Aleida’s flashback shows how pain can make you get to a point of rage but here, she could also be thinking, ‘Daya can’t live this way, I have to do this to her.'” “You hope that it’s not definitive, because there’s already so much tragedy. After filming Aleida’s introductory slap on the first day of filming, Aleida and Daya’s final moment was one of the last to shoot. “How perfectly poetic and tragic,” Rodriguez tells The Hollywood Reporter of the final scene, which she says bookended her entire OITNB experience. The image viewers are left with is one of Aleida on top of Daya with her hands around her neck as Daya struggles to breathe through an injured windpipe. Confronted with the woman her daughter has become, Aleida strangles Daya.
In the final moments of the series, the mother of five finds out that Daya is attempting to pull another one of Aleida’s daughters into their cycle and takes matters into her own hands. After getting released two seasons ago, Aleida ends up back at Litchfield when she violates her parole her story of recidivism playing out as a parallel to the more privileged leading inmate of Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling). Throughout OITNB‘s run, Aleida and Daya have represented the plights that incarcerated mothers and daughters face and how the generational cycle can continue without proper care on the inside or adequate support on the outside.
In the series finale, Aleida once again sees red, and this time her rage response is driven by an inherent need to protect her other daughters. But her disappointment in her daughter showing up at Litchfield is what drives Aleida to lash out in anger. Aleida, viewers come to realize, has made many mistakes as a mother. In the first episode of the series, viewers are introduced to Daya’s incarcerated mother when Aleida Diaz (Elizabeth Rodriguez) slaps her daughter across the face. And while Jenji Kohan’s Netflix prison dramedy accomplished that feat in its final run, one main character’s ending was purposefully left up in the air.ĭayanara Diaz ( Dascha Polanco), who is better known as Daya within the confines of Litchfield Penitentiary, ended her story similar to how it began. Orange Is the New Black had the immense task of wrapping up multiple character storylines before signing off after seven seasons.