In the final moments of the first season of Netflix’s original series “Orange Is the New Black,” its protagonist, Piper Chapman, mercilessly beats another woman.
Chapman, a WASP from New York serving time in Litchfield Federal Correctional Facility for smuggling drugs a decade earlier, whaled on Tiffany “Pennsatucky” Doggett, a homophobic, racist, former meth addict and born-again Christian, leaving fans wondering if Chapman committed murder.
As the years pile up – and here’s a spoiler warning for the third season, which premiered last month – that beating stands as a transformative moment for both characters during the course of the series.
While Chapman started as show creator Jenji Kohan’s self-described “trojan horse,” a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, white woman who allowed Kohan to tell the stories of women from a variety of races, sexualities and ages, Doggett entered as a clear villain, an immature, holier-than-thou, unhinged force.
However, at the conclusion of the third season, the roles are reversed. Chapman is more villainous than ever while Doggett has become sympathetic.
The show’s third season has more bugs than Volkswagen, lacking a clear villain, not fully utilizing its flashback format and failing to flesh out new characters beyond two dimensions, among other failings. How skeevy was it every time Red flirted with Healy? Blech.
After three seasons, Chapman seems to embrace the monster inside her. The crime which landed her inside Litchfield seems paltry when stacked against physically assaulting Doggett, lying under oath and becoming the kingpin of a contraband enterprise to smuggle women’s dirty underwear out of prison for profit.
In a telling scene from the second season episode “40 Oz. of Furlough,” Chapman is on a 48-hour furlough from the prison to attend her grandmother’s funeral. She talks with her father, Bill, about how he doesn’t visit her. After Bill says that the person behind bars is “not who you are,” Chapman seethes. “That’s exactly who I am,” she says.
Later, in the same episode, when family friends ask if she’s anxious to get out and return to her old self, she says, “I’m not, actually.”
It’s possible to see “40 Oz. of Furlough” as a funeral for Chapman’s old persona. Clad in all black, the episode is a series of rejections and misinterpretations by people from her life outside Litchfield, from a father who doesn’t accept who she is to her disillusion at a life that has changed while she stood still.
In the third season, gone is her first-season fiancé Larry. By ditching Larry and the domestic storyline, it deepens the reality that Chapman is embracing life behind bars and the realities of her criminal side. That part of her life doesn’t exist anymore.
Doggett, meanwhile, has cleaned up her teeth and her act. During the course of the second season, she befriends Carrie “Boo” Black, the prison’s self-proclaimed butch lesbian.
Doggett’s second-season arc finds her ostracized from her former born-again buddies for being too righteous. She meets with Healy, a prison counselor, to work on her anger. During the course of the season, she begins to drop her ultra-religious facade. In the third season, it’s revealed Doggett was raped when she was younger and, later in the same episode, she is raped again, this time by Officer Charlie Coates at the prison.
However, unlike Chapman, Doggett’s arc is somewhat redemptive. Although Boo and Doggett feed Coates a sedative and plan to sexually assault him as revenge, Doggett backs down. She gets out of her prison work assignment with Coates by feigning a seizure.
The new season ends with many of the prisoners escaping to a nearby lake for a swim. Unbelievable as it is, it feels cathartic.
Yet Chapman is not in this scene at the lake at the end and that’s not an accident. She’s still inside the prison. When nearly everyone else in the cast roster is enjoying the freedom of the lake and the sunshine, Chapman is in the place where she has grown, changed and became herself the most, inside the prison walls.
However, Boo and Doggett are at the lake with the others, horsing around with the friends who alienated Doggett during the second season. They’re embracing the freedom and the hope that, someday, there will be life outside the prison. It's a stretch to call her a heroine at this juncture, but she's a lot closer than Chapman.
That’s a telling stance about where the two women stand after three seasons. Whether “Orange” continues to switch the heroine and villainess roles for Chapman and Doggett remains to be seen, especially what the series will say about redemption and whether it’s possible.
For now, anyway, “Orange” is at least convinced that both Doggett and Chapman are capable of some sort of change, for better or for worse.
All images courtesy Netflix
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