Handmaid reloaded?
‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ season two comments on women’s plight beyond Margaret Atwood’s novel. By Tymon Smith
After its spectacularly successful first season, which saw it win eight Emmys and become the first streaming service show to win a Best Drama award, Bruce Miller’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel heads into unchartered waters in its second season. The second season has become to series what the second album is to many recording artists — the moment in which we really see what the creators are made of and whether they’re able to consistently deliver.
In this case there’s a double-edged sword for Miller and the cast of the show as they are no longer able to rely on the source material provided by Atwood’s piercingly prescient novel. They must take their exploration to a new plane of interrogation of the sexual dynamics of the dystopian, ultraconservative, brutally Old Testament-guided world of Gilead.
At the end of the first season, the heroine Offred (Elisabeth Moss) — after discovering that she was pregnant by her master Fred Waterford’s driver Nick (Max Minghella) and that her husband and daughter from her preGilead existence as June Osborne were still alive — revolted against the tyranny of the Gilead regime.
The first episodes find Offred/June dealing with the consequences of her insubordination and fighting an internal battle between her past identity as June and her current designation as handmaiden Offred.
Whereas much of the violence and brutality of the puritanical world of Gilead was implied rather than demonstrated in the first season, the early episodes of the second season make much more use of explicit scenes of punishment and torture to bring home the bleakness of the daily lives of not only Offred but other handmaids who supported her attempt at revolution.
This makes it more difficult to watch than its predecessor but also no less compelling as a critique of the disdainful arrogance and patriarchal nature of current society, which in the year since the show debuted has only continued to provide revelations that show that while things are changing — there is so very much that needs changing.
Miller and his writing team utilise the early part of the second season to develop the back stories of the handmaids and explore in more depth the rise of the Gilead regime — so we see much more of June’s life and its contradictions and psychological continuities between her past and present identities.
Elisabeth Moss excels in this regard — demonstrating her subtle abilities as a performer able to broadcast a wealth of internal dilemmas through the slightest change in her eyes and facial expressions.
OBEDIENCE OR DEATH
By the fourth episode it’s become apparent that the overriding question of this season will be whether Moss’s character will be able to cling to any vestige of her previous identity as June. This is in spite of the overwhelming pressure from the terrifying chief indoctrinator Aunt Lydia (the ever excellent Ann Dowd) to accept her fate as Offred, surrogate of the Waterfords, protected from certain death only by her fertility. At the moment it’s uncertain but damn if we’re not rooting for her in spite of the bleakness and seeming impossibility of her success.
With continued fidelity to a haunting visual aesthetic and intelligent atmospheric evocation of the endless despair of life for women under the yoke of Gilead, the second season looks set to continue providing a compelling if uncomfortably bleak examination of pertinent issues.
Issues facing not just the women of some imagined dystopia but those living in the age when even the righteous indignation and awareness of the #MeToo movement seem unable to capture just how terrible things are. In spite of moving beyond Atwood’s book, the show still has plenty to say and demonstrates it’s not just a one-season wonder.