‘Orange Is the New Black’ Season 4, Episode 6 Recap: ‘I Took Care of You, Now You Are Gonna Take Care of Me’

Warning: This recap for the “Piece of Sh*t” episode of Orange Is the New Black contains spoilers.

Things just got serious, ya’ll. Much of the fourth season, so far, has been heavy on the comedy side of Orange Is the New Black, with Uzo Aduba and Kate Mulgrew already proving they should be among the 2017 Emmy contenders, and everyone from Lolly and Frieda to Black Cindy and Morello giving us dozens of laugh out loud moments.

But as we hit what’s essentially the halfway point of the season, there’s a dramatic shift to, well, the dramatics, and this installment was downright heartbreaking — necessitating multiple tissues — for several characters. If there’s a theme to “Pieces of Sh*t,” it’s this: Those in charge of taking care of the inmates at Litchfield have not only failed in their basic duties, but have, and continue to in some cases, acted in ways that were to the direct detriment of the prisoners.

Related: ‘Orange is the New Black’ Episode 5 Recap: Of Grand Theft Auto and Shower Poopers

Up first, but in no way least: Luscheck, the prison’s head electrician. He arrives at work — via a ride from a friend, because his motorcycle has been impounded and his truck has been booted — to find his mailbox stuffed with hate mail. They’re letters from Nicky Nichols, the beloved Litchfield inmate who was sent down the hill to the maximum security prison after Caputo found a bag of heroin in Luschek’s desk and he pinned it on Nicky. Among Nicky’s missives to Luschek: “Roast in Hell, like the fat pig you are.” And “F**k you, you piece of s**t.” And, “I hope you choke on Caputo’s dingleberries.” Luschek is upset by the letters, because, even though he insists he did nothing wrong when he’s relating the story to new friend Judy King, he has some feelings of remorse about what happened to Nicky. Well, a feeling: guilt. Judy encourages him to go visit Nicky and apologize, try to make things right.

Nicky, meanwhile, is holding on to her sobriety by her fingertips in Max, earning her three-year chip in the prison AA meeting, but having to hand it over the minute she exits the meeting, as it’s considered contraband. She’s working on the janitorial assignment, which includes mopping the floors in the SHU, where she sees Sophia. Sophia is not doing well, can’t sleep, and begs Nicky to bring her a blanket the next time she’s there. Nicky can’t, she says; she’s trying to stay out of trouble herself, and the guards would just take it away when they saw it.

She does slide a magazine to Sophia under the door, encouraging her to read every word, slowly, even the ads, to keep her mind occupied. Sophia is grateful for the kindness, as she worries that her sleeplessness will continue and she will go insane. But Nicky’s about to get a push in that direction herself: Luschek, more motivated by his own guilt than the desire to make her feel better, shows up during Max visiting hours to see her. She’s not pleased: “Hey, f**kwad,” is her exact response. “You know, you put me in a really crappy position, Nichols. I almost lost my job because of you,” is among Luschek’s actual statements, before he tells her he’s sorry… “that things ended up the way that they did. I’m sure it’s not great down here.”

“No, Luschek, things aren’t great,” she tells him. “Let’s see, I’m sober, so that’s something… hardest f**king thing I’ve ever done and, oh, yeah, I picked a hell of a time to do it considering that anything you want down here is available to you and less than a foot away at practically all times. What else, what else? Let me catch you up, I have no family, I am completely alone. I have no friends. And it’s all my fault, so thank you for coming all the way down here and reminding me of all that, while also managing to conveniently clear your own conscience.”

Luschek realizes he made things worse, so he tells Judy he’s considering confessing the truth to Caputo. She tells him that’s a dumb idea, and takes matters into her own hands. The next time she sees Luschek, she’s in her room. She tells him she, well, she and her high-priced attorney, took care of the situation: Nicky will be returned to their little corner of the world shortly. Luschek is thrilled, until he finds out what Judy wants in return for the favor: him, in her bed, now.

Meanwhile, at the Max, Nicky is again mopping the SHU, when a guard tells her to go inside Sophia’s cell and clean it. When she enters, the cell is empty, save the magazine, torn up, she had given Sophia earlier. The walls are also covered in a red substance that looks like blood, and when the guard won’t tell her what happened to Sophia, she’s shaken. This, combined with her visit from Luschek, leads her back to old patterns; looks like she’s going to be starting over in her next AA meeting, because she makes a deal with a female guard to trade sex for a packet of drugs.

All before she gets the news that she’s being transferred back to her old stomping grounds with Red and Morello and the rest of her friends.

And because Luschek truly is so selfish and rotten that his guilt about Nicky doesn’t change a single thing about how he treats the other inmates, he’s taught some of them how to install illegal cable, which he’s having them do at Charlie Coates’s guard bungalow on the Litchfield campus. Gina Murphy cuts her hand with a rusty wire cutter (given to her by Luschek) in the process, and when she runs inside to tell him she’s bleeding and needs to go to medical, he tells her to wait until he’s done with his soccer videogame. “One more scar is not gonna change your world,” he her. She calls him a piece of s**t, and he threatens to have her sent to the SHU, but someone jumps in on her behalf. Coates!

“Hey man, she needs to go to medical,” he tells Luschek, who resists.

“If she’s telling you she needs something, you need to listen to her. They’re people, for Chrissake!” Coates yells at him. “It’s our job to take care of these women. Do your f**king job! You’re not listening to her!”

Luschek thinks Coates is joking, until he kicks him out of his home. Coates, man. Whether or not he truly understands what he did to Pennsatucky, he clearly heard what she said to him, and what she told him about how he made her feel. As for Luschek, he’s shamed into taking Murphy to medical. “Let’s go, tetanus,” he tells her, before asking Coates to give them a ride.

Luschek; Coates; the female guard at the Max who exchanged drugs for sex from Nicky; Piscatella profiling the Latinas and having his guards do stop-and-frisks on inmates like Hapakuku, who has to pull her pants down in public; the newbie guards at Litchfield who get wasted before their shifts; and Joe Caputo, who continues to allow Sophia to be unjustly locked away in solitary confinement… each has failed in his or her duties to keep the inmates safe.

Elsewhere in Litchfield (and beyond):

* Sam Healy is another Litchfield employee who has certainly let his personal beliefs get in the way of helping inmates who needed it. But we’re reminded in this episode that, while his history with his mother’s illness can make him behave in abominable ways, it can also make him be an incredibly kind man. After calming down Lolly last week and (with good intentions, but falsely) assuring her she didn’t kill anyone, Healy takes a walk with her around the Litchfield track, asking about her life and sharing a bit about his. He tells her his mother, who was “like her,” loved a particular episode of The Twilight Zone, where a married couple woke up one morning trapped in a fake town. It turned out they had been kidnapped and were now the playthings of a giant girl, living in her dollhouse. His mother, Healy says, “would always say that that’s how it felt, like she was locked in a fake world that no one else was a part of, even though it looked exactly the same.”

Lolly: “Yeah, I got a lot of prisons in my life, sir. I got the literal one — duh — I got the one where I’m on my meds and I can’t feel anything… that is not so great. Then, I have the worst one, the prison that I’m usually livin’ in, and there’s all these people, and they’re talkin’ and talkin’ and talkin’, and they cannot agree on what is the truth. That’s like that episode!”

* After reading the book ReWarden Yourself by Kip Carnigan, the prison expert he met at CorrectiCon, Caputo has a “career-defining” idea. He thinks he can make life at Litchfield better for the women (and make a name for himself) by offering them life skills “enrichment” classes, so their time is more productively occupied, and so they have some means to be more productive outside prison. Linda tells him it sounds too expensive, and that MCC would never allow “one of those fruity liberal arts colleges” inside the prison. But Caputo’s got it covered: He’ll have the guards trained to teach the classes. The guards! The ones who get drunk on raw eggs and Jäger shots every morning before they report to work. Yes, Joe Caputo, you are certainly shooting for a whole sky full of stars there.

* Black Cindy and Abdullah make up when they bond over their interest in the Scientology book Going Clear and their shared belief that Tupac is not dead. Their new friendship also allows Taystee’s moneymaking scheme to move forward, since Abdullah will now allow them to use her contraband cell phone to snap photos of Judy King, which they plan to sell to celebrity magazines.

* Chapman’s plan to squash Maria’s used panty business by getting Piscatella and the guards to profile all the Latina inmates starts to backfire when her minions, the racist ones who are only too happy to have a chance to focus negative attention on the Latinas, tell CO Dixon they have heard rumors about a used panty business, with used drawers fetching $700 a pair outside the jail. Chapman looks concerned, but only after a worried Boo talks to her does she realize she needs to take further action.

“Now we come to the point in our journey where it’s time for you to think about someone other than yourself,” Boo says. “You brought people into this. You’re responsible for us. If you wanna wear the crown, you gotta be willing to fall on your sword.”

Later, Maria is called into Piscatella’s office, where he busts her for the illegal used panty business. She says Chapman’s the one running that game, but Piscatella doesn’t buy it, telling her Chapman is the one who started the task force that uncovered Maria’s business. Oh, and Piscatella’s going to recommend the judge add three to five more years to Maria’s sentence because of it.

But Boo’s “falling on your sword” words might not have been so far off, because when Maria sees Chapman in the yard, she tells her, “I am going to bury you. You’re never coming back from this. Never.”

And then Maria tells her crew she’s just decided: They’re going all in on another business: selling drugs.

Questions: We Got a Few

* Is Sophia OK? Where is she? Was that blood on the walls of her cell?

* Healy tells Lolly his mom is “fine” when she asks about her. Is she? Is she even still alive? Or was that simply a kind little white lie to make Lolly feel better?

* “Your parents named you Baxter Bayley? That sounds like a cartoon dog name,” Luscheck says to CO Bayley, who shared earlier in the season that his dad is obsessed with dyeing dogs to look like other animals. Did he really then name his son just to make him sound like Deputy Dawg or Huckleberry Hound or some other similarly alliterative animated pooch?

* Judy King is wickedly funny, but is she really just a female version of Luschek? Is that why she’s attracted to him?

* How are the women going to react when they find out how lame Caputo’s “enrichment” classes plan is? He visits them in the rec room, where they pepper him with complaints about lack of job opportunities so they can buy the things they need from the commissary. He tells them he has some “exciting new educational opportunities” coming for them, which sparks DeMarco to start chanting, “Caputo! Caputo!” But again, what are they going to be chanting when they find out his big idea is to have his current crop of dumba** guards do the teaching?

She Said, He Said

“This valueless piece of crappy plastic really means a lot to me… symbolism, etcetera. I’m proud of myself.” — Nicky, after accepting her three-year sobriety chip during the Max AA meeting.

“Panty Galore.” — The nickname Maritza gives herself after Maria tells her that was some “James Bond level s**t” she pulled off in getting the used panties to Maria’s cousin without getting caught.

“This has been moderately to minimally helpful. Thank you, inmates.” — CO Lee Dixon to a group of inmates who squeal about a series of small infractions and blame it on the Latina inmates.

“Pizza, daisies, smelly markers, any animal, a really good dream, a warm bath, picking a booger (a dry one), pizza, graham crackers and icing sandwiches, the feeling you get when you make a really good joke and someone laughs in a nice way, not a mean way…” — Suzanne, answering Taystee’s rhetorical question, “You know what’s better than being famous?”

“There was some family medical history I didn’t want to pass on.” — Healy’s sad explanation to Lolly of why he never had children.

“The me that I used to be wanted them, but considering our present situation, it’s probably good that I didn’t make any more little Lolly-pops.” — Lolly’s equally sad reason why she hasn’t had children.

“I need the dead man’s keys.” — Red, to Frieda, asking for the guards keys Frieda kept as her payment for moving Ayden’s body for Alex and Lolly. Red uses them to get into the medical center, apparently, because she has a bottle of pills, and the one she takes when bunkmate Dwight starts snoring again knocks her out for 19 hours (and counting). A rumor even spreads that she might be dead (leading Aleida to call dibs on her glasses she keeps around her neck on a string).

“Are you gonna keep dancing over there like a little girl who has to pee, or are you gonna come over here and tell me what’s wrong?” — Judy King to Luschek

“‘Everybody deserves kindness?’ What do you think I am? Some black granny knitting on a porch in Savannah? Come on. Stop whining in my kitchen and go figure this out.” — Judy to Luschek

“You are a straight, white man. You don’t get to be the victim, sweetie.” – Judy to Luschek.

“I really don’t like feelings.” — Luschek, after visiting Nicky and making her life worse.

“I took care of you. Now you are gonna take care of me, Butterscotch.” — Judy King’s chilling words to Luschek, letting him know she expects sex in return for getting Nicky transferred back to their part of the prison.

Behind Bars:

* Ah, the paparazzi! That’s who’s flying the drones over Litchfield! To get pics of Judy King, Taystee points out, much to Crazy Eyes’s disappointment. She thought the drones were an indication that aliens were coming.

* The Twilight Zone episode Healy describes to Lolly is “Stopover in a Quiet Town,” and it was written by Earl Hamner, Jr., the creator of The Waltons.

* Judy King’s Maldon salt, which she uses in her freshly whipped butter cooking class… it’s a thing.

* Nicky isn’t the only blast from Season 3 we see in Max… Chapman’s ex, Stella, the one she framed in order to get her sent to Max, had a fling with Nicky, and is now going through her own battle with drugs.

* End credits song: “You Know Me Well” by Sharon Van Etten.

Orange Is the New Black Season 4 is streaming on Netflix.