‘Orange Is The New Black’ Season 7 Episode 2 Recap: “Just Desserts”

There’s not a lot of room for lateral improvement inside the walls of Litchfield. Literally, there aren’t many places to move around, and figuratively there’s little opportunity for growth. It’s difficult to even maintain the status quo, as Linda and her wig might say. That means there’s generally only one place left to go…

Down.

And there’s often no quicker way to get there than by trying to rise to the top. In Episode 2 of the final season of Orange Is The New Black, positions of power—oh, they are a-changin’. Between flashbacks, prison drama above and below deck, post-prison drama, and a seething hatred for C.O. Hellman so fiery it threatens to consume the earth whole, there are suddenly a lot of balls in motion following a fairly simplistic premiere. So let’s get right to it:

Episode 2 opens in a pop-pop-poppin’ New York City club which might lead you to believe we’re opening on a flashback, but no—Maritza is participating in an ass-shaking contest, and she is doing it in the present.

Our girl, so sorely missed in Season 6, is back on our screens, back out of prison, and not wasting a moment. After winning the contest with ease (and ass), she and her friend waltz over to the VIP section, and it’s two scenes flat before she’s made a low-level NBA player fall in love with her. But he’s an NBA player who lives in L.A. which means he wants her to come to L.A., very much not a thing she can do while on parole.

As Maritza toys with the idea of breaking her parole to fulfill her truest WAG-potential, Piper is also dealing with the humbling duties of post-prison life, namely, wiping baby butts to pay her rent. Neri is going back on the craft fair circuit, which means Piper can nanny to pull her rent. But that also means she has to go to take Baby Goodall’s “socialization group” where certain moms think breastfeeding should be a round-robin style activity. They do provide Piper with some good perspective, however, on the “long distance” relationship she tells them she’s struggling with. Piper says with Alex so far away, she has no idea what’s going on with her or how she’s feeling, and she’s afraid Alex will do something reckless.

“Well…did you marry someone who does reckless things?” one of the mothers asks. (“Who wants a turn nursing Nathan?!” asks another.)

Recklessness might not be the source, but Piper has good reason to be worried about Alex who has been forced into an impossible position by C.O. Hellman, an oozing wound with eyes. Alex tells Hellman that it’s impossible to move his stash with all the random drug searches going on and she can’t swallow it again. “They’re searching our lockers twice a day, so you better fucking Tampax that shit before I make like I caught you with it,” Hellman says. Oh, but he’s not done! Then he talks about how big his dick is for a while, including threatening to shove it down Alex’s throat if she doesn’t sell the rest. “Now I know for sure you’re a fucking dyke, most girls would have creamed at that offer,” he says in parting.

This is the man that Hopper is suggesting for new Head Guard to Linda.

Let me back up: Linda is back and better/worse than ever! She seems to constantly be at the center of a photo shoot and talking about women dying of drug overdoses in her prison like it’s a dusty shelf that needs a little extra cleanin’. That cleaning includes firing Figeuroa as interim warden with the intention of promoting Hopper, and making one of the current C.O.s the new Head Guard. Just about ever C.O. heads in for an interview with Linda, and just about ever C.O. is utterly unimpressive, except for Ward.

When she found out she was making $10,000 less than all the white male guards a year ago, she started taking night classes in corrections management to improve her chances of getting a raise. And those night classes just so happen to be taught by Caputo who is…well, trying his best.

He tells Ward that Linda is all about the bottom line (he also tells her Linda is a soulless bitch who wears a wig), and Ward goes in with a winning thesis statement about “keeping costs down while making sure that the prison remains safe in a way that honors the PolyCon brand.” But Ward also goes off script to say that she thinks of prison as an opportunity: “We get people when they’re at their lowest point which means maybe they’d be willing to try something new—to change.” Linda loves it.

But inspiration is often short-lived around here (at least the positive kind). McCullough watches Hellman through squinted eyes and gritted teeth all episode knowing that he’s the reason they have to arrive early for drug searches, and he’s the reason the prison is flush with drugs (she, of course, does not know the whole reason). When she catches Alex in the employee kitchen trying to force Hellman’s heroine inside his locker, it’s unclear what she’ll do. She’s probably the best person to catch Alex, but the best case scenario at Litchfield is rarely that good.

Alex pleads with McCullough to help her, telling her that Hellman is forcing her to sell drugs and she knew if she went to the administration no one would believe her…

And that is enough to snap McCullough out of a funk she’s been in basically since we met her, and definitely since the prison riot. She flashes back to her days as an Army private about to head in to combat. She’s an ace shot but her Sergeant tells her she needs to stop showing off and figure how to make friends with her seemingly all-male unit if she wants to ever feel confident that they’ll have her back when the going gets tough. No one really considers why McCullough would want to have the backs of a bunch of sexist assholes, but as the only woman, that’s not really a call she gets to make.

So she hires a stripper for one of the guys’ birthdays and everyone loves it; everyone gets drunk; everyone passes out; and the private who’s been the nastiest to McCullough the whole time starts feeling her up while she’s asleep. The next morning, all the guys who were cheering her on the night before are ignoring her because “maybe they think you’ll accuse them of some bullshit too.” McCullough reported the assault, the guy didn’t get in trouble, no one believes her, and now she literally has to head into combat with these people. As they unload out of the vehicle, there’s unexpected fire—McCullough stays inside the truck.

And back at Litchfield, as Daya makes the decision to switch the narrative on accidentally killing Daddy turning it into a power play so that people fear her rather than try to retaliate against her, McCullough makes a power play of her own. She’s *this close* to turning in an incident report on Alex that includes the accusation that she got the drugs from Hellman, but when she walks into the guard room, Hopper, Hellman, and two other male guards are all simulating sex to show how their interviews with Linda went.

History tells McCullough that no one would believe her. So McCullough goes to Alex’s cell and tells her that she believes her about Hellman. So she can either turn the incident report in with Hellman’s name on it and no one will care, or Alex can start selling for her with a five percent increase on what she was making with Hellman. Not great for Alex, but for McCullough it is…movement. In which direction is yet to be determined.

Because for every win on Orange Is the New Black there is an equal and opposite shit storm. A definite win is that while all the idiot C.O.s get their rejection e-mails for Head Guard, C.O. Ward gets a phone call: she hasn’t been named Head Guard; she’s been named the new warden (sorry not sorry Hopper). And here comes the shit storm: as Maritza’s friend tries to cheer her up for making the right decision not to violate her parole, the club they’re in is raided by ICE, and the next thing we know, Maritza is being marched into a PolyCon detention center with Linda’s smiling face on the wall, sobbing that they’ve made a mistake, she’s a U.S. citizen.

I’m reminded of the words Suzanne yells during a pudding-induced incident after suddenly having to grapple with the idea that maybe—just maybe—the legal system got it wrong, and she doesn’t deserve to be in prison…

This isn’t fair.

Jodi Walkerwrites about TV forEntertainment Weekly, Vulture, Texas Monthly,and in her pop culture newsletterThese Are The Best Things. She vacillates between New York, North Carolina, and every TJ Maxx in between.

Stream Orange Is The New Black Season 7 Episode 2 ("Just Desserts") on Netflix