‘Orange Is the Black’s Finale Showed the Series at Its Best — and Worst

This month marked the release of the seventh and final season of Orange Is the New Black, one of Netflix’s first and longest running original series. And true to this complicated show’s form its final hours channeled both its unending compassion toward complicated social problems, and its harried storytelling. Spoilers ahead for Orange Is the New Black Season 7.

But first the good. Ever since the tragic death of Poussey Washington (Samira Wiley), OITNB has evolved into becoming Taystee’s (Danielle Brooks) show. After all, Taystee was the one who led Season 5’s game-changing prison riot. After that, she was tried and convicted for the murder of a guard in Season 6. Season 7 sees Brooks — and this character — at their absolute best, as Taystee stares down the permanence of a life sentence.

As painful as it is to watch this lovable character actively work towards her own suicide, the series takes great care in having her motivation make sense. All of her life, Taystee has been screwed over by the system, largely because she was a poor woman of color. The fact that she’s hard-working, giving, dedicated, smart, and great with people has never been enough to counter the socioeconomic constraints that led her to selling drugs, returning to prison, and ultimately getting a life sentence. Taystee knows she’s an incredible person. But in a world that refuses to see that, why bother living?

Slowly, and with the help of her longtime friend, the warden Tamika (Susan Heyward), Taystee comes to realize she does have something left to give the world and chooses herself over giving up. Brooks beautifully captures the unending hopelessness of Taystee in her most self-destructive moments.

Similarly, Red (Kate Mulgrew) and Nicky’s (Natasha Lyonne) last story is a tragic thing of beauty. Watching the once-impenetrable Red lose her grip and fall even deeper into dementia hurts. More than that, it hurts to watch Nicky cry over yet another failing mother figure. Yet as intrinsically tragic as Red’s situation is, when Nicky dons her mentor’s iconic red lipstick and starts bossing around the kitchen it’s a thing of beauty. Nicky has always been a character who has needed to grow up. Sadly it’s taken the loss of Red, and her best friend/off-again, on-again lover Lorna (Yael Stone) to get there; but in Orange‘s final moments, she arrives.

And enough good cannot be said about this final season’s blistering examination of ICE. Through the storylines of the supposedly illegal inmates Blanca (Laura Gómez) and Maritza (Diane Guerrero), OITNB dives into the hell that is Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. It’s these women’s unrelenting lack of options that drives most of the pain this season. Small things our inmate protagonists once took for granted, like making phone calls, understanding officers, or being able to research their cases are tossed out the window. The message is clear as it is powerful: this country treats illegal immigrants worse than it does criminals.

Each of these storylines exemplify what Orange did best: taking adored, complicated characters and using them to talk about systematic problems ignored by most other shows. With Taystee, that meant exploring inmate mental health; through Red, dementia in aging prisoners; and with Blanca and Maritza it’s the horrors of ICE.

But in between all of these heartfelt storylines are oh-so-many half-hearted conclusions.

Suzanne (Uzo Aduba), Tiffany (Taryn Manning), and Daya’s (Dascha Polanco) conclusions are by far the least focused. As Suzanne is trying to repair the relationship between her friends Taystee and Cindy (Adrienne C. Moore), she slowly begins to realize that sometimes people are blamed for crimes that weren’t their fault. In some ways, Suzanne herself was wrongfully imprisoned. Suzanne was never mentally aware enough to realize she was kidnapping the boy who later died on her watch. Seeing her come to terms with the complicated idea is, to be fair, fascinating. But instead of exploring that further, Orange throws it aside to give Suzanne a heavy-handed chicken imprisonment subplot and a few more moments to act silly.

Tiffany and Daya face even worse fates. After struggling with addiction for years and slowly learning to become better people, Tiffany relapses and is found dead of an overdose. Shortly after her body is found it’s revealed that she passed her GED. And the once sweet and promising Daya becomes a shadow of her own mother. Her transition from young woman who made a mistake to murderous crime lord is an examination of how prison changes people, but Season 7 Daya feels cartoonishly removed from the woman we used to know.

And then of course there are Piper (Taylor Schilling) and Alex (Laura Prepon). If prison made the aggressively white and hipster Piper bearable, all of that is wiped away by her release to the outside world. There’s yet another convoluted plot about why it’s hard for Piper and Alex to be together — even when they’re already together. It’s all as exhausting as it has been for the past three seasons.

Yet the biggest sin of Orange Is the New Black‘s final season is one the show has struggled with for eternity: its misguided focus. In its final season, this already overcrowded show introduces two new major characters, Karina Arroyave’s legal savvy Karla and Marie-Lou Nahhas’ new love interest for Nicky Shani. Both Arroyave and Nahhas give great performances as Karla fights tooth and nail to cross the U.S. Mexican border to return to her children and Shani talks vulnerably about the horrors of female circumcision. But in a show that’s already juggling 50+ characters between the main and recurring cast, there’s no room for new ones. Neither of these new stories can breathe, and as a result the whole season feels overly congested.

Over its seven years on streaming Orange Is the New Black has given us so many incredible things. It’s spoken frankly about systematic racism, transphobia, homophobia, and the unfair treatment of inmates and it’s done it all through a lovely, compassionate group of women. But in its quest to humanize, OITNB always bit off more than it could chew. The final season of Orange Is the New Black is wonderful in many ways, but as a final chapter in a long-running narrative? It feels like Season 7 was so concerned about telling even more stories, it forgot to lovingly end some of the ones it started.

Watch Orange Is the New Black on Netflix