**Spoilers**

Five seasons in, most TV shows will either begin to sag, or in most cases, winding itself down completely with outlandish stories and dream episodes. The Sopranos is probably the best example of this, using a few episodes in the fifth and sixth season for showrunner David Chase to run out his weirdest ideas from a comfortable position as the most-watched show on TV.

Orange Is The New Black is Netflix's greatest achievement in terms of viewership, beating House Of Cards, Stranger Things, Sense8 and any other Netflix Original series you care to mention. In other words, it's in a similar position to other TV shows where - if it wanted to - it could off in an ill-advised experimental fashion if it so desired. Smartly, however, Season 5 is by far the most disciplined and tightly written piece of television you'll see this year - especially for a series that's five seasons deep. When the show last ended, Litchfield was on the cusp of a riot and Humps, the psychotic CO who carried a handgun into the prison, was about to meet certain death with the same handgun.

The show picks up at the very next scene and uses the layering of the last season to build up the premise for this one. Litchfield goes from corporate-run gulag to prisoner utopia and a lot of the comedy this season is derived from that. A bartering economy from candy, tampons, beauty products begins to take hold, a cafe with slam poetry readings and comedy segments is made by the prisoners and the in-prison culture flourishes, all while Joe Caputo and the guards inside are essentially degraded and turned into hostages. The prison population splits, gently at first, into those who are keenly there to make demands known and heard by the outside and those who want nothing to do with it.

This, in turn, splinters the various storylines into such a way that makes each of them important without sacrificing one for the other. Taystee leads the public face of the prison riot, attempting to right the wrongs of the system and ensure that Poussey receives justice and the CO responsible for her death is brought to justice. This brings in Joe Caputo, who turns from hostage to negotiator, and keeps the whole standoff running in a believable way. Red, meanwhile, starts off the season as the comedy relief; she gets hooked on "supplements" that are actually amphetamines. At first, you'd think it wouldn't work - that Red's character is so straight-laced and authorial that she wouldn't be able to bend like that, but it makes for some of the funniest moments in the entire series. Like so much of the series, the writing is so smart and what initially seems like a way of sidelining a character to bring in another actually comes with a definite purpose.

As has been customary since around the third season, Piper's been removed as the central focus of the series. That said, she does come into play at certain intervals, but only when absolutely necessary and that babe-in-the-woods routine has now been dropped for a much more rounded, nuanced character. As Jenji Kohan admitted, Piper was the way in for audiences to interact with characters and stories that you wouldn't normally expect to see on television and the fifth season is the clearest example of this ethos. We get to see how exactly Red came to the US, how Taystee and Poussey met for the first time, why Frieda is so smart with ropes and knives, and - for the first time in the series - what life is like after prison, with Aleida trying to get her life back in order.

The episodes blend perfectly into one another, and compared to other Netflix efforts - Luke Cage being the worst offender that comes to mind - none of the episodes feel like they're spinning the wheels. There's more than a few times you'll end up kicking on to the next episode because the cliffhanger is so potent that you need to see what happens next, particularly when the brutish CO Piscatella comes into the action. By far, Piscatella is the most believable and terrifying villain of the series and his flashback explains his raison d'être without condoning it. It's probably one of the most effective flashbacks of this season, but doesn't belabour the point needlessly. In that same episode, it takes its cue from horror films like Hallowe'en and Friday the 13th - but still has that emotional core to it, which makes it all the more terrifying. In fact, one particular scene involving Red and Piscatella is very honestly the most horrifying sequence you're likely to see on television this year. 

If there's any complaints to be made against this season, it's that it's backed the series into a wall. In other words, they can't go anywhere else with it after this and they'll have to wrap it up in the next one. Piper's only got three months left on her sentence - something that Vause points out as a reason why she shouldn't be directly involved with the protest. As you'd expect, the season ends with the riot over - though not as you'd expect; another clever bit of storytelling - and the entire prison population loaded onto buses headed in different directions, which means the next season will either focus on where they all land and the difference in other prisons.

Overall, Season 5 is a vast improvement - and probably the strongest season so far, in fact - and readies it for the end. How they're going to get another two seasons out of it, however, is the bigger question.