In the second season opener (and here's where the spoilers begin), Piper, who has been in solitary confinement since her confrontation with Doggett, finds herself in a situation that is straight out of Dickens' Circumlocution Office, an absurd sequence of events whose purpose is concealed from Piper herself. As she's transported to an unknown destination, the seemingly irrational nature of her travel would feel almost like a farce, if it weren't so entirely terrifying for Piper.

The episode quickly sets up a new set of circumstances for Piper and introduces an entirely new set of oddball characters — cockroach-trainers, an astrologically obsessed sex pest, and Lori Petty as an inmate who smuggles a glob of Vaseline in her ear — as Piper tries to regain a semblance of equilibrium amid the unknowable. There are plot devices at play — like the tension between coincidence and fate — that feel straight out of a Dickens novel, but which don't warrant spoiling here, because they're just that surprising and in keeping with the show's ability to engineer suspense and tension out of the seemingly mundane. A mystery about the Piper–Doggett fight emerges and is quickly resolved, its resolution both satisfying and unnerving.

Subsequent episodes focus on characters whose pasts haven't yet been explicitly spelled out just yet. A series of Taystee (Danielle Brooks) flashbacks depicts her childhood and teen years and introduces a new character to the mythology of the show: the manipulative and dangerous Vee, played with exquisite oiliness by the great Lorraine Toussaint. Vee is a Fagin-like character, gathering unwanted urchins and promising them warm dinners and a home for their participation in crime, in this case, the drug trade. As she bakes multigrain bread and cooks organic fare for their dinners, the implications of Vee's insidious nature are apparent: You can only come home if you've fulfilled your obligations. As such, Vee seems to be straight out of a Dickens novel, a dodgy operator who knows how to get under people's skin and make them do the dirty work for her. When Vee shows up at the prison, her presence within the narrative destabilizes the entire wonky order of Litchfield itself. She's a disruptor and an agitator; her very arrival spells danger.

Likewise, details emerge about the backstories of cerise-lipped Morello (Yael Stone) — which will likely generate some very intense discussion when viewers reach her episode — as well as that of Samira Wiley's Poussey (a heartbreaking tale of love, loss, and intolerance), and Selenis Leyva's prison cook Gloria (whose past unfolds in a story about battered women, crimes of necessity, and the cleansing power of fire), and Uzo Aduba's Suzanne aka "Crazy Eyes," whose painful flashback episode establishes her as a deeply tragic and sympathetic figure. In the case of Poussey and Suzanne (who's referred to by her real name more often in Season 2), the reasons behind their arrivals at Litchfield remain unclear, even as pieces of their formative years point towards future issues. (It bears mentioning that the two girls who play the younger Suzanne within the flashbacks — as well as Aduba herself — are extraordinary.)