‘Orange Is the New Black’ Season 4, Episode 11 Recap: So Sad It’s Almost Supernatural

Photos: Netflix

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

Here it is, the rest of the Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren backstory, the one you were so sure you wanted, the one you may be sorry you know now. Like so much of this season, it is devastating.

Suzanne, 28-year-old Suzanne, was a greeter at a Wal-Mart-ish store called Super Emporium. She was genuinely a super enthusiastic employee, even remembering the names of one regular customer and the names of her children. For her efforts, Suzanne’s manager named her employee of the month — complete with certificate suitable for framing — and she was proud to show the award to her sister and roommate, Grace.

But when Suzanne noticed Grace was packing her clothes, she panicked. Grace and her boyfriend Brad wanted just one weekend to themselves, for a trip; every other weekend, Grace reminded Suzanne, was spent with her. Suzanne worried she wasn’t ready to be left alone, but Grace told her she would leave her with a schedule, a fridge full of food, and her video games. Maybe she could even make some friends, Grace suggested. Suzanne said that’s not so easy. “Sure it is,” Brad said. “You’re a people person… you’re employee of the month!”

Related: ‘Orange is the New Black’ Episode 10 Recap: Give Yourself a Hand

On her own for the weekend, Suzanne, who’s at her most childlike state in the flashbacks, took Grace and Brad’s suggestion to make new friends to heart and went to a nearby park. She stood along a bike/walk path and tried to connect with people by greeting them the way she did at the Super Emporium, which only resulted in her getting strange looks from people unaccustomed to – and leery of – such friendliness from strangers in a park. But then Suzanne spotted a familiar face: Dylan, the youngest brother from the family she greeted regularly at Super Emporium.

He showed her his cool new truck, and they chatted about his brothers, who preferred killing ants and “putting Tiger Balm on their wieners” to playing with trucks. Suzanne asked him if he was allowed to eat popsicles, and when nodded, she told him she had some back at her house.

In her apartment, Suzanne and Dylan were playing video games, and all seemed well until she made a comment about Dylan spending the whole weekend. He said he should call his dad, which sparked Suzanne’s idea to make prank phone calls, and she didn’t pick up on the fact that Dylan was starting to get scared. When she went to her closet to pick out a selection from her cape collection, Dylan did make a call — to 911. She told him you’re only supposed to call 911 in the case of an emergency – information she shared as one child would to another – and he ran for the door and started to unlock it. Suzanne was angered; she still didn’t understand that Dylan had begun to feel threatened, and she lashed out at him for turning on her, as a friend. “I am not the bad guy here, Dylan, and it really hurts my feelings,” she yelled, frightening him ever further. “You do not run away from your friends!”

With her blocking the front door, he ran the other way, towards a window. He opened it and climbed out onto a fire escape, with Suzanne following him. As she stood at the window reaching for him, grabbing for him, he backed away, closer and closer to the edge of the fire escape — until he fell over the railing and onto the ground.

Elsewhere in Litchfield (and beyond):

• Blanca and Piper are still standing on a cafeteria table as punishment for defying the guards when an alarm is sounded and the whole prison is put on lockdown after Aydin’s body — the chopped up parts of Aydin’s body, that is —are found in the garden. Blanca and Piper, along with the rest of the inmates, are sent to their bunk areas, while Piscatella does some defying of his own and ignores Caputo’s order to wait for the FBI to arrive the next morning and investigate the body parts. Piscatella orders his guards to keep everyone in line and round up the files of a list of inmates he considers suspects. He also calls the suspects in, one by one, to a dark room lit only with a desk lamp, to interrogate them.

* Alex is freaking out about the discovery of Aydin’s body, of course, but Red warns her and Piper to “pretend this doesn’t concern you,” and to meet at Frieda’s bunk in an hour. The senior women are playing pinochle when Alex and Piper arrive, and they warn the younger ones to say nothing, should they be questioned. They also advise them not to engage with Lolly at all.

* When Luschek is assigned to guard Judy King during the lockdown, she sees it as an opportunity for more frisky time. He refuses at first, telling her it wouldn’t be professional — and we all know Luschek is a model of professionalism — but when she mentions she got her hands on some Molly, and that she’d like to share it with him, he changes his mind. Flash forward: Judy starts making out with Yoga Jones and Luschek joins in. Flash forward again: Yoga and Luschek look miserable and regretful post-ménage à trois, while Judy sits at a table, drinking tea, eating grapes, and chuckling about something she’s just read.

* In “The Ghetto” dorms, Black Cindy, Taystee, Alison and some of the other women are dancing the night away, since they’ve been told the lights will remain on all night. Dixon and McCullough are assigned to guard the dorm, and when she asks him if they should make them stop dancing — she thinks it’s inappropriate because someone is dead — he tells her not to work harder than she has to. “They give me this post all the time, because they know that I know how to talk to ‘them,’” he tells McCullough. “Because I’m from Memphis. You see that dance they’re doing? I can do that dance.” McCullough’s unimpressed, and when a radio call comes in for one of them to take Suzanne to Piscatella, she volunteers quickly.

Taystee, the unofficial Crazy Eyes Whisperer, tries to find out why Suzanne is being taken away and when she’ll be brought back, but neither McCullough nor Dixon will tell her. When a worried Taystee asks Dixon again later, he tosses a racial insult at her. She sarcastically tosses it back, and he demands her watch — the one she loves, the one she convinced Caputo to buy for her — drops it on the ground, and repeatedly crushes it beneath his boot. “Now you don’t need to worry about what time it is,” he tells her.

* The lockdown makes for one initially strange pairing that soon makes sense. Pennsatucky walks by Nicky’s bunk, and Nicky’s having a particularly tough time trying to detox. For one, she has no option… there’s no opportunity for her to get her hands on drugs with the lockdown situation. Also, her friends are scattered — Red, Alex, and Piper have bigger, dead-body-found-in-the-garden concerns in their faces at the moment — and Pennsatucky notices she may be in need of some “distraction from yourself.” They chat, and Pennsatucky helps Nicky through a night of detoxing sickness, even offering Nicky the use of her basket — the one she’s been so proudly weaving with various pieces of garbage from around the prison.

* Piscatella brings Red in for an interrogation (and she’s the only one of her crew who is questioned), but probably doesn’t suspect she’s going to be as cool a customer as she is. He tries to rattle her by mentioning details from her file: “When the police raided your place, the five people they found in your freezer… did you cut them up, too?” He tells her people don’t change — he knows, because his mom sent him to a gay conversion camp — and he assumes the only reason she ended up in a minimum security prison is because her Russian mob friends paid for a very good attorney. While this is certainly making me want another Red backstory episode ASAP, Red makes it clear she is not impressed with Piscatella’s interrogation skills. She tells him he can torture her, waterboard her, and maybe they could break her down so far she would actually confess, but it wouldn’t mean anything. “And it certainly won’t prove you’re any kind of detective,” she tells him. “We already know you’re not, otherwise, you wouldn’t be working here. What was it? Were you not smart enough? Or did they just not want a fairy on the force?”

It’s a smug comeback, and it gets to Piscatella. But seconds later, his guards come in and show him the results of the bunk toss and kitchen office search he’d ordered on Red. Behind a file cabinet in her office, they found a set of keys, the ones Red had borrowed from Freida, who got them off Aydin’s body when she found him in the greenhouse. “Would you look at that?” Piscatella says, laughing and holding up the keys. “Looks like I won’t be needing that confession after all.”

* As if you didn’t already want CO Humphrey – he of the gun-to-the-head, baby mouse-eating torture of Maritza – to suffer the fate of a Game of Thrones supervillain, he and Stratman decide to amuse themselves by creating their own version of Fight Club inside the room where the women waiting to be interrogated by Piscatella are being kept. Maria, Ouija, Sankey, Skinhead Helen, Kukudio, and Suzanne are among them, and when Humphrey knocks a sleeping Sankey off her chair and the whole room laughs, she focuses her anger on Suzanne. Humphrey eggs her on, telling her she can hit Suzanne without punishment from them. Sankey backs down, saying she doesn’t want to hit a “retard.”

“But she laughed at you … you’re gonna let some black retard laugh at you like that?” Humphrey says.

Sankey tells him to back off, that she’s not interested in fighting, but he doesn’t care. A fight is going to happen, and when Kukudio stands up and says she’ll fight Suzanne, Humphrey announces, “Start placing your bets boys. We got a fight!”

Suzanne also does not want to fight, and doesn’t even understand how this happened. But the other inmates and the guards have formed a circle around her and Kukudio, and they’re yelling at her, and pushing her towards her ex-girlfriend. Kukudio is also trying to rile up Suzanne, saying cruel things that cut right to the heart of Suzanne’s fears about herself. “You don’t know how romance works. You don’t even know how people work,” Kukudio taunts. “You’ll always be the person everybody laughs at.

Suzanne, who’s been yelling “Stop it!” over and over again, finally breaks down. She punches Kukudio in the face, and then tackles her to the ground. With the crowd, including those rotten guards, cheering her on, she continues whaling on Kukudio until Kukudio isn’t even attempting to fight back, and blood is flying everywhere. When even the other inmates get the sense this could turn into a fight to the death, their cheers stop, and Maria and Ouija pull Suzanne off Kukudio and try to soothe her in a corner. Stratman has a look on his face that suggests he realizes he allowed the situation to go too far, but instigator Humphrey just announces that he won $20.

* Healy is shaken when he hears about the body in the garden, and his mind goes to Lolly, who had confessed the exact crime to him. Though all staff members have been asked to remain on campus, a panicked Healy takes off. He gets King Kone ice cream, wanders along a beach, and after making a rambling call to his estranged mail order bride Katya, in which he says he doesn’t think he’s very good at his job, he drops his cell phone on the ground and walks into a lake, fully clothed. He’s chest-deep when his cell rings, and he goes back to the beach to answer it. It’s work, not Katya, and Healy finally returns to Litchfield and ends the string of interrogations Piscatella is enjoying way too much. Healy shares the story Lolly told him, and helps the guards find her in her time machine. “I’m just trying to travel back in time, back before I killed that guy,” Lolly tells Healy, before he helps the guards escort her to the psych ward.

“Mr. Healy, did we travel back in time?” she asks when they get to the admitting desk.

“No, not this time,” he tells her.

“That’s okay,” she says. “We’ll just keep trying.”

But when the guards take her all the way into the ward, Healy stands on the other side of the door. Lolly looks at the other psych patients, including one being strapped to a bed, and begins screaming for Healy. He stands at the door shaking, and tearing up.

Questions: We Got a Few

* Alex was about to turn herself in to Piscatella when Healy told him about Lolly. But if Alex was having trouble dealing with what she did to Aydin, who was at Litchfield only to kill her, how’s she going to live with herself now that Lolly has taken all the blame for Aydin’s death?

* Red’s also off the hook for Aydin’s murder now that Lolly is doing time in the psych ward, but Piscatella was way too happy to find those keys to prison facilities in her kitchen office. No way he’s letting that opportunity to nail her for something pass, right?

* Speaking of Red, Piscatella’s reveal about the five chopped up bodies found in her freezer… do we think Red is responsible for those murders, or did she take the fall for her mob cohorts, who liked to use the Reznikov family’s market to store corpses?

She Said, He Said

“Until sh*t gets complicated, and then you’re ghosting.” — Black Cindy to Judy King, questioning Judy’s loyalty when she lies and tells Cindy and friends she fell asleep and missed The Wiz movie night… they saw her enter movie night and then quickly leave when the racial tensions nearly led to a fight.

“Orange juice, toothpaste, AR-15 assault rifle.” — Super Emporium greeter Suzanne, checking off items from a customer’s receipt as he leaves the store.

“She doesn’t like it when I talk too much, sing, or tell knock-knock jokes, or do plays where the actors are my fingers.” — Suzanne, telling her manager the things she does that annoy her sister.

“Four murders in a year. That was a crazy year.” — Freida, when Piper asks about her criminal record. How badly do you want to see Freida’s backstory?! She’s been one of Season 4’s biggest scene stealers.

“How fortuitous that this night shift should just fall into your lap. What else might fall into your lap I wonder …” — Judy King hitting on Luschek after he’s assigned by Piscatella to guard her in her room during the lockdown.

“Are you kidding me? Kukudio is a suspect, and I’m not? I killed a cop with his own gun. Wait … did I get caught for that? I’m getting old.” — Freida, upset that she’s not called in for an interrogation by Piscatella.

“If I don’t get enough sleep, my circadian rhythm gets off, and I’m tired during the day… I get the eyesie-closies and the head-nod, sleepy-jerk wakies.” — Suzanne, explaining why she’s trying to sleep with the lights on and her bunkmates dancing.

“Once, I woke up from a shift with no pants on.” — Coates to Bayley regarding the prison’s supernatural atmosphere, though viewers know Coates was de-pantsed during an ultimately abandoned Boo plot to get revenge on Coates for raping Pennsatucky.

“That’s why you called me down here? To brief me on what not to say?” — Caputo to MCC honcho Jack Pearson, when Caputo realizes MCC execs don’t care about the dead body found at Litchfield as much as they care about what Caputo says when the FBI interviews him the next day.

“You might be the only person I’ve ever met who actually is better for going to prison. Why is that?” — Nicky to Pennsatucky, who answers, “I think I’m smarter because I stopped doing drugs.”

Behind Bars:

* Song at the end of the episode: Deqn Sue’s “Bloody Monster,” a song that’s appropriate for many reasons, including that the singer wrote the tune after her roommate aimed a hateful racist word at her, and because “bloody monster” could apply to so many characters this season.

Orange Is the New Black Season 4 is streaming on Netflix