I know I haven’t written anything on here in over 2 years. I have no excuses. I just flat haven’t felt like writing publicly. I’ve been doing a lot of writing privately and really enjoying that but writing publicly has just not been on my radar until now. I’m not going to make any promises because who knows what will happen. Maybe I’ll fall in love with this again and maybe it’ll be one post and then I disappear again for awhile. I don’t know, I’ll do what feels right.
So on to what has motivated me to write!
Oh my gosh guys I am obsessed with a new to me show! I haven’t felt this in love and obsessed with a show in a long long time. There are other shows I love and am watching currently but this show has taken over every inch of my world and my brain and everything else! The last show I felt this strongly about was probably Gilmore Girls and that show came out 20+ years ago! The show is Orange Is The New Black! I'm so obsessed, that it might be nearing an addiction lol.
I know I am way way behind. However I’ve been going back and watching shows everyone was obsessed with a few years ago that are over now. I watched Game of Thrones first and it was sooo good as well! But OITNB is next level. I brought up Gilmore Girls and I’d say one of the reasons I love this show, is one of the reasons I’ve always loved Gilmore Girls. It’s packed full of complicated unique beautiful rich interesting characters. I find in some shows when there is a huge cast the characters can be really flat and one dimensional and kind of all become similar. But in OITNB the characters all pop and are unique from one another and it’s a very special beautiful thing!
The main character is Piper Chapman. She is going to prison for 15 months for trafficking drug money internationally several years earlier with an ex girlfriend. So basically it starts off as she’s getting ready to surrender and then you see her enter jail and wouldn’t you know it that the ex girlfriend Alex, is there too lol. But there is a whole bunch of other amazing characters in prison as well!
Alex is my favorite character by a long shot. She’s a bad ass and she takes no shit from anyone but she also has a soft side and sensitive side. She has very few weaknesses. In fact, I’d say she has just one...Piper!
I can’t lie, Alex and Piper’s relationship is for sure what sucked me into this show. I love a good love story. In my life, I’m pretty jaded about love. Love can be great and beautiful but when it goes sour it can be very damaging and traumatic and painful. That person knows you well and they know your weaknesses and they know what to do and say to break you. I think the interesting thing about Alex and Piper is the writers didn’t just show you the happy unicorns and rainbows side of their very passionate often times dysfunctional relationship. You saw them loving each other and yet you saw them fighting each other and you saw them doing things to intentionally hurt the other. I mean the whole reason Piper is in prison is because Alex gave them her name to get her back for breaking her heart! Later on you see Piper turn on Alex and have her ex best friend call her probation officer and get her thrown back in prison. But then they have these really beautiful moments and conversations and you just know that at the center of this crazy relationship in a beautiful powerful love that they neither one can completely let go of.
The interesting thing to me as I watched the this relationship play out through all 7 seasons, is the shift in Piper. In the first season, we see flashbacks of them meeting and how things progressed and ultimately how it fell apart the first time. For Alex, she clearly loves Piper from the second she sees her(In real life, I don’t believe in love at first sight but this is a show lol). They meet in a bar and you can see Alex spot her in the background and you see her entire demeanor shift(all the credit to Laura Prepon’s acting with that!). Piper was attracted and intrigued as soon as Alex approaches her(I love the way she can’t look into Alex’s eyes for too long and keeps looking down at her lips, I don’t know if it was purposely done or something Taylor was doing without thinking about it, but it works so well for the scene!)and when this stunning woman keeps pursuing her she clearly loves it! Alex is actually in relationship when they meet and the first time Piper goes home with her and they have sex, her girlfriend shows up and attacks Piper and throws her out and what not. But later on Piper shows up at the bar again and when Alex goes to the bathroom she follows her and they have this really great scene where she tells her if you love her and she’s your future wife, tell me to back off and Alex doesn’t. In Season 7, we actually get a flashback of what happens between Alex and Sylvia(the woman she was with when she met Piper) after she catches Alex and Piper and we find out that Alex and Sylvia had had a fight a few days before and Sylvia had taken off. But at the end of that scene Sylvia hugs Alex and it’s clear she doesn’t want to hug her back but eventually she like half hugs her but the whole time she’s looking out the window watching Piper! For me, seeing that flashback just reaffirmed what I felt from the earlier flashbacks and that was Alex completely and totally loved her from the start like no one before and no one after! We see her with other women throughout the show but it’s never the same. There is another flashback from not long after she gave them Piper’s name, where she’s in bed with another woman and Piper is sitting in the bathroom at her home and she’s drunk and she drunk calls Alex and leaves her this long rambling voicemail and tells her she misses her. As soon as Alex hears this message she makes this other woman leave. For Alex, it’s always been Piper and it will always be Piper. She’s done a lot of crap in her life(hence why her and Piper are sitting in prison lol) but the one thing about Alex that you can’t deny is how much she loves Piper.
Piper loves Alex as well and in reality, for her it was always going to be Alex as well. She’s engaged to Larry when she show starts but it takes little time for it to be clear they aren’t right for each other. She tries for a bit to force it to be right but it’s just not and it was never going to be. There are times in the early season, you see her front slip and you see how much she truly loves Alex. But Piper, is clearly afraid to be all in with her. Alex mentions many times she’s(meaning Piper) a runner and she can’t handle it when things get hard, so she runs. Even when they are trying to make it work in prison most of the time, you just sense she’s not all in. But over time slowly you see things start to shift. Finally towards the end of Season 4 and for sure in Season 5, it feels like Piper is all in. The entire 5th season takes place in 3 days during a prison riot. Towards the end of this season and the riot, Alex and Piper are fooling around in the shower and a crazy prison guard takes them hostage along with some other people. This guy tortures Red(another amazing character that I will for sure be talking about later) and breaks Alex’s arm and it’s very intense scary thing where they could’ve very well died. After the guard is taken down and their free, Piper goes upstairs(after a bit of tiff with Alex) supposedly to try to find some pain meds for Alex. But instead she sees her mom outside the prison with a group of people and she calls her and they have this beautiful exchange where she basically tells her mom that while she wasn’t afraid to die before, she is now because she’s afraid of missing out on life with Alex and she wants to stay around for her. It turned me into a teary pile of goo to finally see her acknowledge to someone else outside of prison from her real life how much she loves Alex and how much Alex means to her. I feel like it’s a moment I was waiting for the whole series. I mean I could see how much she loved her. I could see she wasn’t going to be able to just let her go but she was terrified to admit it. She goes back down stairs to where Alex and the others are hiding and proposes to Alex and Alex says yes and then after a surprisingly easy Season 6 for them(as far as their relationship anyway), they get married at the end right before Piper is released!
But if things were easy in Season 6, I think it was to have us fresh as daisies for the crazy roller coaster ride their relationship was in Season 7 lol. Season 7 finds Piper and Alex dealing with a lot! Piper is of course trying to adjust to life on the outside and adjust to how life has changed since she’s been gone and figure out what she wants for life next and dealing with her jerk of a father(I swear he is awful the whole season!) and it’s a lot. The life she had when she turned herself in 13ish months before is gone. Larry and Polly(her ex best friend) are now together and building a life together. Her brother has a wife and a baby. Everything’s just completely different and it’s hard for her to figure out where she belongs in that world now. On the flip side Alex, on top of dealing with not having Piper around anymore and figuring out what prison looks without her, she is dealing with guards using her to sell stuff. It starts off with a guard forcing her to sell drugs and he actually shoves a condom full of heroin down her throat at one point, which was brutal to watch honestly! Then another stupid guard gets her out of that but starts to force her to sell phone chargers. Everything just spirals from there. Piper and Alex aren’t really talking, they don’t know what’s going on with the other. They’re both really lost and sad and vulnerable and that breeds fear and distrust. I feel Alex fears Piper leaving because things are hard but I think her bigger fear is that she’s holding her back and ruining her life. Alex introduces the idea of having an open relationship and at first Piper doesn’t like the idea but eventually she tries it and tries sleeping with some random guy which was a disaster and another woman which was an even bigger disaster(I kept wanting to scream at the screen, that it wasn’t sex she was missing, she was missing connection and you know she could try talking to her wife….). So she gave up on it but that whole thing put even more insecurity in their relationship it felt like to me. Piper goes on a really bizarre camping thing with her sister in law and one of the other women invited a woman who is lesbian named Zelda(and this clearly a set up lol) and her and Piper strike up a friendship. Alex has gotten herself a cell phone and she begins seeing videos of Piper and Zelda and starts to get jealous. Eventually she reaches this point where it feels like she is so afraid of losing Piper and of being hurt by her, she decides to beat her to the punch and strikes up a relationship with the creepy ass female guard who she’s been selling phone charges with. To be honest, this relationship was so weird and has so little chemistry, I couldn’t stand to watch. I found myself looking away, it was so weird lol. There is flirting with Zelda and Piper but Piper refuses to do anything with her. She actually was great this season and I kept wishing Alex could see how she was defending her and their relationship to everyone all season long and how committed she actually was. There is this really cute scene where Piper sends Alex this envelope full of little pieces of paper with cute things about why she loves her. They call it a sentence for every week left in her sentence(or something along those lines lol) and they talk on the phone about it and you see them finally really connect for maybe the first time all season and it's a really great moment. This wakes Alex up finally and she tells the stupid guard that they had to stop doing what they were doing, all of it. The stupid guard gets mad and shows up at Piper’s place and tells her about sleeping with Alex and she sees Piper and Zelda and then Piper runs to Zelda and they sleep together(I also could not bring myself to watch that crap either lol). The next day the guard meets up with Alex and tells her she went to see Piper and that she was seeing someone else and Alex gets really mad and shoves her into a shelf and tells her to stay away from her wife(and I celebrated lol). But she calls Piper and they fight and she says she needs to see her in person. So Piper comes and they talk and Alex tell Piper she doesn't have feelings for the guard(which was pretty clear to me) but Piper can't say she doesn't have feelings for Zelda and the leave unsure if they can move forward. In the mean time, the stupid guard gets Alex transferred to Ohio to get back at her. So Piper comes for visitation again and Alex tells her she’s being transferred and that she thinks it's a good thing and they should break up. It’s an awful scene, you see the devastation of Piper immediately but Alex keeps her poker face up...until she walks away from Piper and the look on her face as she waks away and breaks kills me inside! Laura Prepon and Taylor Schilling can both do so much with just their eyes and this one of those scenes where Laura knocked it out of the park. I want to cry and I want to hug her. Such a hard painful scene! Anyway Piper leaves and she's of course very upset. There is this really emotional scene where Piper shows up at Larry’s and she tells him about Alex and he says some less than helpful things(Not that Larry is known for being helpful lol) and they kind of argue over who she was as opposed to who she is. It's a very interesting conversation(in which they both kind of admit their relationship was never going to work) and at one point she makes the comment that when she met Alex it was like she grew a new limb. In the end, Larry gives her a great piece of advice “Do what new Piper would do” and she packs up her life and she moves to Ohio and she starts build a life for herself and her Alex get back together...and I bawled lol. She was done running.
I think the beauty of that ending is, when McCollough(aka the stupid creepy guard) got Alex transferred she did it to get back at her and she did it to try to break up Alex and Piper. But what she actually did was give them a beautiful gift. It got Alex out of that prison with so many crappy people and so much drama and into a new place with a bunch of people she knew and liked and she got a new start to finish her time. She’s with friends where she doesn’t have to worry about extra stuff and can just concentrate on her future and what she wants to do next and on rebuilding her relationship with Piper. I think it was even bigger for Piper though. I felt like the whole season Piper was trying to figure out who she was(really the whole series) and where she belonged. Alex being transferred to Ohio gave her the chance to prove to Alex she was done running. She gave up everything to follow her. But I think bigger than that, it gave Piper to the chance to start over and to build a life for herself. Piper had never stood on her own two feet. She never had to. She was with parents and then she was in college and then she was with Alex and then with Larry and then prison and then she got out of prison and was living with her brother and sister in law and working with her father. The thing in season 7 was because her family were so far into her life, they felt they had a right to try to tell her what she should do with her life and try to plan it for her and were really pushy(and frankly so was Zelda!). I think all season she felt like she was being suffocated. Everyone wanted her to forget prison and Alex and move on like it never happened, which didn’t allow her to process any of it. Her life was not hers and she had so many voices coming at her for most of the season, she struggled to hear her own. But going to Ohio gave her the chance and space to be on her own and build a new life and find out who she was. I think she needed that as much as she needed anything. I see a lot of people say she should’ve ended up with Zelda but I see a few issues with that. The most obvious was, she is in love with Alex. When she’s talking to Larry they list all these wonderful things about Zelda but her final conclusion was the same as it’s always been, she loves Alex. She actually wasn’t interested in doing anything with Zelda until she was getting back at Alex. I mean she found her fun and attractive(who wouldn’t find Alicia Witt attractive?? LOL) but it was nothing more. She fought for Alex and their relationship all season, it just wasn’t where Alex could see it. It was always Alex. Zelda would’ve been just like Larry, it would’ve just been Piper marking time until she could be with Alex. But also as I mentioned I feel strongly that Piper needed to stand on her own two feet and to create her own life and being with Zelda wouldn’t have looked like that. She had a well established life and it would’ve been Piper just stepping into that life. Piper didn’t need someone else’s life, she needed her own. She'd done that before, that was old Piper. Old Piper was great at doing what was easy to run away when things got hard and it always lead her back to being restless and unhappy. New Piper wasn't that way and she didn't want or need easy, she needed real. Alex was real and their future together was real. The beauty in all of that, is it was exactly what needed to happen to show Alex she was all in and she wasn’t running anymore. It was Piper telling Alex you are my wife, you are my family now, and you and our future are what’s most important to me and I’m not going anywhere. I feel like fear of losing each other and getting hurt was the driving force in most of the issues they had. I mean in some ways I can see where that would be case. They love each other so much and they have this really special thing and I can see where the thought that at any moment one or the other could do something to destroy it, would completely cause fear. You throw into that Piper leaving Alex the first time at the worst possible time in her life(the day she found out her mom died) and I think that add’s another level of fear to it. In season 7, there was another fear for Alex though, the fear of holding Piper back and ruining her life. She loves her very very much and she wants all the best of life for her and she felt she couldn’t give her that while in prison. So her driving force is to make sure Piper has everything good in life. She goes about it terribly but it’s really a beautiful thing. I feel like season 7, that fear of holding her back not only makes Alex make some dumb decisions but it keeps her from really hearing Piper. When she breaks up with Piper, one of things she does is apologize for the fucked up detour she took her on and Piper says something along the lines of you weren't a detour from my life, you are my life! That was season said, it was Piper fighting for their relationship with everything she had while Alex let fear and guilt and shame rule the day. But at the heart of all of their fear and problems, is actually just a really beautiful strong love and they just need the chance to build the relationship around that and that’s what that ending represents. Piper is on her own and making a life for herself and thriving and Alex is with friends and free of the drama of the last prison. But also she knows Piper is all in and there is a future for her and them and there is something to work towards. I thought the ending was perfect and it was exactly the most natural ending for the journey we took with those two women. For all their flaws and all their ups and downs, they have lived a heck of a life together! They deserved the chance to follow through with that and that move to Ohio gave them that. So what McCollough meant for ill, Piper and Alex turned to good. I think a lot of people were really busy finding reasons to be unhappy and to be annoyed with Piper and not watching the journey she was taking. Season 7 was her season(along with Taystee) and I honestly think while she made mistakes, it was the best Piper we’d ever seen. She realized it was her life and no one else knew better than her what she wanted. She found her voice and she did what made her happy. In that last scene of her visiting Alex, they both looked far and away the most relaxed and happy they had all season and it made my sappy hopeless romantic self cry so much lol.
I’m not sure how this turned into 7 pages of Alex and Piper but here we are lol. I guess if I want to talk about other characters, I should probably do another post! If you read all of this, kudos because it’s super long and rambley and probably all over the place but I really enjoyed putting all of my thoughts about these two women down in writing! I’ve never ever been as fascinated by a couple on TV show as this has fascinated me! They’re so well written, so well acted, and the chemistry between Laura and Taylor is like nothing I’ve seen before and it makes for this really complex, sometimes frustrating, but always beautiful relationship! I’m so thankful for the show and for the people who did all the hard work to bring this world and all of these characters to life!
