WARNING: THIS POST HAS SPOILERS
It’s official: I cannot watch The Handmaid’s Tale during the evenings. This show disturbs me so much that I cannot fall asleep after seeing it. There are other shows that also deal with heavy topics, have scenes of violence and tragedies, but none reaches the frightening level of this one. Why, then, do I keep watching it?
Probably because the story is just so intriguing and it makes me extremely curious. Not to mention that it awakened in me something that had not happened for a long time: I am actually rooting for the characters. When I started watching American TV shows, cheering for characters was more common, since it was clearer who the “heroes” and the “villains” were. Nowadays, however, with the rise of antihero stories, it is harder to have genuine empathy for many of the protagonists (as I mentioned when I wrote about The Americans).
Offred/June (Elizabeth Moss), the heroine of The Handmaid’s Tale, is far from perfect, but it is impossible not to hope that she will be able to find her daughter again and leave Gilead. The same is true for Emily (Alexis Bledel): her character suffers so much this season in, so many different ways, that when she attacks Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd), I did not judge her – on the contrary, I found it liberating.
And how much suffering this season! From the “colonies,” something like concentration camps in which dissident women (called “unwomen”) are enslaved to forced labor in degrading conditions, to the public execution of a young couple by drowning. Not to mention the endless rapes, mutilations, etc.
It is true that some episodes were a bit slower than others, since the season was longer than the previous one and is no longer based on a book (there is no second volume of the book written by Margaret Atwood). And this difference of sources is visible, with the story sometimes getting lost a little in the parallel plots, but ends up getting back on track at the end of the season.
The cast, however, remains as formidable as ever, with Elizabeth Moss proving, once again, that she is an excellent actress. Special attention should be given to episode 11 (“Holly”), in which she appears by herself most of the time and is forced to give birth alone in an abandoned mansion. The birth scene moves with any woman, regardless of whether or not she is a mother.
Nominated for 20 Emmy Awards, which will be held in September, The Handmaid’s Tale has already been renewed for a third season, proving that I’m not the only person who cannot stop following the journey of these women in that hard and painful reality.
