OITNB S4 E11 “People Persons” was about:

* The story of how Suzanne ended up in prison (I have seen this episode like four times and it kills me every single time). Suzanne’s sister decided to take a weekend trip with her boyfriend and as she is leaving she tells Suzanne to make friends on her own. Suzanne decides to go to the park and start saying hello to people just like she does at her job as a greeter at a Walmart-like store and ends up seeing a kid who she met with his family at work and a lot of sadness ensues.

Short form, the kid comes over to Suzanne’s place to play video games and starts to think Suzanne has kidnapped him. As he tries to escape, he falls off of her fire escape (and, as far as we know, perishes). One has to remember when watching that Suzanne is, in many ways, trapped at the exact same maturity level as the kid and has no malice towards anyone (when she is violent it is universally because she is pushed beyond her coping boundaries).

In addition to this, Suzanne is also induced into fighting Kekudio by CO Humphreys (in one of the hardest to watch scenes I have ever seen on OITNB.

Come to think about it, several of the hardest to watch scenes are in this and the next two episodes).

* The discovery of Aydin’s dismembered body in the garden by the work crew which causes Piscatella to put the whole prison on lockdown (ending Blanca and Piper’s table-standing punishment).

Aydin was Kubra Balik’s enforcer that was sent to Litchfield to kill Alex Vause. Aydin took a job as a Correctional Officer for MCC so that he could get to Alex.He was killed, in case you forgot, by Lolly Whitehill (who was saving Vause’s life). *I was just remined that technically she was killed by Alex after Lolly's assault left him almost dead, apologies (and thanks to my friends on Reddit for keeping me on my toes)*

Caputo is called to headquarters (where he meets the MCC PR guru Josh who will become more prominent in S5). Before he leaves he tells the CO’s to act professionally, treat the inmates well and take no retribution, an order Piscatella immediately countermands.

* Piscatella’s attempts to interrogate several prisoners but especially Red. They try to imply that Red turned Lolly in but Red would never do that (It ends up being Healy who turns Lolly in).

Frida getting frustrated that she is not one of the inmates questioned given her extensive history of violent crime. It was also Frida who correctly suggested to Alex that Red would never snitch on her and that that “loyalty has nothing to do with it.”

* Luschek getting put on “Judy King duty” as the result of the lockdown. He ends up doing Molly (which Judy has procured previously) and ends up in a totally unnecessary threesome with King and Yoga Jones.

* Doggett going out of her way to help Nicky get through her withdraw from heroin. Doggett mentions that she really started to want to be a better person after she was assigned to bring all the inmates working construction water. Nicky correctly mentions that Doggett is one of the few people who prison made a better person (I was another of this rare breed).

* Caputo finding out that Linda has never even been inside a prison or jail. Danny confronting his father with the picture of Sophia in the Segregated Housing Unit.

* A bunch of really disquieting brutality and cruelty from the CO’s. It is all pretty ironic given none of the CO’s or the prison administration ever even noticed that Aydin was missing. You might answer that he could have just quit, but he quit without turning in his KEYS TO THE PRISON, his uniform, or doing any exit paperwork or anything else.

He was killed during an event when 100’s of inmates left the campus to go swimming in a nearby lake, him being missing after that even would have been a HUGE red flag. I get that Litchfield is a total administrative sh*t show but it was not a day where people would not be missed after the fact.

Healy and Lolly

I won’t lie, Healy can be tough to love, but after all this time, and watching the series several times, I have a lot more compassion for him.

He is, without a doubt, one of the most messed up and destructive forces at Litchfield (at least until MCC took over) but there has also been more exposition about the reasons why he is a total disaster than there has been for virtually any other character on the entire show.

Knowing how much he sees his Mom in Lolly, and knowing he almost killed himself so that he didn’t have to turn Lolly in (knowing full well what the psych ward was like), seeing him turn Lolly in was just really tough to watch.

If you hate Healy, I would seriously recommend watching all the previous scenes with Healy as a kid and also recommend watching the scene from earlier in Season 4 where Healy sat with Lolly in the Time Machine (if this doesn’t take you full circle on Healy, nothing will).