“This isn’t a scene from The Handmaid’s Tale,” Kamala Harris wrote in recent a fundraising email, “This is happening in our country.” In his late night monologue, Stephen Colbert joked that a rash of new abortion laws felt like “some pretty intense viral marketing for the new season of The Handmaid’s Tale.” Protestors dressed in red cloaks with winged bonnets, the costume of enslaved handmaids in both the novel and the television show, surrounded the Alabama courthouse to protest the state’s severely restrictive abortion law. The Handmaid Coalition is a new nonprofit organization dedicated to sewing handmaids costumes for protest in the “fight to keep fiction from becoming a reality.”

Over the last few years, references to The Handmaid’s Tale—Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, now a Hulu series whose third season debuts on June 5—have increasingly served as a quick and easy pop-cultural shorthand for the extremity of our moment. People type “under his eye” (the religious mantra of the restrictive, fundamentalist country of Gilead) when sharing links to articles, or “nolite te bastardes carborundorum” (a Latin phrase used by the underground Gilead resistance movement Mayday, which means “don’t let the bastards get you down”). The idiom of the show, which Atwood invented in her book, has become a way to communicate that you know that things have gotten really bad—that this timeline feels like that terrifying thing you saw on streaming television.

The set of symbols that the show unleashed has far outpaced what the show actually provides.

There is nothing inherently wrong with these references: People have always turned to film and literature in order to make sense of the world, to process and provide context for complex, frightening times. But watching the first episodes of the new season, what strikes me is that the set of symbols that the show unleashed has far outpaced what the show actually provides. The striking metaphors The Handmaid’s Tale birthed all belong to the book and to the show’s first season, in which the horrifying vision of a patriarchal fascist state and all its paraphernalia becomes clear. The Hulu show has since become a long-running soap opera about women’s trauma, and like any good soap, it needs the drama to continue endlessly, and to raise the stakes continuously.

I found the first season of the show, which debuted in 2017, subtle and surprising. The show gradually unfurled its details in flashbacks, slowly revealing its horrors like peeling open a rotting fruit. The main characters are living in the aftermath of an environmental disaster that left only a few women fertile, and a coup, in which a Christian fundamentalist group seized power, imprisoning the fertile women and forcing them into surrogacy. June, known in Gilead as Offred (Elisabeth Moss), works for Commander Waterford (Joseph Fiennes), which means she was also ritualistically raped by him—though in the first season they became close, with the Commander allowing June to enter his private library and read books, a privilege normally off limits to handmaids. She suffers under the iron rule of Commander Waterford’s ice queen wife, Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski), who is a leader in Gilead’s fundamentalist women’s movement and believes that wives should be subservient to their husbands at all costs.

When the series begins, Serena Joy, who longs for Offred to bear her husband’s child so that she can raise it as her own, is one of two examples of toxic white feminism in Gilead, that of the wealthy priggish prude who promotes Victorian mores. The other kind, the “aunts” or women who are in charge of educating and disciplining handmaids (many of whom were abducted trying to leave Gilead after a political uprising that turned a world that looks a lot like ours into a dystopian hellscape) are traitors, women who long to whip other women and rap at their knuckles. Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd), the minder who oversees June’s placement, becomes the stand-in for all cruelty and hypocrisy (the term “Aunt Lydia” also popped up on the web a great deal to describe women governors who signed the abortion bans). No wonder then, that a fellow rebellious handmaid, Emily (Alexis Bledel) stabs Lydia and shoves her down a flight of stairs at the end of the second season.