Suffice it to say, Kate Mulgrew's Red goes through a hellish, traumatic arc in season five thanks to CO Piscatella. It's a change that the actress doesn't think her character will recover from anytime soon, which will make for an interesting storyline moving forward in season six. "There is no question that it is an irreparable kind of change," she told The Hollywood Reporter of what happens to Red. "We are altered by trauma, the best among us are altered by it. It remains to be seen. Red is strong, multi-dimensional and quite capable, but I've been hurt now in a way that I hadn't before . . . So I think going forward it will be fascinating to see how the writers deal with it, and how I deal with it in the dance with them. And I hope that born out of this are the terrible shadows that follow us when we have been badly, badly devastated."
Mulgrew further noted that she hopes the writers will embrace the complexities of Red's PTSD, saying, "Let's see it, emotionally." The real question, though, is if Red will even live to deal with her issues. In the season five finale, she and the rest of the characters are left standing hand in hand as an explosion rings out and the riot police storm the Litchfield pool. Will someone die?
"I know in that moment — Red's not a fool — that the riot has decimated the reality of Litchfield, but what I don't know is, will we all survive, the 10 of us holding hands in that empty pool flanked by Blanca Florez and Freida Berlin, are we all going to survive this?" she said to THR. "What will this mean going forward? We're all culpable and complicit in many, many interwoven plots, murder not the least among them. There has to be a price to pay, I don't know how it will be made manifest, I don't know what [creator] Jenji [Kohan] will choose. She is absolutely a master of the unexpected so for me to speculate would be silly because I would be 100 percent wrong."
