Netflix’s ‘Orange Is the New Black,’ Season 3 (third review)

Through almost every episode this year, once-major characters like Piper (Taylor Schilling) and Alex (Laura Prepon) take a relative backseat; instead, Litchfield denizens from Gina (Abigail Savage) to Mr. Healy (Michael Harney) play out each new twist (well documented in previous BSR reviews). One thing remains consistent, though: OITNB doesn’t shy away from disappearances, and many of the most compelling conflicts each character experiences stem from the simple but wrenching fallout that happens when a loved one vanishes.

Bye, Rosa

We began Season 3 with high hopes of finding out what happened to Miss Rosa (Barbara Rosenblat) after she blasted away in that Litchfield van, smoking Vee on her way to meet her fate outside prison walls in the face of her terminal diagnosis. But Rosa’s only appearance in Season 3 is in a flashback to Joe Caputo’s (Nick Sandow) first day at Litchfield.

In Season 3, the show’s trademark backstories revolve around seminal disappearances in the lives of the characters or their families. As Pennsatucky (Taryn Manning) comes under the sinister abuse of an unscrupulous guard, we learn more about an agonizing moment in her young life, when the only considerate man she’s ever known suddenly moves away. Leanne (Emma Myles) disappears from her Amish upbringing during Rumspringa, then silently flees her family to spare them the fallout of her subsequent arrest. Even Caputo, in another flashback, feels the sting of abandonment as his partner walks out on him after he sacrifices his musical career for her.

And inside the prison walls, disappearances — not sex, power, illicit commerce, revenge, or faith — make the show’s most interesting and sympathetic moments. After a long-awaited Mother’s Day visit, Maria (Jessica Pimentel) howls her grief down the hallway as her partner, safely past the metal detectors, informs her that he won’t be bringing their daughter to visit anymore.

Dreading the SHU

One of the more poignant storylines follows a parenting feud between Gloria (Selenis Leyva) and Sophia (Laverne Cox) that, at its root, may be the result of their disappearances from their own sons’ lives and their inability to do anything about it. The conflict culminates in a trans-phobic attack that leaves a battered Sophia locked in the SHU for “protective custody.” What happens to her? As the season ends, we can only guess. (Speaking of Sophia’s walk to SHU, did you hear that song by Willis Earl Beal, “Too Dry to Cry”? Go buy Beal’s entire 2013 album, Nobody Knows.)

The pregnant Daya’s (Dascha Polanco) boyish lover, CO Bennett (Matt McGorry), pulls his own disappearing act after charming her, in her increasingly bulging khakis, with a marriage proposal. Later, Daya’s mom Aleida (Elizabeth Rodriguez) decides to make Daya’s baby disappear, to one character at least, lying about its fate to the anxious adoptive parent, Pornstache’s mother, after he and the Hispanic girls author his own disappearance into prison. And then in one of the season’s final scenes, Aleida’s home and volatile partner Cesar (Berto Colon) are raided by police. They scoop Daya’s baby up, presumably to evaporate into the foster system, though her mother and grandmother don’t know that yet.

One of the worst disappearances for fans is the moment wisecracking, bighearted Nicky (Natasha Lyonne) gets sold down the river by Luschek (Matt Peters), Litchfield’s frowsy electrician. Horrified under her mascara and luxuriant frizzy mane, Nicky goes down the hill to Maximum Security. And those who hoped that the show would pick up on her fate there, in this season at least, are disappointed.

At the season’s close, even the Litchfield staffers take up the theme, walking out on Caputo as he sides with their ruthless corporate bosses. And the experience of unexpected disappearance even carries into the inmates’ physical and intellectual environment, as an unbudgeted-for bedbug infestation suddenly costs them their beds, their clothes, and their books.

Feeling for the characters? Or feeling with them?

Judging by the show’s refusal to follow up on the fates of intriguing and heartbreaking characters like Miss Claudette (Michelle Hurst) after her own trip to Max, or a senile inmate released to wander the streets alone in Season 2, Season 3 is enough to keep any die-hard OITNB fan up at night. Bennett, Sophia, Nicky, Daya’s baby — will we ever find out what happens to them?

And that’s why the dramatic tension of Season 3 may be equal to that of the previous two: not in the cohesiveness of its storyline, but in its willingness, unusual in the world of storytelling, to leave the audience hanging in the same sense of dislocation that the characters constantly feel.

Most stories — in TV, movies, or books — limit the emotional resonance of characters forced apart; creators instead go for the dramatic juice of allowing the audience to follow the characters’ separate paths. The tension comes as we wonder if, when, and how their fates will ever intersect again (take the pop culture phenomenon of Gone Girl or the Game of Thrones saga). The characters may have to say good-bye to each other, but we don’t have to say good-bye to them.

OITNB blazes a different narrative path, even for its best-loved and most popular cast members. It’s the difference between feeling for the characters and actually feeling what they feel as we wonder alongside everyone else in the ensemble — what happened to a person we care about? For the writing of a TV show, it’s a bold and often frustrating choice, but one that’s sure to keep OITNB fans watching.