‘Orange Is The New Black’ Season 7 Episode 4 Recap: “How To Do Life”

Finally, Flaca and Maritza are reunited after a tortured season apart, but I wish I could say it was simply for the pleasure of hyping each other up. In Orange Is The New Black Season 7 Episode 4, the Litchfield kitchen crew are finally taken to the mysterious kitchen they’ve been assigned to, and find out that it belongs PolyCon’s immigrant detention center. When the window gate rolls up on the detainees waiting for food, Nicky and Flaca—inmates in a maximum security prison, mind you—look horrified. 

But they only get the full scope of how bad it is when they spot Blanca and she begs Gloria to locate Diablo for her. Suddenly, there’s an “OH MY GOD,” and Maritza is sprinting across the room to Flaca, and I’m crying, and you’re crying, and Flaca is saying Martiza looks hot, and Maritza is saying, “Duh, I’m still me.” I just love how much these two love each other. There’s nothing Flaca wouldn’t do to help Martiza out of the mess she’s in, which she makes clear to Gloria on the van back to Max. “We’re their only hope, we have a mission to help them,” Flaca pleads saying that they have to get phones in order to contact Diablo and Maritza’s mother.

Gloria says she’ll ask her sons to help on the regular prison phone, but she can’t risk anything that would keep her away from her sons even longer. Because in episode 4 we find out that Gloria’s two sons are actually her two younger children. In flashback, we see the day that Gloria left Puerto Rico for New York City, looking young and excited. She’s consoling two little girls hiding in the tub, and at first I assumed they were her cousins, but soon they’re begging their mother not to leave them there. Gloria explains that she has to go to New York to make a better life for them all, and when she brings them over to be with her, they can sleep in bunk beds in their very own room.

In the next flashback, Gloria announces to her aunt Lourdes that she’s buying a stake in the convenience store where she’s been working in New York. She expects Lourdes to be happy for her, but Lourdes says the money Gloria was saving was supposed to be for an apartment to move the girls into. Gloria insists that it’s no use if she can’t bring the girls into a better life in a better neighborhood, but Lourdes tells her the girls don’t understand things like neighborhoods and school districts, they just want their mother. 

In the present, Ward is trying to make a better life for her girls, the “residents” of PolyCon Max. She’s bringing in new education programs that come with participation incentives like more yard time. Caputo is volunteering to lead the Restorative Justice Group, Doggett is trying every single class until she trips into a GED course and is surprised by how engaging the teacher is, and Taystee is…not interested in any of it. 

Ward drops by Taystee’s cell assuming she’ll be excited for the courses since Caputo said GED courses were one of Taystee’s demands in the riot. But what’s the point of advancing your life when a jury has already dictated how it will go forever and ever. “So what now, you sit around all day waiting to die?” Ward asks, frustrated. 

Unfortunately, that’s not Taystee’s plan. She shows up at Daya’s new drug headquarters in the laundry room and says she heard about Daddy and wants “whatever it is you have to take someone out.” Thoughts immediately go to Cindy, but when Daya says she has to know who the drugs are for before she’ll consider selling, Taystee gives the worst possible answer: “It’s for me.” And she thinks Daya of all people would understand, knowing that they’ll be spending the next 20,000 nights “looking at the same fucking darkness in the same fucking box.” Daya doesn’t try too hard to dissuade her, but she does tell Taystee it’ll cost $1000 which might as well be a no. 

Suddenly flush with (relative) cash is Alex whose charger-selling scheme with McCullough is going quite well, even if she’s technically still being forced into doing it. But the new source of income means she’s able to buy a phone and call Piper, who isn’t even mad, she’s just relieved to hear from Alex because she’s been so worried about her. But she’s sure whatever she’s been imagining is way worse than anything that’s really been going on…

I dunno, Piper, have you imagined a baggie full of heroin literally being forced down your wife’s throat? Hearing this from Alex is terrifying, and puts the grievances Piper has been dealing with into perspective, which mostly involve being told what to do and how to do it in every aspect of her life by either her boss/father or parole officer. But the difference is, no one’s forcing her to do anything; she still has a choice. And in this moment, she chooses to grab a bottle of tequila out of a receptionist’s drawer and go absolutely HAM on a cookie cake in the staff fridge.

Flaca also manages to commandeer a phone, and through a lot of effort, gets in touch with Maritza’s somewhat estranged mother. Flaca is so excited that she finally found the right Maria Ramos in Miami, but when she tells Maria that Maritza is in ICE custody and needs her U.S. birth certificate to get out, she hears the worst: Maritza doesn’t have a U.S. birth certificate because she wasn’t born in the U.S., she was born in Colombia. Flaca is so upset she can’t even tell Maritza, so Gloria does. And surprisingly, Maritza seems more angry than scared, saying of course her mother lied to her about where she was born, “Because she’s a lying selfish idiot cunt.”

Rattled, Gloria tells her, “Your mother was running from a terrible situation to give you a better life; whatever mistake she made, I’m sure she was doing her best.” Not exactly what Maritza needs to hear right now, but definitely what Gloria needs to hold onto. In her final flashback of the episode we see a pregnant Gloria with little Benny running around while she makes up two frilly pink bunk beds in preparation for her daughters to move from Puerto Rico…

But at this point it’s been at least six years, and when she speaks to her daughter on the phone, she’s a teenager. Her daughter tells her that they’re not coming, that they don’t want to leave her home. Gloria tells her that she’s done everything for them, and she had to leave them to create better opportunities. “No you didn’t have to leave,” her daughter spits back. “That was your choice, and this is mine—we’re not coming.”

It’s really a terrible episode all around for mothers, most heartbreakingly so for Lorna who, every time we’ve seen her this season, has been cooing about her little baby Sterling who arrived so prematurely last season, and has been in the NICU fighting ever since. When Vinnie shows up for an unplanned visitation, it’s clear that something tragic has happened even if Lorna is refusing to recognize it. Vinnie tells her that Sterling got pneumonia and didn’t survive. 

The look of terror on Lorna’s face is so awful, but we never see her weep or collapse. In fact, we don’t see her at all until Nicky comes to find her and Lorna explains that she just had a headache, and shows Nicky the Instagram she’s making for Nicky who she says is finally leaving the NICU for home. She shows no signs that she doesn’t believe it herself, and it’s a reminder of how we met Lorna, waxing poetic about her fiancé Christopher. Sometimes the sunniest people are the most tragic of all. 

And as corny as they seemed to the inmates at first, maybe these educational courses really do stand to make a difference. Cindy shows up to the Restorative Justice class, where Maria is avidly participating, no longer full of rage, but still passive aggressively reminding the group at large that Beth tried to murder her. She says it doesn’t matter if her near-death experience was spiritual or manmade: “It made me realize that fucked up things could lead to really fun kickball games where no one gets killed if you just try to be a good person.”

Caputo, Maria, and Cindy take turns reading aloud from the text about what constitutes a crime and how sometimes we’re on the receiving end as a victim, and sometimes we’re on the other side as te offender. “Justice is about realigning that break, but sometimes the means of reparation isn’t clear and justice seems impossible, Capto reads as we see Taystee organizing the belongings in her cell carefully in the dark.

“If we are perpetually running away from the things that feel too hard to face, we’re defining ourselves by what we’re seeking to avoid,” Maria reads as Taystee begins winding a shirt around her hands. “But on one escapes this lie without experiencing pain or injustice, and some people are dealt more hardship than others,” Cindy reads as Taystee ties the shirt around her bed post. 

“How do we restore justice in a world that is profoundly unfair?”

Suddenly, Taystee is hanging herself, being choked by her shirt, and it’s terrible to watch. Just as suddenly, she either stops herself or the shirt breaks, or a combination of both, but the episode ends with Taystee weeping as Digital Daggers’ “Save Us From Ourselves” plays: Nothing’s  come to save us / Nothing’s come to save us from ourselves…

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 4 ("How To Do Life") on Netflix