Were it possible for you to somehow absorb the first seven or so hours of the new season of Orange Is the New Black—its sixth season, dropping on Netflix on July 27—in a fraction of that time, and then enjoy the next six episodes in full form, I’d advise you to do that. As we’ve discussed before, it can take a while for an O.I.T.N.B. season to get going, only gradually assembling its clutter into a trash sculpture approaching beautiful. If you don’t have the patience to wait out the bumpy beginnings (and middles), I don’t blame you. But in Season 6, just as in past seasons, something good awaits the persistent.

There just isn’t another show like Orange Is the New Black. In all its erratic clamor, Jenji Kohan’s series gives voice and body and tenacious, reckless spirit to a panoply of women whose narratives don’t resemble much else on television. The show is decidedly messy in its sociological exploration and outreach, too often going for the cheap joke or the irreverent digression at the expense of character. And yet, as its season-long narratives take shape, those unfinished edges and unnecessary embellishments are forgiven. O.I.T.N.B. arrives at its points after much meandering, but those points still land, hard and salient. It’s one of the most brazenly political shows on television (in as much as it’s “on television”), and I’ll probably always love it for that, despite its myriad frustrating missteps and indulgences.

Season 6 begins in disarray, both narratively and structurally. The just-barely-successful experiment of the last season—13 episodes covering a few days of story—has passed, and now many of the show’s characters find themselves in post-riot maximum security, caught in the tumult of crackdown and consequences, navigating a new ecosystem bristling with threats. Maybe we can relate to that experience at the moment: these women suddenly finding themselves somewhere half familiar, only with more sinister stakes, a hopeless new basement below what they (and we) already thought was pretty bad.

It’s one of the soapier seasons, focusing on a conflict between two cellblocks, guided by rival longtime convict sisters (Henny Russell and Mackenzie Phillips—yes, the Mackenzie Phillips). It’s fun having true Big Bads again, just as it was fun when Lorraine Toussaint glided so malevolently through Season 2. But it’s not all a lark. This intra-prison civil war entangles itself with the opioid crisis currently ravaging America, and further highlights the indifference of the prison system—particularly the for-profit prison system. It’s serious, immediate real-world stuff, which the show handles with a resigned mordancy that’s comforting some of the time—and really depressing the rest. Whether that’s a useful tone at this current juncture is, I suppose, the question.

But that’s not necessarily a burden that the show has to assume. Something I’ve always admired about the series is that it doesn’t seem all that fussed by the onus to be soothing or therapeutic in its prodding. The show has its axes to grind, its causes. But it maintains a defiant idiosyncrasy, a penchant for anarchy, that can, yes, get the show into trouble; is offenses are often lame and crass, rather than the vitally transgressive provocations the writers seem to think they are.

Still, it’s satisfying when O.I.T.N.B.’s purview suddenly, strikingly aligns with some sense of the current moment. There’s a scene at the very end of Season 6 that is somehow both a gut-punch and a sly joke, a mix of outrage and irony that is this series at its insistent best. How could we not have noticed that, of course, this other looming threat was there all along, waiting to pounce? When it wants to, O.I.T.N.B. is keen to remind us that it’s been paying attention to everything, even if it’s spent a lot of its time making shit jokes.