India Today – August 13, 2018

80 INDIA TODAY AUGUST 13, 2018

LEISURE

range Is the New Black peaked in Season 4 and

should have gracefully bowed out after another

season to cope with the death of the librarian,

Poussey. Yet as Season 6 hits Netflix this month, it

has already been slated for a seventh, and we don’t

even know whether it will end then. A dignified exit

is required.

The show has introduced characters and

storylines every season to keep the audience

hooked. With the prison riot last season, all

those arcs had the opportunity to make a

neat exit. The scale and scope of Season 5

as it hurtled through three days of com-

plete chaos had all the right ingredients

for a grand finale. Instead, Season 6 offers

a soft reboot. The action moves to Litchfield

Max, a maxi-mum-security prison where many—

but not all—of the old gang find themselves following

the riot.

The cruelty of Litchfield Max makes previous

seasons look tame. The guards here are borderline

caricatures who seem to treat the prison as some per-

verse video game. They even keep score.

OITNB first drew attention with its shocking

depiction of prison life, and maintained it by weaving

every trending human rights hashtag into its narra-

tive. Immigration is the cause of choice in Season 6,

even as the show continues to firmly keep its eyes on

Black Lives Matter and human right violations in

prison. However, returning to shock isn’t doing the

story any favours.

Season 6 seems to acknowledge that Piper’s

15-month sentence is an absurd timeline for a

show that is going to go on for at least seven

seasons. She came in to Litchfield engaged

to a man, and leaves this season married

to her girlfriend, Alex. We continue to

see the rise of Taystee, whose transfor-

mation into an activist was one of the

best parts of the last season. Freida, we

learn, has been in Max before, and she has

some enemies in prison dating back several

decades to when she was a teenager. Red, who

was the terror in Season 1 when OITNB began, is beat.

Instead, there is a bewildering array of new gangs

and intrigues at Max—resulting in a certain ennui as

you slog through to see what happens. Season 5, the

should-have-been finale, packed a punch despite its

messiness. Now, though, we’ll be all too glad to see

this epic come to an end. n

—Farah Yameen

Season 5 of

ORANGE IS THE

NEW BLACK

had all

the ingredients for a

grand finale. Instead

Season 6 gives it a soft reboot

WEB SERIES

O

WHEN

WILL IT END?

Courtesy NETFLIX