Spoilers ahead. CW: suicide

I just finished the last season of Orange Is the New Black and in a way, I'm a bit disappointed by the last episode. It was too reconciliatory. Given how (rightfully) scathing and critical the show of the prison-industrial complex is, it felt like the writer let some of the crew too easily off the hook.

Not all redemption is bad: I thought it was nice that Maria Ruiz was able to reconcile with her ex and his new girlfriend, or that Blanca Flores actually got out and met the big hairy guy again. And thinking of it, there are a few more instances. I get that in the end, the show or rather Netflix doesn't want to give people permanently a bad vibe or end on a sad note. Maybe there is something fine about that, who am I to say who gets to forgive whom and feel which degree of redemption, right? Okay, right, people-wise, I sort of agree. If Cindy Hayes' mother wants to give her the umpteenth second chance, I get that. But: in the end, I almost forgot that we are in a prison with the huge institutional problems.

Tamika ward was sacked because one of her COs smuggled in drugs. Too bad, huh? But she collaborated with this fascistic institution "trying to be good on the inside." She's all good now, because she got fired and even feels kind of relieved even though she was just a moment before telling the corporate devil about how they might just lie about Tiffany Doggett's death.

In my view, the show was too lenient in leaving us with the lingering feeling that the prison system in the US is extremely bad and corrupt. CO Hellman became the new warden but the way they presented it, it was almost slap-stick, just how comically angry he was about the chair being broken. We weren't reminded how he literally shoved his own drugs down Alex Vause's throat not to get caught and how he was been distributing and smuggling for the entire time, not to talk about the dubious sex he was having with inmates. Linda Ferguson, the mayor, the CEO (Pearson) of MCC, Hopper, Hellman, McCullough, ... they were all kind of forgotten to be mentioned again. And I don't mean that there should've been a reckoning, no, because there is no justice; I think they should've reminded us again. An ending where everything is happy-dappy is just that.

The biggest miss is Doggett's suicide/overdose instead of Jefferson's. I understand that it might have been a red herring but I think this dramatic 'trick'/device didn't really do what I think would've been best for the message and the artistic picture. Killing a beloved character, especially if they did a huge arc with loads of development like Doggett, is easy. Everybody is gonna be sad. Like killing Ned Stark in Game of Thrones. Once creators understood that killing automatically yields drama and IMDB points, they started doing it all the time. Maybe I'm going too far: I'm not super upset that they killed her off, I was quite sad about it and it did the supposed dramatic shake up with me. It just felt a bit unrelated and from how I read Doggett not something she might do, just because she made so much progress (somehow even less so before, since she used to be such a stubborn, concrete headed personality [On that note, I think there's an entire post warranted on the unfair characterization of Appalachian culture. Stereotypes are one thing and all but for me they didn't get tangled up enough as other stereotype-inversions did in the show]).

So instead of Doggett killing herself, I think it would have been 'best' if Jefferson actually followed through with it. It's a bit of a strange thing to say; of course I am happy that this fictional character is still 'alive' or found her reason to live. But abstracting away the parasocial bond we have to these people and just looking at them as plot devices, I found one thing Jefferson said very impressive: (Paraphrasing) Namely, that the prison has a lot of power over them. If she plays along, it's exactly what they want. Inmates being docile, suffocated under so much harassments, mistreatment, and hopelessness that they wont know in and out. Following existentialist Camus' ideas, what so crazy about suicide is that we have it in our own hands. We can literally kill ourselves, the last resort to freedom (again what Jefferson said). Even if everything is against you, they can't keep you alive (some disclaimers blabla).

The Atlantic describes the situation with Taystee Jefferson as follows:

In dealing Taystee such a brutal hand, the writers on Orange gave the series its darkest story line since the death of Poussey. And they set up a conundrum for the show’s final season. If they gave Taystee a happy ending and got her conviction thrown out, the series would sacrifice its commitment to accurately portraying the state of the justice system for so many of the unfairly incarcerated. But if they left her in despair, they’d be doing a disservice to a character who represented the show’s heart.

The articles continues to describe how by keeping her in prison, they accurately portray the prison system but by her being upbeat in the end, they sort of stay true to the character. "Taystee didn’t get justice, yet. But she did, despite everything, manage to survive." is how they end the article. But I think the issue is that situations can be so bad, that exercising the control of your own death might be more important than surviving. Many people have died for the fight against racism (for instance) as it was most important to them to get the cause heard. Nobody wanted to die, but it was just necessary sometimes. Jefferson dying in the last scene of the show would have brutally cemented the fact that there is no justice. Her being happy panders to the liberal notion that for every bad thing there is also something nice. "Tomorrow will be better" as Tamika Ward said to Jefferson. "But will it?"