‘Orange Is The New Black’ Season 7 Episode 7 Recap: “Me As Well”

Like a pigeon resembling a dove that flies around the rafters of a PolyCon detention center, or a mythical chicken just on the other side of the Litchfield fence—finally, a glimpse of hope! It’s the hope of a dreadfully long appeal process or finding a free lawyer who can fight a legal system desperate to make a nation invitation-only, sure, but still…

After episodes of loss and setbacks, it feels good to see some characters get a win, or at least to allow themselves to imagine the idea of a win again. Taystee has long been the beating heart of this series, and to see her take hit after undeserved hit has been one of the greatest heartbreaks of Orange Is the New Black. To see the light come back into Danielle Brooks’ eyes as Ward fought desperately to convince Taystee to fight for herself felt like a new beginning, even if we veteran viewers know to temper our expectations.

And Blanca has had one of the most dynamic character arcs of any of this large ensemble cast, so to see her call on all the things she’s learned inside Litchfield to start turning her situation around inside the PolyCon detention center felt like growth that was incredibly earned.

Hope, growth, new beginnings—it’s starting to get a little misty around here. Better dump on a frigid bucket of reality in the form of Caputo who just can’t resist kamikaze-ing any growth he’s had by reverting back to the hopeless nincompoop we’ve always known he could be. As Fig tells him while he spins out over how unfair former CO Fischer’s accusations against him are, “The only thing more annoying than you being a nice guy is your need for everyone to think you’re a nice guy.” Fischer hasn’t named him, she’s simply telling her story, so Fig tells him to just let this blow over. Does Caputo listen to this trusted woman in his life’s advice?

Of course not. Because Caputo listens to women riiiight up until anything a woman says interferes with his own personal narrative. So, naturally, he goes to the expert on how to treat women like equals: former CO Sam Healy. Man, I can’t stand that guy. But the new zenned out, smoothie-slinging Sam actually gives some reasonable advice, and you’re never gonna believe it: listen to women. 

So what does Caputo do? He arrives unannounced on the door of a woman who has expressed discomfort with him. He starts off by telling Fischer, “I’m sorry if I ever did anything to make you feel unsafe, or uncomfortable, or objectified.” Fischer tells him it’s not if he did that—he did all of that. “Right, and if that’s how you feel, then I am really sorry,” he replies, refusing to listen to what she’s telling him. Caputo concedes that he was her boss and perhaps inviting her to see his band was intimidating. Fischer informs him that he didn’t just invite her to see his band, he also rearranged her work schedule to make sure she had the night off, and eventually fired her for rejecting his advances.

He says her firing had nothing to do with that, she was simply a terrible CO, and Fischer rightly asks why she didn’t get any warnings before she was fired then. “If you think you were a good CO, you’re delusional,” Caputo bellows. “I only gave you so many chances because I liked you! You actually benefitted from my feelings for you.” Right! Nothing says “benefitted” like being terminated without warning because she dared to question him one single time.

It might be comical if it wasn’t so fucking accurate. 

Finally, Caputo gets so worked up about a woman telling him he’s wrong about something, he bursts a stitch from his recent testicle surgery and begins grabbing at his crotch on the doorstep of a woman he once sexually harassed. Later, Fischer she writes another post and calls Caputo out by name.

So that could have consequences for his current involvement with Litchfield, but at least Ward’s other implemented programs are going well. There’s a new chicken therapy class, as well as other programs to aid the neurodiverse inmates who have been integrated from the former psych ward. And there’s the GED class that Doggett is having a great time in, winning Reese’s cups in the games her teacher Mr. Fantauzzo makes up. He tells them that next week they’ll be taking a GED practice test to gauge where they are currently…

Doggett prickles at having to take a test even though she’s clearly excelling with the subject matter. We see in flashback that even as a young adult, her estranged father would drift back into her life with promises of father-daughter bonding like fishing, and then blame and berate her for being stupid when anything didn’t go his way. At the end of a failed fishing trip, he nearly gets in a fight because he reads another boat’s name as “BAN MASS” instead of “BASS MAN.” In the present day, Doggett is asked to stay after class by Mr. Fantauzzo. He can tell she cheated off Zirconia on her practice test, but questions that Zirconia got right, Doggett got wrong because she flipped the letters around.

Doggett immediately tries to quit and flee the class, sure that Mr. Fantauzzo is calling her stupid, but he tells her this is a good thing. He believes she has a learning disability, most likely dyslexia, and if they can identify it, then they can help her be more successful. He tells her that Steve Jobs, Whoopi Goldberg, Tom Cruise, “and Emmy-Award-winning actor Henry Winkler” all have dyslexia and lead very successful lives. “The Fonz got what I got?” Doggett says hopefully, ready to move beyond yet another piece of her past that’s held her back for a long time.

At the detention center, Blanca is told by Gloria and Flaca that the lawyer who was supposed to visit her from the Freedom for Immigrants group is being kept away by the ICE agents. So Gloria encourages her to work with Karla, the woman from El Salvador who knew so much about her rights in the court room last episode. But Blanca isn’t great at cozying up to people, and winds up getting in a fight with Karla at the computers she’s using for legal research; Carlos, the head ICE agent who wears his sunglasses wrong, comes over and unplugs all the computers as punishment.

But you know what Blanca is good at? Dealing with “a rainbow of assholes on power trips.” She gives it a little time, then approaches Carlos with more broken English than she usually uses, telling him she and her friend didn’t mean to be disrespectful or ungrateful, they were just so excited to be around computers because no one in their village has one. “That asshole likes to feel like a real American hero,” she tells Karla once she’s gotten him to plug the computers back in. In return, Karla begins showing Blanca how to use the legal library and prepare for her own case. 

Inside the detention center kitchen, the relationship between Nicky and her new walk-in-freezer-lover Shani has gotten surprisingly tender. But over in established relationship land, Piper has begun compulsively masturbating rather than seeking out third-party physical intimacy like Alex suggested. But when her roommates put a stop to that noisy activity, she tries picking up a finance guy outside SoulCycle who she knows she won’t compare to Alex; they have some lackluster sex that ends with her staring down his electric toothbrush. Piper calls Alex and leaves her a voicemail that this isn’t working…riight as Alex is finally succumbing to the sexual tension that’s come with undressing in a small closet with McCullough multiple times a day. 

And speaking of secret closet happenings, Daya’s phone with lots of incriminating information on it was found in a recent drug raid. Which means Daya now has a task for Taystee worthy of earning her the drugs she wants to kill herself. Taystee has to get the key to the contraband room from Ward’s office, which winds up being easy enough, but even with the key in her possession ready to pass off to Daya, Taystee is distracted by something else.

Suzanne has gotten the book she’s been working on about what she and Cindy witnessed the night Piscatella died to Taystee cia the rolling library cart three HoneyBuns as a bribe. Reading it, Taystee learns how she was framed for murder and that there are witnesses. But the truth doesn’t make her feel better; it just reinforces the fact that she never had a chance. She tosses the notebook in the trash, and proceeds with helping Daya get her phone back, but when Taystee goes to return the contraband room key, Ward is sitting at her desk: “Do you want to explain this to me?”

But she’s not talking about the key, she’s talking about the notebook that contains information that could potentially turn over Taystee’s conviction. But Taystee won’t engage, saying it doesn’t matter and there’s nothing to be done about. Ward tells her that she can’t just give up, but Taystee shouts back, “You don’t get to tell me how I should feel!” In Taystee’s experience, no one has cared about her enough to fight for her right to justice, so why should she. “I don’t have no more fight left in me,” she tells Ward. “I’m exhausted.”

Ward begs her to keep fighting, to keep trying, to keep showing up. 

And there’s a look in Taystee’s eye by the end that suggests, if someone else is willing to share this burden of caring, this burden of hope with her…then maybe she could hope a little too.

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 7 ("Me As Well") on Netflix