**Spoiler Alert**

Like some form of cruel joke, Netflix launched season 4 of ‘Orange is the New Black’ on the Friday of Denver’s Pride Weekend. And, while usually I would be glued to my couch, ordering a lot of Pizza Hut and reloading my bowl between every few episodes, I was out celebrating my queer lifestyle.

Of course, I’m not mad about it because once Monday hit, I binged watched my way through all thirteen episodes, depriving myself of sleep and human interaction. It was worth it. Season 4 of the hit Netflix series tackled some of the biggest cultural issues floating in the air today while keeping the fun, campy writing that garnered so many fans.

The Struggle For Power

The season starts immediately where season three takes off, with the inmates at Litchfield Prison running through a gated fence and into a questionable lake, Piper reeling in from sending her Aussie girlfriend down to maximum detention for stealing her money, a slew of new inmates walking off a transport bus, and the guards walking out of the prison due to the for-profit status.

All of these issues are addressed early on by stacking the inmates on top of each other in the bunks, the hole in the fence is fixed, and new guards, in the form of cheap military vets and one (very handsome) bear, Piscatella (Brad William Henke), on a huge power trip. But, even though the immediate problems are solved, it only leads to a whole season of figuring out who is running Litchfield.

As Caputo, recently assigned as the warden, fights for his inmates he is greeted with resistance from the MCC who only care about money. With this comes Caputo’s absence from the prison allowing Piscatella and his new army vet guards to subject the inmates to some harsh, weird punishments, including standing on a table for days on end.

Meanwhile, inside the prison Chapman is struggling to hold control over her dirty panty business as the new inmates rush to claim dominance in the prison. A significant wave of new Dominican inmates shift the power balance to the Latinas and back Maria Ruiz (Jessica Pimentel) as their leader, allowing her to become Litchfield’s premier prison gang. When Chapman attempts to strike back, she accidentally starts a white supremacists group that act as hall monitors, sneering and making racial remarks to anyone with a pigment darker than their own.

This causes an all out race war within the walls of the prison.

In addition, Pennsatucky (Taryn Manning) struggles to keep her composure as the guard who raped her last season maintains his position. Sophia (Laverne Cox) languishes in solitary confinement, while celebrity chef Judy King (Blair Brown) gets a private room to discourage any future lawsuits.

The most jarring, and thought provoking, power struggle comes from the new slew of guards abusing their power.

“There is no such thing as a consensual relationship between a prisoner and a guard”

This issue started to rise last season when Pennsatucky was raped by a guard. But the relationship between the inmates and the guards are pushed to the limit in the new season.

It becomes very clear halfway through the season that Piscatella does not value the lives of the inmates in Litchfield. His reign of terror is often mimicked by the new guards who see the job as another assignment with the women as the enemy. The punishments for these women are inhumane. They are torturous. But, above all, they are unstopped by the other guards. Why? There is a brotherhood that must not be compromised.

Like the theme song for the series, they see these women as ‘animals,’ which also the title of this season’s penultimate episode. After a few of the new guards force Crazy Eyes to fight another inmate gladiator style, the prison gangs join forced to plan a peaceful protests to get the guards fired. The plan never makes it off the ground, but as the women are congregated in the cafeteria and Piscatella pushes the respected Red to the ground after forcing her to stay awake for days, the inmates take to standing on the tables in a silent protest.

When the power hungry guards start forcibly relocating the women back to their bunks, Crazy Eyes has an emotional, visceral outburst at the guard who forced her into the Litchfield Fight Club. The chaos ends with one inmate being suffocated by one of the guards.

As the women grieve, MCC tries to paint the only decent guard as a terrible person, the guards try to paint the inmate as a violent woman who had a weapon, and Caputo tries to figure out what direction he must follow. The end result isn’t pretty, as the racial gangs grab their weapons and head into a prison bawl.

In one of the most heart wrenching, blood curdling, stomach knotting moments in the season, a vet tries to calm down the guard who killed the inmate by telling him stories of Afganistan where he would make little boys in the village juggle grenades until they went off, and killing the women he slept with while deployed.

Season 4 is by far the best season OITNB has seen. While it grew darker, it still shined a little bit of light into all of our Netflix loving hearts.