‘Orange Is the New Black’ Season 4, Episode 10 Recap: Give Yourself a Hand

Photos: Netflix

SPOILER ALERT: This recap for the “Bunny, Skull, Bunny, Skull” episode of Orange Is the New Black contains storyline and character spoilers.

It’s not hyperbole … with three episodes remaining in Season 4, everything for Litchfieldians near and far is just the worst.

Aleida gets her early release, and though she is frightened about her uncertain future, her realization that giving fancy manicures is among her skills also gives her a bit of hope. But the minute boyfriend Cesar has his latest girlfriend, Margarita, pick her up outside the prison, Aleida knows she has underestimated just how tough her post-prison life is going to be. She spends her whole $40 release stipend on a dress, only to find out her cousin Jasmina spent all the money she was supposed to be holding for her. And she even sold Aleida’s clothes. Jasmina offers Aleida a place to stay, but given that her apartment is filled with stolen goods she’s trying to sell for someone else, Aleida wisely decides to knock on Margarita’s door and admit that she has no where else to go. Daya’s mom spends her first night of freedom sleeping on the couch of her boyfriend’s girlfriend, rocking their crying baby, while she’s not a single step closer to getting her own kids out of foster care or getting herself employed.

Related: ‘Orange Is the New Black’ Episode 9 Recap: How Blanca Got Her Groove Back

Meanwhile, Aleida asked Gloria to keep her eye on Daya, but that’s proving to be tougher than imagined, too, because the minute Aleida is gone, Maria sees an opportunity to recruit the lonely Daya into her crew. Gloria warns Daya that Maria and her friends are into some dangerous things in that salon, but Daya says she knows, and she wants to hang out with people her own age … not someone who’s trying to be her mother.

So: Universe 2, Diaz women 0 for this episode.

Elsewhere in Litchfield (and beyond)

* Blanca is still standing on that table in the cafeteria, two days after CO Stratman ordered her there. She’s already wet herself twice, and she can’t keep her eyes open. “I’m up, ogre man,” she tells Piscatella when he rouses her awake. Stratman’s second-guessing his decision — he asks if Caputo is cool with it — but Piscatella tells him that they have to keep up this game of Chicken and that Blanca will break soon. She doesn’t, though, and when her fellow inmates try to sneak drinks to her, Piscatella warns them that the next person caught doing so will be made to crawl back to her bunk. “Flores is not a martyr, people,” he tells them. “She’s a normal, regular criminal.”

Related: ‘Orange Is the New Black’ Episode 8 Recap: Window Dressing

Chapman puts a granola bar down on the table for her, and when CO Dixon spots her in action, he doesn’t make Piper crawl to her bunk … he makes her join Blanca on the table.

* Sister Ingalls is in SHU and making every effort to see Sophia. When she wanders by the other cell doors as she’s taken out of her cell for exercise, she calls out Sophia’s name, telling the guard she has a nervous tick. She uses the SHU’s intricate and clever system of string and paper clip delivery to get a message to her she writes on a torn-out page of her Bible. And there’s her plan to take a cellphone photo of Sophia for evidence, but when a female guard leads her to the shower, she sneezes as she’s about to get cuffed, and the cellphone falls out … of its hiding place … on her body. She’s busted, and Caputo visits her to tell her so, taking the phone with him. But when he walks by Sophia’s cell, he slides the window open and takes a photo of her with Sister Ingalls’ phone. After reading Danny Pearson’s dannytalkstruth.com blog and a story about how MCC bribes judges to incarcerate more inmates — i.e., profit — Caputo secretly meets with Danny and hands the phone that was “up a nun’s vagina” (an outdated model phone that doesn’t have Internet) over to him so he can publish the photo of Sophia.

As for Sister Ingalls, she’s not enjoying her stay in SHU any more than Sophia is, but when she asks Caputo how long she’ll have to stay there, he doesn’t answer her.

* Red is happy that Nicky has committed to getting off drugs again, but to help her, she tries to make sure that no one at Litchfield will sell drugs to Nicky, including Maria and her crew and Angie. So Red is surprised when Nicky rolls into movie night obviously high and, as Morello points out, reeking of reefer. She got a joint from Luschek after getting him to confess that he’s in love with her and that he had sex with Judy King so she’d pay her lawyers to get Nicky moved from Max back to Litchfield.

* It’s confirmed: Maritza ate the baby mouse after psycho CO Humphrey put a gun to her head. Stratman and McCullough see her coming out of the bathroom, after hearing her hurl. Stratman says he saw Humphrey taking Maritza to his cabin. McCullough points out it’s too soon for her to be pregnant, but they both suspect something bad happened, possibly rape, yet Stratman tells her they — the COs — all have to stick together, because they’re a “brotherhood,” even her.

Maritza, obviously shaken by what she was forced to do, tells BFF Flaca about it. They break down in tears about how the inmates are all at the mercy of Piscatella and his terrorizing guards, as Flaca says what Humphrey made Maritza do is like “some Hannibal Lecter sh*t.”

* Suzanne and Morello are mopping near Lolly’s time machine in the laundry room, and it makes them both think about moments they’d like to revisit. Morello wants to go back to her wedding day with Vinnie, when “our brains weren’t distracted or suspicious,” i.e., when they were both swept up in their new romance, and the realities of day-to-day life in a marriage that includes half of the couple being incarcerated weren’t so harshly realistic. Suzanne is also thinking about romance, namely how she regrets skipping out on Kukudio the night they were going to do “the dance with no pants,” as she puts it, in the broom closet. “What if I missed my only chance to get physical with another person?” she wonders. Morello tells her she doesn’t need a time machine … she just needs to talk to Kukudio about booking some more time in the broom closet.

Suzanne does, suggesting a do-over to Kukudio. During movie night, they make eye contact, and Kukudio slips off to the closet, with Suzanne right behind her. Kukudio makes the first move and just as Suzanne’s about to go to her happy place, Kukudio stops. “So you know what it feels like to be abandoned in the middle of the woods,” she tells Crazy Eyes. “You hurt my feelings, Suzanne.”

* Before the movie night screening of The Wiz, the most controversy the film causes is discussion among Taystee and her friends about what a lousy movie it is. Taystee loves it; Judy King defends Diana Ross’s performance; everyone else hates it. But when it unspools during movie night, it sparks hateful comments from the white supremacists, who use the vile words you would imagine they would use, so no need to repeat them here. The tensions heat up until the room appears to be on the verge of violence, prompting Coates and Bayley, the only guards in the room at the time, to turn off the projector and send everyone back to their bunks. This is a situation that presumably is only going to get uglier before the season ends.

* This isn’t going to be good for anyone, not Lolly, who has already confessed to a murder; not Alex, who actually is responsible for the death; not Frieda, who’s involved with everything but the actual murder; and not Red, who not only has knowledge of the entire crime, but who also just lost her beloved garden: an issue with the new dorm construction forces Piscatella to give Leon the OK to reroute the project, right through the greenhouse and garden. And when the backhoe digs into the ground, Leon spots a giant garbage bag he asks the driver to dump. He opens it and pulls out a hand. Aydin’s hand.

Questions: We got a few

* What will Red do to Luschek if she finds out he’s giving Nicky drugs?

* Why was Kukudio plucking her knee when Suzanne visited her bunk to ask her about trying their broom closet date again?

* Is there any way Daya isn’t going to get swept up in Maria’s drug business somehow? Even if it’s guilt by association…

She said, he said

“Last week, we released this other Hispanic girl at midnight … she didn’t have a ride, so she was just walking on the side of the road. I guess she was trying to hitchhike, but a townie thought she was a prostitute and called the cops. She got picked up, brought right back to prison. Or jail, actually. Started in prison, ended in jail.” — CO McCullough, bidding farewell to Aleida when she’s about to be released and prompting Gloria to tell her, “You don’t got another story you could tell her today? Sh*t.”

“Must be a button down there.” — Maria, to Red, about Piscatella, when Red says it’s usually small men who act like him, but he’s practically a building … so what is he compensating for with his evil behavior?

“But I gathered the haters together, and then I angled them towards the Dominicans.” — Piper, after Alex says she didn’t create white hate at Litchfield.

“It’s not a window. It’s a reminder to stay out of other peoples’ sh*t.” — Alex to Piper, who remarks that she kinda likes her scar, since Red turned the swastika into a window.

“I don’t know what poison you and your hillbilly friends are peddling, but if you sell any of it to Nichols, you will never know what’s really in your food, and I assure you I can slip in untold horrors.” — Red, advising (threatening) Angie not to give Nicky any more drugs.

“Now, ease on out of here.” — Caputo to Taystee, after she persuades him to show The Wiz at movie night.

“He’s just our weirdo, roach-liquefying kid brother.” — Stratman, to McCullough, telling her that they have to protect fellow CO Humphrey, as part of their “brotherhood.” This comes after he told her about Humphrey spotting a cockroach and, instead of stepping on it, putting it into a blender to kill it.

“The emotions were fictional, but the science was real.” — Suzanne, when Morello says she thought The Time Hump Chronicles was fictional.

“F***in’ Morgan Freeman.” — Skinhead Helen, to her fellow white supremacists, after one of them suggests that they have their own film festival “that celebrates the accomplishments of white people,” only to have someone else point out that would be hard, because “Morgan Freeman’s in everything.”

“What happens in the corn stays in the corn.” — Nicky to Chapman, after Chapman apologizes to her for enabling her addiction when she and Alex smoked crack with her in the cornfield.

“If you might, maybe, perhaps want to try the broom closet thing again, I might, maybe, perhaps be open to it.” — Suzanne’s smooth wooing of Kukudio.

“The next time you care to express something to me, you can write me a letter and then shove it up your tight, little heinie.” — Piscatella to Chapman, after she tells him about her “moral outrage” over how Blanca is being treated.

“Bunny, skull, bunny, skull.” — Ouija to Daya, who offers to use the nail polish Aleida left for her to make some cool designs, like bunnies, on Ouija’s manicure. Ouija’s OK with the bunnies, as long as they’re interspersed with skulls, hence the title of the episode. Daya also witnesses a drug deal go down in the salon while she’s hanging with her new friends, but she stays in the room anyway.

“Not a hand so much as other body parts.” — Luschek, when Nicky asks if he had a hand in getting her transferred from Max back to Litchfield.

“Only a sh*t-for-brains, fu**tard alcoholic falls for a card-carrying lesbo.” — Nicky to Luschek, when she realizes he helped her because he has feelings for her.

“You ever feel like a person without a country?” — Former white supremacist Pennsatucky to Coates, realizing she doesn’t have much in common with any of the warring cliques inside the prison.

“She’s not only fair-skinned, but she’s fair-weathered.” — Watson, about Judy King, after Judy comes to movie night, only to leave as soon as she witnesses the racial tension among the inmates.

Behind bars

* The song playing at the end, right after Leon finds Aydin’s hand in a bag: “Hand in Mine” by Jonathan Rado.

* Anyone else bummed that dannytalkstruth.com isn’t a real blog? Either as a mirror of the blog Caputo reads, or as a curator of real-life stories related to topics on the show, like the recent 35,000-word feature by the Mother Jones reporter who went undercover as a guard at a private, MCC-ish prison.

‘Orange Is the New Black’ Season 4 is streaming on Netflix