne and gotten the gun from them, even though they don't.

I am still enjoying this season. It's both similar and different from the previous seasons. It is interesting to see how the amount of time over which the season takes place is affecting the storytelling.