S1 E9 "Fucksgiving" is mostly about:

* Red's continuing battle with Officer Mendez (Pablo Schrieber) over smuggling drugs into the prison.

* Much of Alex Vause's backstory from her being picked on as a kid to how she got recruited into dealing drugs after trying to reconnect with her deadbeat absentee Dad (a burned out ex-Rock Star).

* The acceleration of the enmity between Doggett (Taryn Manning), Piper (Taylor Schilling), and Alex (Laura Prepon).

* The release of Taystee (Danielle Brooks) from prison.

* The escalation of the battle between Counselor Healy (Michael Harney) and Piper.

5. "Taxpayer's Don't Give A Shit If It's A Holiday...We're The Badguys"

Holiday meals were kind of a big deal.

When I first got to prison the holiday meals were really surprisingly good and many millions of degrees better than the crap we got on a daily basis.

For whatever reason, for those special meals, we would get what seemed to be real meat, decent vegetables, and tasty desserts. It really was something people looked forward to.

Don't get me wrong, a holiday meal in prison would still only pass for an average meal at a local cafeteria on the outside. But, when you have been eating food that you can barely identify for months...those holiday meals were damn good.

When Red talks, in the context of trying to make due with the "turkey parts," about nobody on the outside caring about prison food on the holidays, that is most certainly true.

Now, why is it that Red doesn't get all her food through Federal procurement again (it is a Federal Prison right)?

4. The Pensatucky Stuff

So, I have talked a bit about parts of the basic code everyone follows in prison. In short, everyone is responsible for themselves and for their own problems and nobody goes to the CO's.

So, it made sense to me that Doggett would test Alex (by taking her mattress or breaking her glasses). And to be 100% honest, from a former inmates perspective, Alex absolutely failed. If you don't stand up for yourself, or for your stuff, nobody will respect you (absolutely no one).

One of the toughest parts of prison is knowing that you have to avoid violence to stay physically safe and to make parole more likely while also knowing that if you don't stand up for yourself when challenged, you will become a target of all the predators.

You might not actually have to fight, but you do have to make it clear that you would fight (and, if someone calls that bluff, you absolutely would have to fight). You cannot let disrespect stand (Alex appears to just let it go).

If you don't at least let people know you would fight, the predators and extortionists will move in (they target the weak) and nobody will care. Nobody stands up for someone who won't stand up for themselves.

Okay, so it makes sense that Doggett would test Alex.

It makes ZERO sense that Doggett would rat out Alex and Piper to Sam Healy. An inmate would not go get an officer in order to get another inmate in trouble. That would be suicide.

Doggett didn't even do this in secret, she went and got Healy and dragged him to Taystee's going home party. For the rest of her sentence, even her own meth-head friends would want nothing to do with her. Nobody would trust her. Every single time that the CO's got inside information, they would assume Doggett was the rat.

You deal with your own problems in prison, you do not go to the CO's.

3. "Are You Real?" ..."I Don't Know"

I am not going to go on and on about this but like I said before, solitary confinement is brutal.

This is one of the most accurate depictions I have seen of solitary, and the reality is even more brutal than what they show.

The time-deprivation stuff is also true, you cannot see a clock and they leave the lights on at all times so you do actually lose all track of time and your body loses all of its normal time-based rhythms.