wawamouse | Oz Rewatch 3: S4E14: Orpheus Descending

Originally posted to tumblr
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Storylines

Lockdown ends with Redding and Morales agreeing to a truce, but tensions remain; Supreme Allah makes a deal with the Latinos to get Hill to kill Redding, who has disavowed Hill
Redding and (the Colonel guy) bond over ’Nam.
Hughes continues to antagonise the Unit J peeps; Basil finally meets with his wife; Hughes shanks Basil and is placed in Solitary
Sister Pete agrees to help Beecher get in contact with Keller; Beecher meets with his lawyer; Keller tells Beecher to not call
Schillinger meets with Carrie and Jewel; a former pimp inmate (named Curtis Bennett) reveals to Schillinger that Hank pimped Carrie out a couple of times and Cloutier urges Schillinger to be patient while the situation is figured out
Said tells Glynn that Robson hired Tidd to kill him and then sent Jenkins to kill Tidd; Said asks Cloutier to convince Jenkins to confess, but the Aryans threaten Jenkins and force him to commit suicide; Cloutier’s meddling causes Schillinger to pull away
McManus challenge Vahue to 2v2 and gets Glynn’s approval for one exhibition match; McManus is partnered with Dave Bass and Vahue is partnered with Busmalis; Vahue and Busmalis win after Busmalis makes a half court shot
Deyell meets with the donor recipient for his corneas; Deyell leaves to go to the hospital to meet his heart recipient and dies in his escape attempt
Padraig Connolly (Padraic Connelly in the subs?) arrives at Em City; Kirk and Burns attack him
Suzanne visits Ryan again; Suzanne reveals that Cyril is his half-brother
Jia Kenmin gets knocked into a coma by Cyril and McManus once again pushed to have Cyril moved to Connelly Institute
Arif tells Said about seeing O’Reily kill Patrick Keenan; O’Reily asks Gloria to help him and Cyril escape

Sister: What would you be doing, sitting on your bunk or staring out your window?
Me: During a lockdown?
Sister: Yeah, look at all them staring out the window. I wouldn’t be standing up for this crap.
Me: (inhales whiteclaw)

Sister: Does he have another pair of legs?
Me: His arms.
Sister: But that’s incorrect. That’s like saying your dog has a hand.
Me: So what do you think? He’s like a secret centaur or something?
Sister: Could be.

Me: Wow, they cuff their legs, too?
Sister: Yeah… Very sexual.
Me: But they didn’t cuff Miguel’s legs.
Sister: Yeah, well that wasn’t sexual. And he’s already sexual. Plus this other guy apparently has all kinds of shanks. Shanking everyone. He probably has a shank in his foot. You don’t know.

Sister: Well at least with this, she gets one point… (laughing) But she has negative one thousand points right now, so it doesn’t matter.

Sister: This place is pretty nice… They got their own machine. They even have their own library.
Me: yeah, but they’re not allowed to go anywhere. They even have their food brought to them.
Sister: Oh yeah, you’d have to worry about the spit in the food.
Me: But it’d suck if you hated the people you were stuck with.
Sister: That’s okay, I’ll take you with me :)
Me: To prison?!

Sister: I keep thinking that he should be evil.

Sister: Why… why is this a plot line?
Me: This won’t be the last time you have to ask this.

Sister: Do the show creators think they’re playing some medieval games? Always putting on jousting matches? What’s next, hockey? They gonna put on a swimming match next? (As McManus) It’s be fine! We’ll just do it in the showers.

Sister: Listen to the balding voice of reason. So embarrassing. It’s like he’s going through a mid-life crisis because he just got stabbed again.

Sister (a big Greek mythology nerd): That is NOT how it went… Of COURSE they were sentimental… They let him go down to Hades BECAUSE they felt so bad about how sad he was and how his songs kept making everyone else so sad. And then the women all killed him because he was still moping afterward and turned away from them. Like Ovid said Bacchus turned the women who killed him into trees or whatever because he was so mad they killed his bard… Everyone was sad for him. This is fake news.
(after the episode) Sister, returning to my room with a giant Greek mythology book: See, the D’Aulaires version says that the muses picked up his body off the isle of Lesbos and held a proper funeral for him because they were so sad. I think Ovid thought that Orpheus should’ve commit suicide to be with Eurydice, but that’s because he always had to tell life lessons in his versions and his whole thing was “you can’t cheat the gods”.
(later, while I’m screencapping) Sister: Also, what was even the theme of this episode? I want to figure out a better story they should have used.
Me (reading Hill’s opening statement): “Back in the old Greek times there lived a man named Orpheus. Loved his wife, took it easy on the ouzo, played a mean guitar. Upstanding guy. So what did the almighty gods do? They fucked with him. Made his life Hades. Why? 'Cause that's what those in power do to those of us with none.” …So I guess they were trying to do a thing about how those with power fuck the little guy over. I guess they should’ve done the Book of Job or whatever. Orpheus is like the opposite of that… They gave him every chance.
Sister: Yeah, they loved that guy. They were so sad. They could done that, uh… That guy they sent out onto the water forever… Odysseus. Or Sisyphus.
Me: I’m surprised they DIDN’T use Sisyphus.
Sister: Or they could have done Hercules, he got pretty fucked over by everyone.
Me: “So, Orpheus wife's strolling along, gets bitten by a snake and dies. Orpheus freaks out and heads down into the Underworld to demand that his lady be returned and some Goddess says: "Okay, on one condition. If you look at her before you get back to Earth, she'll disappear." With, like, ten feet left to go, motherfucker turns around and wifey's sent right back to Hell. Orpheus should've known better; you don't fuck with the Gods.”
Sister: Sisyphus would’ve worked better.
Me: Yeah, but I think they wanted to use Orpheus because of the love angle. Because it was about loving his family. He lost his wife.
Sister: …They weren’t married. That’s like the thing. Some tales said the reason he was so sad was BECAUSE there were going to get married that same day.
Me: “Myths are supposed to teach us something, but what's the life lesson in this sad tale of Orpheus? No good deed goes unpunished? Fuck that, ain't no such thing as a good deed. Love conquers all? Never has, never will. Maybe the moral of the story is that those in power are just as fucked up as those who ain't and the worst thing a body can do is give up his or her own power to some buttheads on Mount Olympus 'cause if they're so fuckin' powerful, how'd they let us get away with all this shit in the first place. Answer me that.” …I think maybe there was a misunderstanding about the myth of Orpheus. Like they got some points right, but it's like a wikipedia understanding.
Sister: What good deed? Oh, they could’ve done Asteria and Leto, too. Honestly, they could’ve picked any women out of Greek mythology and it would’ve fit better…. Io, got turned into a frickin’ cow just to hide and she was like “can you turn me back?” and they were like “no”. And then Hera kept bothering her, too. Sent a gadfly down just to bother her and chase her around. Just look up “lovers of Zeus” and you’d have a better “fucked over by the gods” story. Typical. They had to frame it around a man.
(continues giving Stories It Could've Been & Rambles about Greek gods and myths for another like 15 minutes)