List of Orange Is the New Black characters
Orange Is the New Black is an American comedy-drama series created by Jenji Kohan that airs on Netflix. It is based on Piper Kerman's memoir, Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison, which chronicles her experiences in a women's prison. The series' protagonist is Piper Chapman, a woman sentenced to 15 months in a women's federal prison for her part in a drug smuggling operation. She was led into this situation by her ex-girlfriend Alex Vause who is first seen in one of the opening scenes, which takes place ten years before the start of the first season. The series follows Piper's experiences in and out of prison along with the experiences of a diverse ensemble.
Overview
Main characters
Piper Chapman
Piper Chapman is a woman who was sentenced to 15 months in Litchfield Penitentiary, a fictitious prison in Litchfield, New York, for helping her former girlfriend, Alex Vause, smuggle drug money in Europe several years before the first episode.Season One
The first season shows Piper's journey through the prison system, beginning with her first week, during which she accidentally makes several enemies and struggles to adapt to life on the inside, as well as reuniting with Alex. In prison, she acquires several nicknames throughout the series. A fellow inmate, "Crazy Eyes", calls her "Dandelion" because she is tall and blonde, "Pennsatucky" refers to her as "College", and Tricia refers to her as "Brain", because she is more educated than most of the inmates. Piper is assigned a bunk with Claudette, who treats her rudely at first, but eventually warms up to her. Piper is also assigned to the Women's Advisory Council, despite not running and asking Healy not to place her on the council. She works in the electrical shop at the prison and inadvertently takes a screwdriver from the tool crib and loses it. Her ambiguous sexuality is a source of amusement to her best friend Polly and of frustration to her fiancé Larry. She is initially considered non-threatening by most of the other inmates. She is often accused of being profoundly self-obsessed. She becomes enemies with Tiffany after she ridiculed her religious beliefs, and ended up beating her severely after a failed attempt on her life at the end of the first season, knocking out all of her teeth.Season Two
In the second season, she is flown to Chicago, Illinois to testify at the trial of Alex's former boss, Kubra Balik. After perjuring herself at the recommendation of Alex, Piper is returned to Litchfield to serve the remainder of her sentence while Alex is released on early parole for her testimony. After learning her grandmother is dying, Healy assists her in getting furlough to visit her, and then to attend the funeral, which aggravates some of the other inmates. She is also commissioned by a journalist and friend of Larry's to secretly investigate the prison's books and later collaborates with a guard, Joe Caputo, to expose Figueroa's corruption, preventing Piper from being transferred to a prison in Virginia. She ends up breaking up with Larry, and after discovering that he and her friend Polly are having an affair, she asks them to report Alex to her probation officer.Season Three
In the third season, Piper admits to Alex that she was the one that alerted her probation officer that she violated her parole, causing her to be sent back to prison. Piper ends up getting selected for a new work detail creating underwear for Whispers, a lingerie company. After being rebuffed on her attempt to show the company that they were wasting fabric and could make an extra pair of underwear with each sheet, she uses the extra fabric to start a used panty business with her brother Cal, recruits some of the other inmates to wear the panties, and uses Officer Bayley to smuggle the panties out of the prison. At first, she pays the women wearing the panties with ramen noodle seasoning packets but is forced to give them money after Flaca threatens to cause a strike. However, as her business begins to succeed, she becomes darker and more ruthless, firing Flaca in retaliation for her instigation of the strike. This change in Piper's personality, as well as Alex's paranoia, leads to the end of their relationship, and Piper starts a relationship with new inmate Stella Carlin and allowed her to tattoo the words "Trust No Bitch" on her arm. At the end of the third season, Piper discovers that Stella stole her money from her panty business to use as a financial cushion on the outside due to her pending release. Piper at first pretends to forgive her and allows her to keep the money, but later plants several contraband items in her area and arranges for them to be discovered, causing Stella to be moved to maximum security, while facing an extended sentence. She uses this incident as a warning to the other inmates that may try to cross her.Season Four
In the fourth season, Piper has allowed the incident with Stella to go to her head, and she has become arrogant and overconfident, hiring her new bunkmate Stephanie Hapakuka as muscle. As a result, when Maria Ruiz tries to persuade Piper to recruit some of her new Dominican friends into her business, Piper is rude to her. Angered, Maria starts a rival business that quickly outperforms Piper's. Faced with the loss of her business, Piper convinces the new guard captain Piscatella to let her start an anti-gang task force, but the women that gather at her meeting mistakenly assume that she wants to start a white supremacist group. During a meeting with one of the COs, the women bring the used panty businesses to his attention, resulting in Maria being caught and Piscatella stating that he would recommend that Maria gets three to five years added to her sentence. Despite her disgust with the white supremacist gang, she hangs out with them for protection from Maria's gang, but she is still kidnapped by Maria and branded with a swastika. She shows Red the brand while crying on her bed and later shows Nicky and Alex while smoking crack cocaine in the garden. While high, Piper discovers that Kubra sent Aydin to kill Alex and she killed him after he failed. Later, she was able to get her swastika altered into a window, with the help of Red, Norma, and Alex, and she apologizes to Alex for not believing her during the branding. After the incident, she and Alex start having sex again. Piper tries to convince Piscatella to stop the increasingly draconian treatment of the other inmates by the guards, and when he refuses, she joins the protest to include standing next to Blanca Flores on the cafeteria table. When Aydin's remains are found, she tries to prevent Alex from confessing to Aydin's murder. After Bayley accidentally kills Poussey, she runs into him in the hall while he is trying to go to Poussey's friends to apologize. She tells him to let them grieve and that she will let them know he is sorry in order to prevent him from going to their cell block. At the end of the season, she discovers that Alex has written several notes with Aydin's full name on it and spread it around the prison. She convinces her to gather them up so that they can burn them, but shortly after they throw them into a garbage can and set them on fire, women participating in the riot kick over the can, spreading the papers all over the floor.Season Five
In the fifth season, when the riot breaks out, Piper and Alex find Linda Ferguson taking shelter in the bathroom and, after initially attempting to take her hostage, disguise her as an inmate so that she is not subjected to the same brutal treatment as the other hostages. She and Alex then organize the inmates not participating in the riot into a single party, which stays out in the yard away from the action. However, she is pulled into the riot herself after discovering who Linda is by looking through her phone and then using it to film the inmates burning their peace offering. Later on, she and Alex are kidnapped by Piscatella, and she – along with the rest of the group – is subjected to his emotional torture methods. After being rescued, and whilst hiding in Frieda's bunker, Piper proposes to Alex, and she accepts. However, shortly after, the bunker is stormed by the CERT officers.Season Six
In the sixth season, Piper is being held in Max and has not seen Alex for days. She desperately tries to find out what happened to her, though she receives no information. Inmate Madison Murphy "assists" in getting Piper sent to medical to look for her by tripping her up, causing her tooth to chip, but Alex is not there. When Red attempts to get the message to her group that Piscatella was killed after he was released, Piper misunderstands the message, thinking that it was Alex who died, which is strengthened when she learns that one inmate died in the riot. Believing that Red's actions got Alex killed, she names her as an instigator, causing ten years to be added to her sentence. After being moved to Block C, Piper is forced to bunk with Madison, who tries to boss her around, despite her grieving, depressed state. Piper is thus caught off guard when Alex turns out to be alive, merely having sustained a broken arm in the raid, and they have a happy reunion. Alex then helps Piper by persuading Madison to leave her alone. Wanting to make her final months more bearable, Piper lobbies Luschek to reintroduce the Max kickball tournament, and eventually receives assistance from Block C's gang leader, Carol Denning. Madison initially muscles in to be captain for the team, but they eventually vote for Piper to take over, which incites Madison's jealousy. She responds by trying to have Piper's sentence extended by two years by planting drugs on her. Although Alex disagrees with Piper's planned approach to the problem, to just tell the guards, it actually ends up being successful: when Madison is eventually scared off, she is unable to prevent CO Hellman from handing a report about a drug infraction from Piper to his superior, CO Rick Hopper. However, because Piper chose to tell Hopper in advance what Madison was doing, he destroyed the report, and instead had Piper put forward for early release, fearing she would expose the drug smuggling operation he was assisting with. Before leaving, Nicky and Lorna organize a surprise wedding for her, so that she and Alex can be married before she leaves. She is finally released from prison and collected by Cal.After Piper is released from prison, she moves in with Cal and his wife Neri, and she has to frequently check in with her probation officer Wyndolyn Capers. She was able to get a job working at a Thai restaurant but is fired after requesting time off to visit Alex. After being told by Wyndolyn that babysitting her niece is not sufficient to satisfy the employment requirement of her probation she is able to convince her father to hire her. She is almost sent back to prison for a parole violation when she ate a "Bloob," which contained marijuana at the behest of Cal and she later failed a drug test. Instead, Wyndolyn sends her to Narcotics Anonymous. Later in the season, she goes on a forest retreat and meets Zelda, who she eventually starts dating after an unexpected visit from her former CO McCollough convinces her not to continue staying faithful to Alex. She is also in contact with her former fiancé Larry and learns that he got Polly pregnant. Near the end of the series, Zelda tries to convince her to go with her on a consulting trip to Northhampton and her father strongly endorses Zelda's request. After getting advice from Larry she decides to decline Zelda's request and instead continue her relationship with Alex. In order to continue seeing Alex when she got transferred to a prison in Ohio she quit her job at her father's company in favor of moving closer to Alex's prison, getting a new job at Starbucks, and taking a civil procedure law class.