When You've Got Time

“When you’ve got time” is a rather apporpriate theme song of the hit Netflix series Orange is the New Black. For the 13 episodes second season we got to see a handful of the population of a struggling prison cope with time. Time is never ending. It’s dependable. You can calculate the moments, seconds, hours, days, months, years, and decades. Time slows and ends. But we always knew it was there.

The writers of OITNB use time the way that writers of Lost wish they mastered. They truly capture what I always thought was the essence of what made Lost’s flashbacks a breath of story telling fresh air and made it really work. They actually show us these characters, these women, these people. We see the steps they made, those moments you wish you could change or take back. And you relive it with them. You are put right there in the shoes of these amazing women.

By the end of this season I had seen, lived with, breathed with these women in this prison. Passing through time with them. Rooting for them. Struggling with them. Standing still with them. And the best part about it was that it wasn’t really about Piper. I mean. Yes, she is the protagonist; she was the first eye we saw this world through, and her storyline gets the appropriate closure. But the climax of the season really had nothing to do with her at all. And while Piper's story intersected with the main story she ultimately wasn’t the one hiding bricks of heroin, she didn’t go through (Yet another Jenji) tunnel, she didn’t go on a hunger strike, or get an officer put in jail. She didn’t have stand off with the season’s big baddie. She got fucked over rapidly but at least she didn’t end up with a broken eye socket, right?

The people behind OITNB have done something that very few television series are able to do. They have made a world filled with interesting, complicated, beautifully flawed, diverse, unique women that the viewer is dying to know everything about.

Every episode we are taken into the prison doors through the eyes of a new player- a different person. And we see that prisoner, warden, journalist, mother, daughter, sister, brother, that we all are alike- we are the same. We are all human. We are all sitting here, breathing, clicking, eating, and peeing like every other human being on this plant. We all struggle. We lose. We win. We live and we die. And time keeps going. Just like I hope this show does.

Which brings me to my question- When can I watch season 3?

Score: 9/10