Mother's Day brings sadness, deep conversations in 'Orange Is the New Black' Season 3 premiere

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Big Boo and Pennsatucky shared an important exchange in Season 3, Episode 1 of 'Orange Is the New Black.'

Image: Netflix

Warning: This article contains spoilers from the first episode of Orange Is the New Black Season 3. Read with caution.
So, faith.
In case you couldn't tell from the veladora candle-inspired Season 3 art — or the fact that the cast talked about it outright — that's the theme of Season 3 of Orange Is the New Black.

See also: 12 binge-watching tips from the ladies of 'Orange is the New Black'

And in the first episode of this new season, which Netflix dropped hours ahead of schedule, the show succeeds in showing faith's many shades on what is surely one of the most complicated days of the year for Litchfield's inmates: Mother's Day.
The holiday is a perfect vehicle to explore the idea of faith in this episode. It's a day that comes with more baggage than most, and for this crew, in which each lady is already hauling her weight in troubles, it's almost too painful to bear.
For some, the pain is very much in the present day — women who can't be with their children, women who ache knowing their children must experience the day inside the walls of a prison, and women — like Sophia — who celebrate the day feeling guilty for their extended absence from their children's lives.
For others, the pain is rooted in the past, as flashbacks show.

Mini Nicky, getting her tiny heart broken. And breaking ours.

Image: Netflix

Nicky's mother was unloving and cold. Pennsatucky's mom only saw her child as a way to get more social security benefits. Poussey's mother was a loving and kind woman, whose death seemingly still pains the inmate. And Healy's mother — yes, the episode even dipped into the guard's past — had serious mental health issues.
In this first episode, we see each inmate scraping to get by emotionally in their own way. Some turn to Santería, trying to rid themselves of bad vibes by rubbing eggs on themselves. Others meet on full moons to pass balls of blue energy around a circle.
And others, like Big Boo, use knowledge to help her fellow inmate, in this case Pennsatucky, who spends some of the episode wondering what would have happened had she not had abortions over the years.
There's a scene between the two that unfolds toward the end of the episode that's entirely touching and one that spells out abortion in a bold way that hasn't been seen on television in recent memory.
Big Boo, in full clown garb, walks over to a pensive-looking Pennsatucky, who's set up a mini graveyard with children's names written on popsicle sticks, and comforts her by explaining the logic presented in Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner's Freakonomics.

"A fan of the 'B' names, I see."

Image: Netflix

"They have this chapter in it, 'Where have all the criminals gone?'" Big Boo begins. "In the 1990s, crime fell spectacularly and this book attributes that to the passing of Roe V. Wade....The abortions that occurred after Roe v. Wade, these were children that weren't wanted. Children who if their mothers had been forced to have them, would have grown up poor, neglected and abused — the three most important ingredients when one is making a felon. But they were never born. So 20 years later, when they would have been of prime crime age, they weren't there."
Her point, she tells Pennsatucky, is that her friend was "a meth-head white trash piece of shit and your children, if they had been born, would have been meth-head white trash pieces of shit."
"So by terminating those pregnancies you spared society the scourge of your offspring. I mean, when you think about it, it's a...blessing," Big Boo says.