![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quinaraSo, Orange is the New Black S2 came out yesterday. I felt like I hadn't committed myself to anything fannish in forever, and the end of S1 really did give me a burning desire to see S2, so I got my free month of Netflix, got up early to watch it (prematurely, because June 6 in the UK actually means 8am June 6 when the whole of America is on the same day as you) and then came home early and stayed up till three to finish it. I am now mildly headachey and out of sorts for the rainy day today!
Here is a reaction post - it is mixed (to say the least), rather than squee, so don't let me harsh your buzz if you haven't seen it all yet or if you do just want squee.
If I had one sentence to some my reaction up, I suppose it would just be: it wasn't as good as Season 1 and it definitely wasn't better. It did not leave me with a need to see S3 that will carry over a whole year in the way that S1 did. And I'm very sad about that; but in the end if you push me on my disrupted sleep and pollened up nose I will generally say that I thought the writing was immature, the plotting weak and the characters short-changed. That's not to say that I didn't enjoy watching it bumble along - I did stay up till 3 after all - but I found it frustrating all the same.
So, the reasons everyone found S1 superlative are well-known: a great cast of diverse characters who have their own lives that aren't simply in service of Piper's WASPy daydreams. A gritty look at prison realities that never loses the absurdist humour of the situation. This is all true. The part that I think gets shorter shrift is that it was also a technical masterpiece in writing a thirteen-episode TV season that could both break into episodes (I watched it one every couple of days originally) and binged (as I did a couple of weeks ago for kicks). Because it was, in the end, a story about Piper and the descent/revelation of her character. All the other characters may have had lives beyond that, but our interaction with them worked to service that core narrative and the gradual realignment of Piper onto that side of the fence, away from Larry and co. When people mention this it generally serves to pull OITNB down from the pedestal of perfect representation and remind people who still gets to be boss of the story. But the fact is, if you're going to tell a story, you have to tell a story, not a series of witty insights.
And, for me, S2 was strongest when it remembered that. I think episode 1 was the strongest of the whole lot, and that's not because I didn't want to see how everyone else was doing. It was clear up-front what we were there to care about - Piper going to a new prison in an echo of S1 with the sort of fear, worry and lack of knowledge that she didn't have the first time, not knowing what's a joke and what's deadly serious, finding herself in the bind of already being a criminal and so wondering why not perjure in the name of self-protection. There was, as they say, an arc.
By the second half of S2, it also strugglingly emerged that we had an arc in the splintering and reformation of Taystee and co. under Vee. At least I think that was where we were actually meant to be going - a story (beyond the violence and drugs etc.) about the insersection between race and social class, and how in prison Taystee and Poussey can be very similar, but you can cut a knife between them very quickly based on the belief of innate class difference, even though you've then got Suzanne on the side showing how it's really just performative, and Sindy making things complicated. And I could go for that, quite happily, but then I don't understand how everyone else in the prison fits in. And Janae didn't have anything like enough to do. It wasn't like there weren't connections to be made between different people - Nicky and the smack was a moment worth caring about, which mattered to that group, but so little was made of it; Watson and Yoga Jones had one interaction that was basically pointless. Red was apparently always already weak (and I generally hate the phrase 'always already', so let my irritation please come across). But the story about the administration had nothing to do with it, even though you'd thing a story about getting drugs into prison would quite easily intertwine with that - I mean, I suppose the various crackdowns were influenced by it, but the various crackdowns had nothing to do with the embezzlement; Healy and Pennsatucky served no bloody purpose at all and yet we saw them every episode.
In fact we saw loads of people every episode that often had no relevance to even the ostensible structure of what was happening. I mean, Polly and Larry??? What was the bloody point? As it was, Piper's character as far as I could see went through absolutely no transformation over the course of the season - I could see her saying everything she said right in episode one - so really any screentime with Piper's people just seemed like a pointless lull, and worse than that Polly, Pete and even Larry seemed to have their characters just massacred in the service of the weird plot they did have. I mean, what the hell happened to Pete! Otherwise, Fig and Fig's husband, Caputo... At a certain point, if you encourage sympathy for every single character then it's very hard to feel invested in any outcome, which I wasn't - except maybe the two of them working together to bring down Fig's crooked husband for japes and interesting conflict, but as it was I didn't really get what we were supposed to care about in that, because all the emotions and events seemed completely arbitrary (and not in a way that made a point of that).
As for Daya and Bennett, I think they just proved how boring relationships are when the characters don't actually know each other and have moved past the point of wanting to get to know each other. I don't think they or their relationship evolved at all. I'm not sure that anyone in the Latina gang evolved; and the less said about the Flacca+Maritza fanservice the better.
This has become a massive whinge-fest, but I suppose I am quite disappointed. To go back to the technical level, there was also a really weird relationship with S1, where we kept being reminded about moments that happened - the gum between Bennett and Daya, the nun and Fischer - and expected to remember them in vivid detail, and then it seemed like we were supposed to forget that Suzanne's parents didn't look anything like what they became in her flashback, necessary for this new mommy issues invention between her and Piper (which made perhaps even less sense than Suzanne's desexualisation so she could have mommy issues with Vee). And I think it was said that Polly and Larry knew each other long before they knew Piper and Pete, but that makes no sense with Larry the embarrassed, cable-stealing plant-sitter.
In general, I also think the mood of S1 was very much lost. Jenji Kohan said in an article before this came out that she wanted things darker and more fractured in S2, since in S1 it got a bit too summer campy... But I think that very much didn't work: things were far more summer campy this series, even after Vee's reign of terror started. In S1, through Alex as much as anyone, no one could ever escape from the fact that they were in prison, filled with a blend of fear, cabin fever and all the various scratchy darknessnesses that had brought them in there. In this season, everyone was on first name terms, willing to open up and get along, generally at ease with themselves. I mean, Nicky's ode to heroin at the AA meeting was a joke compared to the hopelessness of the AA meeting last time. We saw flashbacks in service of finding out more about the characters, but there was no deep revelation about what lied beneath their prison persona in the manner of Janae/Miss Claudette/even Yoga Jones who made do without a flashback. Poussey was sort of an exception... But we could have guessed her emotional state without it, not least with Nicky's heavy-handed high school big sis advice (had they ever spoken before?). With Taystee we just got detail for stuff we'd already learned.
Ugh, I will only say one last thing, but I think it was the character writing that disappointed me the most, in the end. In S1 it really felt like people were being taken on their own terms, with an awareness of just how strong people's commitment to presenting themselves in a certain way can be, and the influence of different traditions on how they express themselves. There were too many times this season where it felt like the character message was actually that everyone's basically a bit like Piper on the inside: prone to liberal pedantry in the name of humour (FFS Mendoza's flashback with her friend breaking into the emotionally charged situation with a Piper/Tumblr-esque comment about hate speech) and naive bi-curiosity (all right, I'm just looking at Flacca and Maritza again, who are obviously just two drunk college girls in a prison kitchen). Oh, and where did all of the edge in Elena and Daya's relationship go? I just think the sort of Whedonish assimilation of character voice that was happening is inexcusable in a show like this.
Another thing I read of Jenji Kohan was that she could see this show going on forever, just with new characters cycling through... It worried me at the time, and honestly I could get into full on panic mode about how that sort of comment is the kiss of death for any prioritisation of tight plotting. Where was the suspense this season? Where was the grit and the edge? What the fuck was the point of Soso and the hunger strike, or Nicky and Boo's sex contest, or Soso full stop? What is the point of a season of television with only several 'fractured' bits of plot hidden, mostly, and rushed in the second half? I've been disappointed enough with Orphan Black this season and how much of its plot has been organised around shuffling people on and off-stage... But I think this made me sadder. :( Sophomore seasons are supposed to be the moment when things get bigger and deeper and more gripping, not smaller and shallower and fanservicey.
I just really hate fanservice. And now I'm sad that everyone's probably going to think this season was great 'because we got to see more of the characters beyond Piper'... While I'll be here in the corner, bitching. I should probably watch it again, with my head arranged to understand what might be the point (HP7 did get better like that), but it might not be for a little while.
ETA: I forgot about Morello's backstory, which I suppose was pretty revelationary! I suppose I did like that... But how did Morello fit into the season? Just do not know. And I still think Piper/Alex can carry a lot of weight, because they complement each other nicely and had some great stuff when we saw them. The fact that Piper says she's going to do the right thing based on hope, then does the wrong thing based on selfishness vs. Alex saying she's going to the wrong thing based on selfishness, then doing the right thing based on hope is killer. And I liked the nod right at the end that even when Alex says she's going to run she doesn't. And Rosa was fun. If irrelevant.
ETA2: Gah, I just remembered the bit where Sophia is willing to tell anyone who asks that it was Michael who turned her in. The great point about those flashbacks in S1 was how that was obvious, but never made explicit... I mean, Sophia doesn't want to realise and accept that crap. I think it was self-deception that was missing in this season, from all the characters, which is funny when the entire of S1 was about that. They all suddenly know themselves extremely well. Including Nicky and her fucking smack! And even Morello who should be the most deceptive of all of them does in fact stop planning her wedding even before she breaks down.
Here is a reaction post - it is mixed (to say the least), rather than squee, so don't let me harsh your buzz if you haven't seen it all yet or if you do just want squee.
If I had one sentence to some my reaction up, I suppose it would just be: it wasn't as good as Season 1 and it definitely wasn't better. It did not leave me with a need to see S3 that will carry over a whole year in the way that S1 did. And I'm very sad about that; but in the end if you push me on my disrupted sleep and pollened up nose I will generally say that I thought the writing was immature, the plotting weak and the characters short-changed. That's not to say that I didn't enjoy watching it bumble along - I did stay up till 3 after all - but I found it frustrating all the same.
So, the reasons everyone found S1 superlative are well-known: a great cast of diverse characters who have their own lives that aren't simply in service of Piper's WASPy daydreams. A gritty look at prison realities that never loses the absurdist humour of the situation. This is all true. The part that I think gets shorter shrift is that it was also a technical masterpiece in writing a thirteen-episode TV season that could both break into episodes (I watched it one every couple of days originally) and binged (as I did a couple of weeks ago for kicks). Because it was, in the end, a story about Piper and the descent/revelation of her character. All the other characters may have had lives beyond that, but our interaction with them worked to service that core narrative and the gradual realignment of Piper onto that side of the fence, away from Larry and co. When people mention this it generally serves to pull OITNB down from the pedestal of perfect representation and remind people who still gets to be boss of the story. But the fact is, if you're going to tell a story, you have to tell a story, not a series of witty insights.
And, for me, S2 was strongest when it remembered that. I think episode 1 was the strongest of the whole lot, and that's not because I didn't want to see how everyone else was doing. It was clear up-front what we were there to care about - Piper going to a new prison in an echo of S1 with the sort of fear, worry and lack of knowledge that she didn't have the first time, not knowing what's a joke and what's deadly serious, finding herself in the bind of already being a criminal and so wondering why not perjure in the name of self-protection. There was, as they say, an arc.
By the second half of S2, it also strugglingly emerged that we had an arc in the splintering and reformation of Taystee and co. under Vee. At least I think that was where we were actually meant to be going - a story (beyond the violence and drugs etc.) about the insersection between race and social class, and how in prison Taystee and Poussey can be very similar, but you can cut a knife between them very quickly based on the belief of innate class difference, even though you've then got Suzanne on the side showing how it's really just performative, and Sindy making things complicated. And I could go for that, quite happily, but then I don't understand how everyone else in the prison fits in. And Janae didn't have anything like enough to do. It wasn't like there weren't connections to be made between different people - Nicky and the smack was a moment worth caring about, which mattered to that group, but so little was made of it; Watson and Yoga Jones had one interaction that was basically pointless. Red was apparently always already weak (and I generally hate the phrase 'always already', so let my irritation please come across). But the story about the administration had nothing to do with it, even though you'd thing a story about getting drugs into prison would quite easily intertwine with that - I mean, I suppose the various crackdowns were influenced by it, but the various crackdowns had nothing to do with the embezzlement; Healy and Pennsatucky served no bloody purpose at all and yet we saw them every episode.
In fact we saw loads of people every episode that often had no relevance to even the ostensible structure of what was happening. I mean, Polly and Larry??? What was the bloody point? As it was, Piper's character as far as I could see went through absolutely no transformation over the course of the season - I could see her saying everything she said right in episode one - so really any screentime with Piper's people just seemed like a pointless lull, and worse than that Polly, Pete and even Larry seemed to have their characters just massacred in the service of the weird plot they did have. I mean, what the hell happened to Pete! Otherwise, Fig and Fig's husband, Caputo... At a certain point, if you encourage sympathy for every single character then it's very hard to feel invested in any outcome, which I wasn't - except maybe the two of them working together to bring down Fig's crooked husband for japes and interesting conflict, but as it was I didn't really get what we were supposed to care about in that, because all the emotions and events seemed completely arbitrary (and not in a way that made a point of that).
As for Daya and Bennett, I think they just proved how boring relationships are when the characters don't actually know each other and have moved past the point of wanting to get to know each other. I don't think they or their relationship evolved at all. I'm not sure that anyone in the Latina gang evolved; and the less said about the Flacca+Maritza fanservice the better.
This has become a massive whinge-fest, but I suppose I am quite disappointed. To go back to the technical level, there was also a really weird relationship with S1, where we kept being reminded about moments that happened - the gum between Bennett and Daya, the nun and Fischer - and expected to remember them in vivid detail, and then it seemed like we were supposed to forget that Suzanne's parents didn't look anything like what they became in her flashback, necessary for this new mommy issues invention between her and Piper (which made perhaps even less sense than Suzanne's desexualisation so she could have mommy issues with Vee). And I think it was said that Polly and Larry knew each other long before they knew Piper and Pete, but that makes no sense with Larry the embarrassed, cable-stealing plant-sitter.
In general, I also think the mood of S1 was very much lost. Jenji Kohan said in an article before this came out that she wanted things darker and more fractured in S2, since in S1 it got a bit too summer campy... But I think that very much didn't work: things were far more summer campy this series, even after Vee's reign of terror started. In S1, through Alex as much as anyone, no one could ever escape from the fact that they were in prison, filled with a blend of fear, cabin fever and all the various scratchy darknessnesses that had brought them in there. In this season, everyone was on first name terms, willing to open up and get along, generally at ease with themselves. I mean, Nicky's ode to heroin at the AA meeting was a joke compared to the hopelessness of the AA meeting last time. We saw flashbacks in service of finding out more about the characters, but there was no deep revelation about what lied beneath their prison persona in the manner of Janae/Miss Claudette/even Yoga Jones who made do without a flashback. Poussey was sort of an exception... But we could have guessed her emotional state without it, not least with Nicky's heavy-handed high school big sis advice (had they ever spoken before?). With Taystee we just got detail for stuff we'd already learned.
Ugh, I will only say one last thing, but I think it was the character writing that disappointed me the most, in the end. In S1 it really felt like people were being taken on their own terms, with an awareness of just how strong people's commitment to presenting themselves in a certain way can be, and the influence of different traditions on how they express themselves. There were too many times this season where it felt like the character message was actually that everyone's basically a bit like Piper on the inside: prone to liberal pedantry in the name of humour (FFS Mendoza's flashback with her friend breaking into the emotionally charged situation with a Piper/Tumblr-esque comment about hate speech) and naive bi-curiosity (all right, I'm just looking at Flacca and Maritza again, who are obviously just two drunk college girls in a prison kitchen). Oh, and where did all of the edge in Elena and Daya's relationship go? I just think the sort of Whedonish assimilation of character voice that was happening is inexcusable in a show like this.
Another thing I read of Jenji Kohan was that she could see this show going on forever, just with new characters cycling through... It worried me at the time, and honestly I could get into full on panic mode about how that sort of comment is the kiss of death for any prioritisation of tight plotting. Where was the suspense this season? Where was the grit and the edge? What the fuck was the point of Soso and the hunger strike, or Nicky and Boo's sex contest, or Soso full stop? What is the point of a season of television with only several 'fractured' bits of plot hidden, mostly, and rushed in the second half? I've been disappointed enough with Orphan Black this season and how much of its plot has been organised around shuffling people on and off-stage... But I think this made me sadder. :( Sophomore seasons are supposed to be the moment when things get bigger and deeper and more gripping, not smaller and shallower and fanservicey.
I just really hate fanservice. And now I'm sad that everyone's probably going to think this season was great 'because we got to see more of the characters beyond Piper'... While I'll be here in the corner, bitching. I should probably watch it again, with my head arranged to understand what might be the point (HP7 did get better like that), but it might not be for a little while.
ETA: I forgot about Morello's backstory, which I suppose was pretty revelationary! I suppose I did like that... But how did Morello fit into the season? Just do not know. And I still think Piper/Alex can carry a lot of weight, because they complement each other nicely and had some great stuff when we saw them. The fact that Piper says she's going to do the right thing based on hope, then does the wrong thing based on selfishness vs. Alex saying she's going to the wrong thing based on selfishness, then doing the right thing based on hope is killer. And I liked the nod right at the end that even when Alex says she's going to run she doesn't. And Rosa was fun. If irrelevant.
ETA2: Gah, I just remembered the bit where Sophia is willing to tell anyone who asks that it was Michael who turned her in. The great point about those flashbacks in S1 was how that was obvious, but never made explicit... I mean, Sophia doesn't want to realise and accept that crap. I think it was self-deception that was missing in this season, from all the characters, which is funny when the entire of S1 was about that. They all suddenly know themselves extremely well. Including Nicky and her fucking smack! And even Morello who should be the most deceptive of all of them does in fact stop planning her wedding even before she breaks down.