Read: A maddening finale for “The Handmaid’s Tale” Season 2

Season 3 of the show, the first three episodes of which arrive on Hulu today, was delayed sufficiently that it missed the cutoff for Emmy eligibility, a decision that Hulu’s Craig Erwich stressed was about maintaining the quality of the series. Visually, The Handmaid’s Tale is as striking as ever, maintaining the chilling beauty of Gilead’s optics—the curated flecks of handmaid red on stark white snow and the strange symmetry of ceremonial events. Story-wise, though, it’s blotchy as hell. If you were enraged by June’s decision to ship her baby off to Canada without her, you won’t be mollified in the opening moments of Season 3, when she justifies it by thinking breezily, There are always reasons. I’m sorry, baby girl. Mom’s got work. To be clear, this is state-sanctified rape and torture she’s talking about returning to, not late nights at the office.

Put aside the clumsy feminist overtures for a moment. The Handmaid’s Tale, in Season 3, is as narratively inert as it was in its earliest episodes, which at least did the necessary work of establishing Gilead’s universe. June, supposedly a smart and intuitive woman, repeats the same mistakes she’s made several times in the previous seasons. Mostly, these involve trusting Serena Waterford (Yvonne Strahovski), a character who previously held June down while Fred Waterford (Joseph Fiennes) raped her. But Serena isn’t the only character who vacillates between sympathetic and monstrous in the blink of an eye: The enigmatic Commander Joseph Lawrence (Bradley Whitford), last seen helping Emily (Alexis Bledel) escape with June’s baby, swings back into (complicated) antagonism after that act of charity. Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd), wounded by Emily and thus more dangerous than ever, doles out electric shocks with a cattle prod in some scenes and teary maternal hugs in others. Even the person June trusts the most in Gilead seems to be getting set up as a villain.

The pacing of the first six episodes is tedious, as the plot picks its way ploddingly toward a new locale while circling through old conflicts and tensions. Janine, played by Madeline Brewer, is still prone to erratic outbursts that put her at risk; June still periodically finds herself being escorted into ominous vans without any sense of whether she’s going to her death or the drugstore. In lieu of character development for June, the camera returns to her in close-up over and over, zooming in on Moss’s visage with all the commitment of a dedicated Hollywood facialist. And the writing, liberated since Season 2 from Margaret Atwood’s elegantly spare source material, is all over the place, meaning that June gets ponderous inner monologues comparing herself to trees, but also sporadically clunky outbursts. (Which handmaids, she wonders in one scene, might be compelled to “burn this shit place to the ground”?)