Orange is the New Black

This closing run of 13 episodes is the most focused season in years, a steady reminder of how smartly political, energetically funny and devastatingly dramatic this show could be.

Moving, emotional final season that hits mostly high notes, and satisfactorily resolves a whole lot of stories.

Season seven is the most satisfying it’s been in years because the story gets the chance to lay itself to rest. It’s the same show, but tweaked and trimmed, well-oiled and screwed-down, to a few major relationships in a few essential places.

Ending a long-running series is fraught with obligation — story lines must be wrapped up, questions must be answered, characters must be honored. It’s a daunting task for a show with such a sprawling ensemble — there are 19 stars listed in the opening credits alone — but overall, OITNB delivers.

The show mostly resists the temptation to say goodbye with a greatest hits tour, but it certainly gets the band playing some familiar tunes. It will be hard to find any fan with a complaint, given that all the favourites, and some surprises, get at least a little screen time, especially in the final episode. Even the chickens make a comeback. Not all of it works – Daya’s evolution into ice-cold top dog is cartoonish, for example – but it never lacks heart.

This sense of coming together perversely helps excuse some of the show’s excess.

The show’s humor is key to its appeal, but in the weaker midseason episodes, it can feel like spoonfuls of sugar to make the pedantic bitterness go down. ... And yet for all its faults, it’s difficult to think of another show that stares so unblinkingly at the most egregious excesses of American capitalism and bureaucracy and injustice, and does so while rarely losing sight of the humanity of the people, especially the women, involved.

A conclusion that feels true and honorable, that isn’t necessarily a happy ending but a right one that satisfies.

There are several strong threads, including standout work here by Diane Guerrero, Laura Gomez and Taryn Manning, as well as a #MeToo storyline that actually sees a male character deal with whether actions he deemed innocuous at the time truly were.

For as impossible a task as tying every loose end is, these last 13 episodes acquit themselves fairly well. But repetitive flashbacks and a couple hugely ambitious new plots unbalance the season and cause the series to make a shakier landing than it might have with some sharper focus.