orange Is the New Black recap: 'Flaming Hot Cheetos, Literally' 

Taylor Schilling, Natasha Lyonne, Kate Mulgrew, Laura Prepon

After a stellar dramatic episode that offered up some moments of comedy, “Flaming Hot Cheetos, Literally” keeps running with the ball, but with a very different tone. It’s also a very strong offering, but it’s more comedic than the episode immediately preceding it.

The central plot to this episode is that Governor Hutchinson is making a concerted effort to end the riot without any casualties. And that’s great. Unfortunately, he’s not taking the inmates’ demands seriously. He and his Gal Friday, Nita, think that meeting the demand for Flaming Hot Cheetos, Takis, and tampons will earn them enough goodwill for the inmates to let the guards go.

But they have grossly underestimated both the anger brewing inside the prison at how they’ve been treated and the intelligence of the inmates to see right through the governor’s “clever” ruse.

The sight of Taystee and Co. dumping garbage bags full of Cheetos outside the prison entrance and then lighting them on fire while telling Nita where the governor can stick it is utterly delightful. And they have a real point: Take us seriously, and come back when you’re ready to get real about the conditions inside Litchfield.

Now, Maria Ruiz does make a keen observation during all this: “I can respect the moral code, but being that blindly committed? That’s when s— gets dangerous.”

She’s absolutely right, and Taystee, Black Cindy, Abdullah, Janae, and now Piper (who has decided it’s time to stop being a conscientious objector) will hopefully realize this was their only chance for pushback and defiance. If the governor keeps taking them seriously and actually gives them something they want, they are going to have to release some of the guards as a show of good faith. They can’t have another Flaming Hot Cheeto tantrum.

These dealings with Nita are juxtaposed with a Taystee flashback, filling in some information about how she came to be in foster care. It turns out her mother was a 15-year-old girl who was living with her boyfriend and facing eviction for both of them if she kept the baby. She reached out to her daughter later, but Taystee couldn’t be told about it until she turned 18. When they finally met, it turned out Taystee’s birth mother had a new family (a husband and a daughter), whom Taystee, mistakenly thought she was going to live with since she’d aged out of the group home. In a heartbreaking confrontation, Taystee’s mom lamely told her it was “not a good time” for her to join the family, and Taystee ran away.

The flashback gives us more Taystee (and more Danielle Brooks), but it unfortunately doesn’t inform the present-day plot as much as one might hope. It also muddies the waters a bit as to when exactly Vee came into Taystee’s life. Maybe the Vee stuff predates Taystee’s meeting with her birth mom, and the crime that got Taystee put in Litchfield had nothing to do with Vee after all?

But it’s hard to worry about any of that after

 I actually started crying a little watching her first meeting with Taystee in the prison library. Miss you, Poussey.

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