The fourth season of Netflix original series Orange is the New Black will debut this month and the story will pick up where Season 3 left off: things are at a temporary calm as the prison becomes privatized. As the you get ready for Season 4, here are 17 spoilers to know about the next installment of the show:
1. Season 3 ended with a cliffhanger, leaving fans speculating about Alex Vause’s (Laura Prepon) fate. Alex is alive and well, but what transpired in the greenhouse with Kubra’s henchmen is still up in the air. Alex can be heard asking in a Season 4 promo: “Can you keep a secret?”
2. In an interview, actress Kate Mulgrew advised fans to “buckle their seatbelts” for Season 4. "There's a lot of laughs, but you must buckle your seatbelts, because she takes some very interesting turns,” said Mulgrew, who plays Red in the series. “It gets darker. It gets very dark. I think you will be very surprised, I think you will be wholeheartedly engaged, you will be riveted."
3. Actress Selenis Leyva, who plays Gloria Mendoza in the series, discussed what fans can expect from the new season with The Huffington Post. “I think [Season 4] is going to be one of the most talked about seasons,” Leyva said. “There’s a lot more conflict, there’s division amongst the groups more than ever. This is the season of the rise of the Latinas and there’s a lot of conflict within that.”
4. Things could become a bit dangerous at Litchfield, according to some hints from Leyva’s Huffington Post interview. “There’s a lot of danger lurking around the corner this season,” said Leyva. “My heart was beating fast for the six months we were shooting.”
5. Prison overcrowding will be a major theme in Season 4. In a trailer, one of the inmates is heard saying they, the inmates, are being packed in like “sardines.” "This season really drops in a totally different way," said Danielle Brooks, who plays Taystee, to Vogue. "The prison is becoming overpopulated. All the new inmates really add more tension, and believe me, it is tense."
6. With more prisoners come more guards. The teaser shows tons of new faces playing inexperienced guards. "They hate me, I hate them, our relationship is simple," says one of the male guards, who is getting stared down by Red, in a promo.
7. The fourth season will feature less of Piper, according to show creator Jenji Kohan, and several new themes will be introduced, from politics to prison overcrowding. "We start with political agendas, the corporatization of the prison, the stratification of people into their little mosaic groups,” said Kohan at the 2016 Winter TCA Press Tour. “We want it to be a surprise, but [you can expect] all the fun stuff like race and hate and some things from current events that we wanted to filter through our lens."
8. Fans last saw Piper (Taylor Schilling) being a successful panty entrepreneur. "I've been in Litchfield for a while now, and I've started to feel unsafe lately,” says Piper in a promo, while being confronted by Maria Ruiz (Jessica Pimentel) elsewhere in the trailer.
9. Prepon has hinted that there is no shortage of stories to tell about Alex and Piper. "The Alex and Piper relationship is so awesome,” said Prepon to E! Online. “It's so tumultuous…they love each other a lot. It's this crazy relationship, there's never a dull moment. I don't know if two people like that could ever ride off into the sunset, but we'll see what happens in Season Four. There's no shortage of stories to tell."
10. Don’t hold your breath for a reconciliation between Daya (Dascha Polanco) and C.O. Bennett (Matt McGorry). “I would love to see that, but you have to be realistic,” said Polanco to Entertainment Weekly. “He walked out of her life and her main priority right now is figuring out how she can take care of her child.”
11. Bennett was not seen in any trailers, sneak peeks or promotional images. During the 2015 Television Critics Association (TCA) press tour, McGorry addressed his character's departure with Extra, confirming that he could be back. “I think it’s always possible. He’s not dead – as far as I know,” said McGorry.
12. Daya’s situation gets complicated, as her daughter is being raised by her mother’s on-again-off-again boyfriend. By the end of Season 3, unbeknownst to Daya, her daughter’s guardian is arrested, suggesting that her daughter’s fate is to end up in child services. “When you’re in jail, you have no control over your situation,” said Polanco. “It just gets more and more difficult for her.”
13. A promo shows Taystee behind a desk, where she is apparently the assistant for Caputo (Nick Sandow) and seems to struggling with the steep learning curve. Brooks revealed her character will evolve this season in her interview with Vogue last November. "We left off with Taystee being the mom, taking over this role that Vee was in," said Brooks in the interview. "We’re going to see how she deals with that."
14. Nicky Nichols (Natasha Lyonne) was nowhere to be found in the promo, but a previously released teaser showed Nichols, suggesting that her character will no longer be confined in Maximum Security and will finally return.
15. Fans watched Sophia Burset (Laverne Cox) get sent to SHU after a feud with Gloria (Selenis Leyva) and the season starts off with her there. Cox has previously divulged that the fourth season will shed light into how transgender inmates are treated in prisons.As for a reconciliation between the two characters, fans shouldn’t hold their breath. “I can’t imagine,” Cox told TVGuide. “As a viewer watching, seeing how much remorse Gloria has, I always like to believe there's a potential for forgiveness, but this is pretty bad. This is really, really bad.”
16. One of the new faces at Litchfield is that of cooking show host Judy King (Blair Brown). "I think a lot of people think, 'Oh, she cooks, so she's like Martha Stewart.' 'Oh, she Southern. She's like Paula Deen.' She's actually Judy King, a creation of Jenji [Kohan] and the writers," Brown told TVGuide. "She's a very interesting character, constantly surprising to me. Sometimes I get a script and I'm like 'I'm going to say that?'"
17. As for her character, King will have a cheery disposition and be morally ambiguous. "She's slightly appalling and very good, and very cheerful, and probably fairly amoral," said Brown. "And it's interesting to watch because she's so other than anybody else in prison. And of course, Judy's greatest ally when she comes in is Poussey Washington."
Orange is the New Black Season 4 releases on Netflix on June 17.
