Spoilers ahead.

Season four of OITNB picks up where season three left off, as an administrative walk-out results in the prisoners of Litchfield bursting through the gates to go swimming in a nearby lake. Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling) is still trying to be the prison kingpin. Alex Vause (Laura Prepon) is fighting for her life. Poussey Washington (Samira Wiley) and Brook Soso (Kimiko Glenn) are slowly but surely falling in love, while Suzanne Warren (Uzo Aduba) and Maureen Kukudio (Emily Althaus) are off in the woods on a romantic walkabout. And offscreen, Sophia Burset (Laverne Cox) is still in solitary confinement. Right off the bat, there’s a lot going on, and it takes an episode or three before things settle into alignment. (Given how much happened last year, it behooves any fan to take a few minutes and read a recap of season three before charging ahead.)

Things have gotten desperate at Litchfield this season

It’s when everyone returns to everyday prison life that the fourth season finds its rhythm. Last season saw Litchfield become a privatized prison under the unabashedly corrupt Management & Correction Corporation. Since then, a massive influx of inmates have been forced to join the current cast of characters, causing overcrowding and inevitable tensions between not only the new crop of guards and prisoners, but also between newly forged racial factions. It’s here that Kohan and her team show how well they’ve learned to handle their characters’ stories. This year features more inmates competing for attention, each with backstories and complex motivations. While the show is less reliant on flashbacks, the ones we see — like Soso’s canvassing days or Maritza’s time as a glamorous con artist — provide lenses into who these women are and how desperate their situations have become.

And make no mistake: things have gotten desperate. By midseason, it’s clear that Kohan is railing harder against the prison industrial complex than ever before. Where previous seasons might have painted the overall prison experience as deplorable, there was sufficient humor to make things feel like being stuck in a really awful summer camp. This year, mass incarceration is unquestionably evil, and the status quo is aided and abetted by authority figures either too conflicted to change anything meaningfully, like newly installed warden Joe Caputo (Nick Sandow), or actively invested in its upkeep, like MCC employee Linda Ferguson (Beth Dover).