‘Orange Is the New Black’ Season 4, Episode 7 Recap: ‘That Sickness in Me’
Warning: This recap for the “It Sounded Nicer in My Head” episode of Orange Is the New Black contains spoilers.
Good golly, Miss Lolly, we finally got your backstory, and it immediately becomes one of our new favorites. There’s never been a lack of storyline on Orange Is the New Black that touched on mental illness (hello, Suzanne), but Lori Petty’s endearing performance as Lolly Whitehill and the writers’ decision to link Sam Healy’s family history of mental illness with Lolly’s as he acts as her counselor (and friend?) have made both characters highlights of episodes 6 and 7.
Lolly’s backstory, too, illustrates how suddenly and dramatically mental illness can devastate those it affects. Twentysomething Lolly (played brilliantly in flashback by Christina Brucato, who looks and sounds so perfectly like Petty that I thought it was Petty in a wig at first) was an eager journalist, assigned to write reviews of things like Kenny Rogers Roasters (the now mostly defunct fast food joint) for a free weekly newspaper. But she really wanted to be an investigative journalist, also turning in to her editor an exposé of a local dry cleaner who, she alleged, was illegally dumping its chemical supplies. Her editor rejected the article, and as Lolly started to hear voices when she left his office, it’s unclear whether she truly had uncovered some dangerous misdeeds by a local business, or whether this might have been the beginnings of her obsession with conspiracy theories.
When next we see flashback Lolly, her (former) newspaper co-worker and friend Ann-Marie is trying to find her a place to live. Lolly’s mom has moved away, and the newspaper won’t allow her back, Ann-Marie tells her, so Ann-Marie is trying to get her a spot in a house where other residents also seem to have mental issues. Lolly tells pregnant Ann-Marie she could live with her and take care of her baby — not in Ann-Marie’s plan, clearly — and while Ann-Marie is off talking to the landlord, another resident gets the scoop from Lolly that she’s a reporter who’s being discredited by the FBI, CIA, UPS, and FEMA, because she uncovered a government plan to poison the population so it can declare martial law. The resident tells her she can’t stay there, then, because the whole place is wired, and because Randall gets violent. Who’s Randall? The guy telling her Randall gets violent.
He advises Lolly to contact a friend of his, who can help her make $20-30 a day collecting scrap metal. She runs out of the house and down the street — and doesn’t stop even when Ann-Marie yells after her. The next time we catch up with her, she’s living in a makeshift home structure on an empty piece of land, surrounded by a lot of junk. As she goes outside her shack to make coffee for Rocky, a fellow homeless person who has requested it, she begins hearing voices, and picks up a stick with bells and other noisemakers on it. She shakes it around her own head until the voices stop. Then she takes off through her neighborhood pushing a shopping cart, and stops to chat with people and give them coffee from the giant pot she has in her cart. She pours cups for other homeless people, even when they don’t have a quarter to pay for it, she offers a cup to a neighborhood cop, and she pours two mugs full for an older lady who comes out of her house and gives Lolly a sandwich. Along the way she occasionally stops and shakes the noise stick at her own head, but she also seems content, like she has a purpose, as she makes her coffee deliveries. When she gets back home, though, Rocky is waiting and he’s upset: a newly placed sign indicates condos are going to be built on their little piece of land.
In the present at Litchfield, Healy takes Lolly to a party Red is throwing to celebrate Nicky’s return. Everyone welcomes Lolly, but she’s having a bad day… doesn’t even remember Nicky, who she had a conversation with the previous day. Red welcomes her and offers her a piece of cake, but Lolly starts to freak out, as the voices in her head tell her the people there are not her friends. She runs out of the room, and Healy chases her.
In flashback, Lolly is a bit older, but she’s still got her shopping cart with coffee to share, and she’s pushing it around her neighborhood, which is a lot more heavily populated. She’s friendly with everyone she passes, but one of the wheels on her cart gets stuck and she stops on the sidewalk to fix it. A pair of bicycle cops approach her and tell her she can’t panhandle there. They’ve gotten a complaint, and she has to move along. She wants to, but her wheel is stuck, and the more they chatter at her, the more stressed she gets, and she starts to hear the voices in her head again. She starts shouting at them — the voices — to shut up, and the cops think she’s talking to them. In desperation, she grabs her noise stick from her cart, and the cops assume she’s brandishing a weapon. They take her down to the ground and radio for a squad car to come cart her off to their precinct, as she lays on the ground, screaming that they’re trying to kill her.
Back to the present, Healy follows Lolly to the Litchfield laundry room, where she’s hiding behind a door in a dark corner of the room. Healy looks inside, and sees the “room is constructed of cardboard boxes, pieces of aluminum foil, and other bits of junk… the junk Lolly’s been pilfering from the Litchfield garbage. To build this, her time machine. “It’s a work in progress,” she tells Healy, inviting him in. She tells him she’s building it so she can go back in time and stop Jimmy Carter from starting FEMA.
“Lolly, everyone wants to go back in time sometimes,” Healy tells her. “To go back to the moment when everything was still possible, before they made a wrong turn, so that they could go on the right path. But it’s not possible. All we can do is make the most of right now.”
“But traveling back in time just seemed more, you know, feasible,” Lolly responds. “I don’t have no moment when everything went wrong. Unless it was that moment I was born with that sickness in me.”
Lolly asks Healy if he’s travelling in time right now.
“No, I was just… I spent a lot of time in boxes as a kid,” he says. “They were forts, really.”
Lolly tells him he can stay in her time machine as long as he wants.
“Maybe a few more minutes,” he says. “Then we’ll go.”
Elsewhere in Litchfield (and beyond):
* Even in prison, Judy King lands in more hot water on the outside. Years ago, she tells roommate Yoga Jones, she hosted a cable access TV show, and decided to add a puppet element to it. The puppet: Chitlin’ Joe, “a lovable old rascal” who liked to steal pies from her windowsill, as well as his friend, Watermelon Sam, who was an actual watermelon. A video of the old series has popped up on YouTube and left Judy in the midst of an international scandal. She and Yoga discuss it in a common area, and just as Yoga says it’s probably best if they go to their room to chat about it in private, Black Cindy, Alison, and Crazy Eyes come into the room, then abruptly turn around and leave, as do Yoga and Judy; Cindy and company are there because they thought Judy was alone and they want to take a photo of her. Judy and Yoga leave so quickly because they think Cindy and her friends might have overheard them talking about Chitlin’ Joe. The fuss leads Yoga to Caputo, and she tells him Judy needs extra protection because of Chitlin’ Gate. She also tells him Judy needs a seltzer machine, which he provides, to keep Judy happy. Later, Judy asks Yoga why there’s a seltzer machine in their room… Judy isn’t the one who wanted the machine, apparently.
* Taystee’s plan to snap and sell cell phone photos of Judy King to celebrity magazines is turning into a comedy of errors. The first attempt is so blurry that Suzanne says it’s like the Loch Ness Monster: “might be Judy King, might be swamp gas.” Later, Black Cindy, Alison, and Crazy Eyes set up a triangulation of caution floor signs, so Judy King is trapped in a small space and Cindy can pose for a photo with her. But Judy thinks they’ve trapped her to do her harm (because she thinks they know about the Chitlin’ Joe video), and when she turns around and sees Alison and Suzanne behind her, she runs away, with Alison snapping a photo of Cindy chasing her.
“You really want a picture out there that looks like you’re about to beat down Judy King?” Taystee asks Black Cindy.
BC: “Yeah, it’ll probably make my mama cry, but if it ends up in a magazine, I’m cool with it.”
Then the friends see a TV news report on Judy’s Chitlin’ Joe scandal — “Chitlin’ Gate” — complete with very offensive clips of Chitlin’ Joe and Judy talking about how Joe ate Watermelon Sam, because… stereotypes.
“I don’t think I like this puppet show,” says Crazy Eyes.
“You know, I think my mama would be totally fine seeing me beat down Judy King,” Black Cindy says.
But the plot to snap and sell a photo of Judy may be moot now, anyway: Alison informs the group her phone has run out of juice, and she does not have a charger.
* Caputo’s excited when Linda tells him the MCC board has approved his plan for a new educational program at Litchfield. He’s not so excited when she brings him a copy of the course catalog they approved, which has none of the art, history, English, and math classes he wanted for the inmates, and is instead filled with classes on plumbing, basic carpentry, foundation pouring, and Concrete 101.
“It’s all construction,” Caputo says. “It’s a chain gang.”
“No, it’s a school,” Linda says. “We have to emphasize the school part, or else we’re going to have to pay them 11 cents an hour.”
* Maria has made a decision about how she’s going to avenge Piper for ratting her out, leading to several more years tacked onto Maria’s sentence. “When you’re in a gang, you get this label put on you,” Maria tells her, after she and her friends grab Piper and drag her into an isolated area of the kitchen. “And thanks to what you pulled, I’ve been marked by Admin as this big, bad gang girl… but I’ve been thinking… you’re gangster, too, Chapman. You’re hella gangster, right? So where’s your label, huh? Hold tight.” With the noise of the music and dancing from the welcome back party Red is throwing for Nicky drowning out Chapman’s screams, Maria and her crew heat up a DIY poker and brand Piper, with a swastika.
* And the Shower Pooper is… Angie Rice! After Morello tells Nicky about the investigation she and Suzanne are running, and describes various aspects of the evidence and the lead suspects, Nicky immediately knows it’s Angie. And she describes her evidence trail thusly: “The motive is drugs. She’s moving drugs down the Hershey highway… she’s probably got some guy that she’s meeting at visitation, and he kisses her all long and passionate, but then instead of slipping her the tongue, he’s slipping her a packet. And she has to swallow it because of the post-visitation strip search and double-ended say ah’s. So, she goes, and she poops it in the shower where it’s easier to pull the goodies out of the f–kin’ Cracker Jack box, ‘cause you don’t want your s–t getting lost in the toilet bowl. A tale as old as time.”
Adds Nicky, “To understand a degenerate, you have the enter the mind of a degenerate. Fortunately, I have years of experience.”
Questions: We Got a Few
* Red saw Nicky sneak out of her welcome back party with Angie. Does she know Nicky has started using drugs again? And will she support her, and kick her out of her Litchfield family, if and when she finds out?
* Certainly Piper is going to have a lot of things on her mind after the Dominicans complete their swastika brand on her, and among them must be, how is she going to continue being bunkmates with Hapakuka after she lured Piper to her very painful meeting with Maria and her crew? Chapman had been consistently rude and dismissive to Hapakuka since she arrived at the prison, even telling her she was on her own earlier in this episode. But Hapakuka had to know that this level of betrayal was going to blow back on her somehow, right? P.S. Thank you, OITNB writers, for setting up a situation where it’s necessary to use the phrase “blow back,” something I haven’t written since Sons of Anarchy ended a year and a half ago.
* What did Aleida swipe from the dresser in Judy and Yoga’s room?
She Said, He Said
“I really do not feel comfortable being part of a brand.” — Piper, to Sankey, who suggests they should hook up their task force with the Aryan Brotherhood, seeing as how Sankey’s brother is head of the Philly chapter.
“They brought in the military and then they cracked down on the Jewish presence. And now they got cameras and drones monitoring our every activity. Plus, we are ruled by a Fascist bearded giant!” — Lolly, telling Nicky about the recent changes at Litchfield. And while they seem like loony rantings to Nicky, Lolly’s actually pretty spot on… military = the new veterans as guards, the paparazzi drones trying to get Judy King photos, “Fascist bearded giant = Piscatella.
“I don’t think racism should be a group activity. I think it should be private.” — Morello, when Piper’s new pals Sankey and Skinhead Helen say they’re trying to become a white power group.
“Some things can’t be rushed.” — Red, after Gina Murphy tells her CO Dixon is going to give her a shot for hugging Nicky too long when she sees her for the first time since Nicky returned from Max.
“Oh, no, it’s the giant.” — Lolly, to herself, when Piscatella catches her rummaging through a dumpster at the prison.
“Nothing. I never learned how to do s–t.” — Aleida, when her friends try to give her career advice by helping her figure out what she’s good at. Later, after Judy King compliments the manicure Aleida gave herself, and tells her she could make good money for that quality of manicure on the outside, Aleida decides she’s going to open a nail salon when she gets released.
“Sometimes, what it looks like is all anybody can see.” — Nicky, to Chapman, who says her new friendship with the white supremacy inmates isn’t what it looks like.
“Keep a tighter leash on your pet nut, or next time I’m sending her to psych.” — Piscatella, to Healy, about Lolly, after Piscatella catches her rummaging through the garbage and takes her to Healy.
“What’s the matter, Nichols? You hardly ate your mush, or your other mush.” — Morello, summing up the quality of the food in the cafeteria.
“You don’t realize there’s a piece of you missing until the piece comes back and immediately pokes fun at your dye job.” — Red, when Gloria points out how happy she seems to have her friend and “prison daughter” Nicky back.
“Warren’s ex-girlfriend, the girl with the Cabbage Patch Doll face and the name that sounds like a Phil Collins song.” — Morello describing Kukudio to Nicky. And, yes! We knew we couldn’t be the only ones reminded of that song when Kukudio’s name is mentioned.
“It’s not that wonderful. We’re very isolated up here.” — Yoga, pretending she’s not enjoying the privileges of life as Judy King’s roommate when Aleida comments on all their perks.
“There was a s–tload of blood, and they had to take her to medical. Sometimes people feel like fighting, so they punch the walls. That would be the best-case scenario based on what I saw.” — Nicky, when Sister Ingalls and Gloria ask her if she saw Sophia while working in the SHU. Sister Ingalls then decides Crystal needs to know what’s going on with Sophia.
Behind Bars:
* The catchy song playing while Lolly is serving up coffee to her friends, from her shopping cart: Deerhunter’s “Breaker.”
* The song that plays after Maria and her friends start to burn a swastika into Chapman’s arm: “Cook Me” by Szabo.
* As Caputo’s driving to work, he passes by a school crossing guard: former Litchfield CO Wanda Bell.
* Random, yes, but the expanded storyline for Lolly this season means the Schoolhouse Rock classic, “Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here,” keeps popping into my head. And now it can be stuck in yours, too. You’re welcome.
Orange Is the New Black Season 4 is streaming on Netflix.
Read more OITNB recaps:
‘Orange Is the New Black’ Season 4, Episode 1 Recap: Over Alex’s Dead Body
‘Orange Is the New Black’ Season 4, Episode 2 Recap: There’s Something About Maria
‘Orange Is the New Black’ Season 4, Episode 3 Recap: A Soso Episode
‘Orange Is the New Black’ Season 4, Episode 4 Recap: ‘I Know Everything That Goes on Here’
