‘Orange Is The New Black’ Series Finale Recap: “Here’s Where We Get Off”

Orange Is the New Black burst onto the television landscape in 2013 with an edgy concept, a diverse cast of mostly women, sanitary pad sandals, and a lot of sex in shower stalls—all on a viewing platform that had just begun dipping its toes into original programming. And now, six years later, as Netflix is a bonafide juggernaut of original content, Orange Is the New Black says its goodbyes in a slightly more subdued series finale.

It’s not that OITNB ever became less edgy, or less diverse, or that the change from shower sex to walk-in freezer sex was much of an adjustment—it’s just that we’ve grown accustomed to it now. We’ve known these characters for six years: we know who like and who we don’t; who makes us laugh and who makes us cry; who we need to see have a happy ending, and who we can live with leaving behind in ambiguity. And that’s going to be different or everyone who watches the show, but the point is that we understand why these women have made the choices that have gotten them to this point; the series finale shows us the ways that they’ve changed (or haven’t changed) that will guide their choices into the future.

There have been episodes of OITNB that didn’t land, there have been a few characters that were simply intolerable, and there was a divisive season that took place entirely over the course of a few days (I liked it!). But Jenji Kohan and her team never took their eyes off the goal of telling the dynamic stories of incarcerated women: difficult, funny, and always worthwhile. In the finale, we say goodbye to those characters, and via a perfect little montage at the end, to the wonderful women who played them, as well.

Many of these characters have been busy grown up, as Suzanne tells Taystee when she comes to see her at the chicken coup following Doggett’s overdose.

Suzanne is less distraught then one might assume after the death of her friend; she tells Taystee that losing people is hard, but she’s gotten used to it. She creates a breakfast-for-dinner (P-tuck’s fave) themed memorial service in Florida-block, and sings P-Tuck’s favorite nighttime melody: the Mountain Dew jingle. Dixon joins in with another Mountain Dew jingle, as does the rest of Florida, and they toast the life of Tiffany “Pennsatucky” Doggett with yellow drink. It’s…wildly moving

Both because of the appropriate tribute to Doggett and because of Suzanne’s progress in her wake. The same cannot be said for all characters. Daya has $4,000 worth of pills on her when Ward orders a full sweep of the prison following Doggett’s overdose, so she passes them off to Hellman who, ahem—stuffs the pill bottles up the butts of chickens. When Linda arrives to talk to Ward about how she’s handling the overdose aftermath, the better the conversation goes, the more you can be sure a chicken is about to poop out fentanyl in front of her. Indeed, just as Linda has said, “You might be getting the hang of this, a I chicken wanders up and lets a pill bottle rip.

Linda immediately fires Ward, and though Ward has been reassuring Taystee all episode that things will get better, she finally breaks down, saying she’s relieved she’s being fired: “Because this job is too fucking much, and those programs were never gonna work, and these women were never gonna catch a break.” And while I don’t blame Ward for the sentiment, I also know she doesn’t believe it deep down. Because after Doggett died and Taystee said her final goodbyes to Suzanne, she returned to her room and finally opened the lethal dose of drugs Daya gave her. But in the process of opening the packet, she looks over and sees a different packet: an envelope full of the certificates of all her students who passed their GED test…including Doggett.

That’s a punch in the gut, but also the clarity Taystee has been needing on the value her life in prison can still have. She marches right over to Daya’s cell and gives the drugs back. “Life keeps throwing me these curve balls; think I’m gonna keep swinging a little bit longer and see what I hit,” Taystee says, sounding like herself for the first time in a long time.

As we know, Daya took a different approach to life in prison. And when Aleida finds out that Daya has been getting drugs from the outside through her little sister Eva, things finally come to blows. Aleida asks what happened to the sweet girl who used to draw pictures. “You know what it’s like to kill somebody?” Daya counters. She tells Aleida to get in line and leave the family stuff to her because Eva will do whatever she tells her to: “And we may even bring Lucy in.” And that’s the last straw the last straw between this toxic mother/daughter duo.

The fate of Daya and Aleida is left open but not looking good, as is the fate of Karla who I assumed we’d seen the last of. But no, that storyline still had room for more tragedy—and good on it for depicting the full extent of trauma in an impossible situation like Karla’s. Just before she was deported, Karla promised her sons that she would do everything she could to get back to them. When we see her one last time, she’s with a group being led through the desert by a coyote, headed toward the border. But when she falls and breaks her ankle, the coyote says they can’t wait on her. He leaves her a bottle of water and says he’ll try to come back to her, but as the camera pans out on the vast desert still left to cross, Karla’s fate seems clear.

Thankfully, things turn out much better for a few of the other OITNB mothers. Luschek’s pining for Gloria finally pays off when he not only owns up to smuggling in the cell phones, but says he was forcing Gloria to sell calls to the ICE detainees so that her sentence won’t be extended for the phone found in the kitchen. Before she gets out, Gloria makes sure Maria knows that she didn’t confess to the phone for her sake—and yet when Gloria is back home with her sons and (tear) daughters, and she finds “Mi Burro, Mi Burro” in her granddaughter’s books…

That book soon ends up in Maria’s hands so that she can finally read it to her daughter—and even better, tell “new Maria” how she needs to be reading it to her daughter.

As for the rest of the PolyCon kitchen staff, Red and Lorna end up in Florida together, each giving the other a little of what they need. Nicky takes over Red’s role in the kitchen, simultaneously bossing people around and taking care of them as she was always meant to do. And Flaca commits herself to continuing to help the detainees as much as she can because even though it’s dangerous, she knows it’s what Maritza would have wanted her to do.

After all, if it weren’t for Flaca and Gloria, Blanca never would have gotten in touch with Freedom for Immigrants who got her a lawyer that ultimately overturned her criminal case and got her green card reinstated. And what does Flaca do Blanca do with that U.S. green card? She flies to Honduras to be with Diablo who was deported. “Why would you come to the murder capital of the world to live in a shack?” Diablo asks her in disbelief. “You’re here,” she answers. “So I’m here too, baby.”

And things finally turn around for Cindy when she gets some advice on what it means to be a mother from a girl living in her tent town who’s talking about how her own parents will likely take her back in once they’ve had some time to cool down: “The way I see it, if you made a person, you’re on the hook forever.”

Even though Cindy was trying to do something good by leaving Monica and her mother behind, she was also letting herself off the hook. So she asks them to meet her at a restaurant, and she promises that she’ll be at that restaurant every Sunday at 11 a.m. until they believe that they can trust her again. Monica doesn’t seem so sure, but when Cindy says she wants to tell Monica about her father, she perks up. Cindy tells her that his name was Curtis and he had a girlfriend: “He chose her over me—but I chose you.”

Indeed, so many of the best and worst things on Orange Is the New Black revolve around the overwhelming power of choice. Take, for example, Piper; she has always struggled with choice, or more specifically, being accountable for the choices she’s made and what they say about her. After Alex tells Piper she’s being transferred to Ohio and attempts to set her free by breaking up with her… and Zelda invites Piper to go live in Northampton with her on a job…Piper shows up at Larry’s door, not knowing why she’s there.

So Larry basically tells her about herself. He says that he thinks that Alex was Piper’s ticket to getting out of her boring, normal life and becoming the special person she always suspected she could be. And even though she didn’t exactly want to go to prison, maybe it’s the best thing that ever happened to her, “Because now you can never be nice and normal again.”

And Larry is…right. But Piper tells him he’s working off an old model. She’s different now. “Then here’s my advice,” he tells her of the choice she needs to make: “Go do what new Piper would do.”

In a line echoing the very first line of the series premiere, Piper says voiceover says, “I’ve always loved getting clean,” as we see her driving toward Ohio. But this time she doesn’t mean showers and baths—while we watch her sweep up at her new Starbucks job, and take her first law class, and smile lovingly at the new, old love of her life, Piper says that she means, “a clean sweep; clean living; a clean conscience.”

We see Yoga Jones and Big Boo at the Ohio prison; Janae running outside, and Brook Soso being wooed; Angie and Leanne still causing a ruckus together. All faces it was great to see one last time…

But this story started with Piper and Taystee, and it ends with Piper and Taystee, too. Piper learning to embrace the person she is outside of prison; Taystee learning not to turn away from her true nature inside of prison. Once Taystee decides not to kill herself, she also makes the choice to live. She calls Judy King again and again until she gets her on the phone directly, and then she tells her about the fund she’s starting in their mutual friend Poussey Washington’s name. Judy’s interest is piqued at that, and Taystee tells her she has a whole plan to give microloans to ex-felons while supporting their success immediately after their release from prison.

And by episode’s end, we see Taystee in front of a chalkboard where she belongs, teaching Litchfield’s very first microloan recipients how to handle their finances once they’re out in a few months.

Orange Is the New Black comes to a close in this series finale, but as information for the real-life Poussey Washington Fund started by the OITNB crew flashes across the screen before the credits, its legacy absolutely lives on.

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 13 ("Here's Where We Get Off") on Netflix