‘Orange is the New Black’ Season 4 Release Date, Rumors, Spoilers and New Trailer; Will Prisoners Die On This Season?

By Mark Rollins
Orange is the new black
Cast members Laura Prepon and Taylor Schilling attend the season two premiere of "Orange is the New Black" in New York May 15, 2014. REUTERS/Eric Thayer

Orange is the New Black is one of those shows that is very hard to designate as a pure comedy or pure drama.  On the one hand, it takes place in a prison, which is never a good place to have laugh-out-loud antics, but those do happen.  However, Season 3 of Orange is the New Black focused on some light-hearted issues such as deals in prison and the relationship between Alex (Laura Prepon) and Piper (Taylor Schilling).  A new trailer reveals how dramatic and possibly traumatic Season 4 could be, and it looks like some might pay the ultimate price of life. 

The new trailer, which can be seen below, is showing that Litchfield is a full for-profit prison.  Not only that, the prison is going to be given 100 new inmates, and it looks like some new guards have been called in.  The situation is described as sardines, which means that it only needs a match to light this powder-keg. 

What isn't shown on the trailer is the fate of Alex, who looked like she was going to be killed at the cliffhanger of Season 3.  However, The Independent has stated that Alex's voice can be heard in the preview asking Red (Katie Mulgrew) "Can you keep a secret".  It has been pretty much confirmed that Alex will be back for Season 4, so fans can rest easy. 

One plotline that has been left hanging is whether or not the former guard John Bennett (Matt McGorry) will return to the mother and child that he abandoned halfway in the middle of Season 3.  It feels like that subplot needs some kind of resolution there, but the new trailer doesn't show any news on that front. 

Other storylines that look to be happening is some kind of power struggle/sabre rattling that is happening between Red and a new guard.  The trailer shows what looks like a SWAT team coming in, which could mean that something bad is about to go down.  Perhaps there might be a jailbreak or riot that will be worse than the one at the end of Season 3 where all the prisoners just played at the lake. 

Orange is the New Black will arrive for its fourth season on Netflix on June 17th.  The Verge reports that the show has already been renewed for a fifth, sixth, and seventh season, which means that the show could have a planned storyline to last for this long. 

It should be noted that the Orange Is the New Black is a show like The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones, as it is based in on literary source material.  Unlike those two previously mentioned series, Orange Is the New Black:  My Year in a Women's Prison is not an ongoing book series, but it based essentially on the 2010 memoir by Piper Kerman. 

Of course, the show does not just follow Piper (who has the last name Chapman on the series), but there is an entire supporting cast that all have their intersecting storylines.  There is clearly enough story to go around for all the inmates for Litchfield penitentiary, and so Season 4 is probably going to come across as just another page in the book of it.  That is, if the show's writers are smart and have it planned out. 

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