10 Reasons Why Orange Is The New Black S3 Sucked

So I’m a little late to the party here as Season 3 of the Orange is the New Black was released on Netflix around two months ago, but since I have found myself horribly disappointed I thought it was still worth writing about. Here are 10 reasons why Orange is The New Black season 3 sucked.

NB. May contain spoilers for those who are yet to watch this season.

1. The lesbian scenes disappeared

Now this one is glaringly obvious, and I don’t want to sound crude, but where did all the lesbian scenes go? One of the ‘highlights’, for lack of a better word, of Orange Is The New Black is the fact that it is full of debauched lesbian prison antics. It was part of the appeal of the show, it made it fresh and slightly ‘shocking’.

The lesbian element was undoubtedly something that the show was known for and I’m disappointed that the producers let that slide this season. Towards the end of the series, there were a few more of such scenes, but most of them were quite rough and seemed fairly irrelevant. There’s even a rape scene which doesn’t get the attention it deserves at all and I didn’t think it was treated quite as seriously as it should have been.

2. Piper got weird 

Piper undergoes a sort of ‘transformation’ in this series, even further than the blonde rich girl to prison lesbian transformation. In this season, Piper turns badass, and by badass, I mean she tries to turn to badass. I mean tattoos and everything – this girl was really going for it. She even started up an illegal business from inside a prison. She basically tried to set herself up as the new big dog in prison, the new Red or the new V.

But I don’t think anyone was convinced. Sure she did some really bitchy and cold-hearted things but she most certainly did not give off the same aura of authority as either of the previous prison big dogs.

3. Things suddenly got so easy for some characters

Speaking of this illegal business that Piper started – why was it all so easy for her to set up? When Red was trying to smuggle things in and out of the prison, it was a long and hard process. I mean, tunnels were dug for crying out loud, but sure when Piper tries to do something similar, things just fall into place.

Also, Morello starts talking to strange men via letter, creates a fake identity for herself and then somehow gets her dream and ends up married by the end of the season. Not just that but she ends up consummating the marriage as the guards turn a blind eye.

4. They brought Alex back again.

I thought we’d got rid of her – why did they bring her back? And why did they make it so easy? The series starts off with Alex back and she seem.. I hate it when shows get rid of a major character in a highly dramatic way and then bring them back as if nothing had happened, just to keep the ratings up – well, my friend, your ratings are going down.

5. Brooke Soso tried to take her own life but nobody knew about it and then suddenly she was accepted by the black community.

Brooke Soso actually became a fairly significant character in this series, with her problems being developed in pretty much every episode. Hers was probably one of the only storylines that developed well and then came to a climax near the end of the series. Brooke tries to take her own life but then is saved and nursed back to health by Taystee and Poussey.

I know that both these characters are nicer than your average inmate but to go out of your way to help someone you don’t know/like, instead of just reporting her to the guards, seems a little implausible. At the end of the series, Brooke is even accepted into the Black community, without much of a stir, which is strange given how important the group segregation is in prison.

6. They tried to make it ‘controversial’ by bringing in trans issues

I felt like the trans issues in this series were very forced. It is a well known fact that Sophia is a transgender black woman who is accepted by the prison community. Why did they have to go and turn everything upside down by suddenly making everyone transphobic? It was completely unnecessary, completely implausible and COMPLETELY UNRESOLVED.

7. What was up with the flashbacks?

Usually the flashbacks in Orange is the New Black actually add to the story and help us to understand the characters and their actions all the more. Whilst the did do this in some cases, the majority of the time they did not.

Quite a lot of time was dedicated to Chang’s past in the first half of the series and I was convinced that something major was going to happen to her – but no. She continued to work in the commissary, we never found out how she ended up in prison and nothing happened.

The same goes for Brooke Soso. She plays a much bigger role in this series and I thought that the flashback to her past would help us to understand or guess what was going to happen to her in the future, but this was not to be. Instead, we’re presented with a scene of poor little Brooke and her tiger mother, but no explanation as to how this is relevant to the current storyline.

8. There were no major storylines

This series did branch out and explore a lot the stories of a lot more characters, Chang, Brooke, Crazy Eyes, Pennsatucky, Dayanara, Caputo and more. For some of them it’s their backgrounds that are explored in detail, for others its the present day. But either way, nothing particularly dramatic seemed to happen and often storylines, especially the flashbacks, seemed to have absolutely no relevance and did not advance the plot in any way.

9. What few storylines there were, were left unresolved

Sophia is still in the SHU and WHERE IS DAYA’S BABY DADDY? He literally disappeared without a trace in the middle of the series and there wasn’t much of an attempt to find him. Daya complained to Caputo when he first disappeared and then seemed to drop it, convinced that he’s an arsehole, but if she loved him, she probably would’ve tried harder to find him and surely Caputo or one of the other guards would want to know what had happened to their coworker?

10. Nothing happened. 

If I had to sum up this series I would have a heck of a hard time trying to. Lots of little bitty things happened here and there but there was no continuous story throughout which meant that wasn’t much to entice you to watch the next episode.

They tried to make up for a generally ‘meh’ series by making the last few scenes of the show ‘momentous’ and ‘dramatic’, but it was all just too little too late and I wasn’t really feeling it. This season was definitely a case of too much build-up and not much action.

I do still want to watch the next series and I’m sure what was left unresolved in this series will become clear in the next, but I probably won’t be sat refreshing Netflix’s homepage next release day.

So there you have it. 10 reasons why season 3 of Orange is the New Black sucked. All in all, Season 3 was a bit of a disappointment but I’m not going to say that the series was bad, because it was probably still far better than a lot of the trash out there on TV nowadays. However, I feel like it’s lost it’s spark. I never felt like I wanted to watch the next episode because I was curious about what was going to happen next, it was more because the next button was conveniently placed under the current video and I had nothing else to do that evening.

Laura

Founder & Editor of What’s Hot?

Laura is an award-winning travel and book blogger based in the UK. She studied French literature at Oxford University and is now an IP lawyer at a top law firm in London. She was named UK Book Blogger of the Year in 2019 and loves to combine her passion for books and travel with literary travel.