Too much time spent on incidental characters. Now we have the White Power girls and the 3 wacky Latinas competing with the Meth Girls for comic relief time. Some of them we don't even know their names, but they pop up every couple minutes. And the white girl who is only there to have her nose broken over and over again is just a lame joke.
Suzanne goes crazy again. Great actress but do something new with her, please.
If we never see Lorna again I'm perfectly fine. We've established that she's crazy but now I'm supposed to root for her because she's pregnant? Pass.
Not crazy about them playing the abuse of the guards for laughs when the same kind of behavior was what demonized all the guards the previous 4 seasons. The guards they had as hostages were all basically the doofus guards, not the bad ones. The writers have irrevocably damaged some of these characters they spent 4 years making you like.
Taystee fucked up and I was kind of glad to see it. Incredibly poor decision making for a character we've previously established to be really smart.
Black Cindy:"Hey Taystee we've got 2 problems: Suzanne is going crazy again and the guard that got shot to start this whole riot is dead."
Taystee: Suzanne's going crazy?! Well, we better go take care of that right away."
Even if Bayley was arrested and charged with manslaughter it still wouldn't be enough for the inmates.
They damaged the characters so much the only way to redeem them was to apparently make Pescatella into a super big bad. And once he's defeated, the swat team rolls in and they're all portrayed as being completely evil too, which is supposed to justify everything the inmates did, I guess. Apparently, there are zero decent people working in corrections? None? At all? Makes it a bit hard to believe.
I'd guess next season features some kind of time jump, to allow for the prison to be repaired and some, not all, of the cast to return to the "new" Litchfield.