The Handmaid’s Tale is all set for an explosive finale
The horrors of fundamentalism have been nightmarishly evoked in The Handmaid’s Tale
(Sunday, Channel 4). But the adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel is also a lean and compelling thriller in which allegorical dread is interspersed with shocking violence.
Claustrophobia and heart-thumping tension were finely balanced in the penultimate episode of this portrayal of the United States as a Bible Belt dictatorship in which women are glorified slaves. But Offred (Elisabeth Moss) had grown ever more determined to track down her missing daughter and so reached out to the “Mayday” insurgency plotting against the nation’s rulers. As it happened, the rebels had a mission for her. She would return to the high-class brothel to which her own loathsome master, Commander Waterford (Joseph Fiennes), had whisked her the previous week, and retrieve a mysterious package.
Moss, so multifaceted as Peggy Olson in Mad Men, has achieved new heights of repressed intensity here. She pleaded with Waterford to take her back to the house of ill repute and seduced him with a desperate femme fatale routine. Even as she purred sweet nothings, her skin visibly crawled.
Yet the plan came wrenchingly unstuck as, upon arrival, her statesanctioned rapist dragged her immediately upstairs to have his sordid way. Fiennes delivered a repulsive masterclass as Waterford next attempted to instigate a three-way assignation with Offred’s old friend Moira (Samira Wiley), who was now forced to work as a prostitute. The handmaid declined and off huffed the Commander for a shower – leaving no time for Offred to complete her task.
Offred’s waking purgatory plunged to new depths the next morning. Ofwarren (Madeline Brewer) had fled her new posting and snatched baby Charlotte. Eyes glistening with pain, Offred talked her friend into surrendering the child – though not before Ofwarren revealed her former master had forced her to engage in forbidden sexual acts. Then she leapt into the river, red cloak billowing in the water below like a parody of a water lily. We later learned she had survived – a bit of a cheat from a show that has to date avoided lazy twists.
With just an hour of season one remaining, Offred is no nearer escaping ghastly Commander Waterford and his Stepford-esque wife Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski) or finding her little girl. But there was a hint of an explosive finale as Moira – who had earlier retrieved Offred’s package on friend’s behalf – bloodily overpowered a client and stole his car. Whatever else happens, an actionpacked denouement seems assured.
lll Behaviour (Saturday, BBC iplayer), the new “cancer comedy” from Peep Show co-creator Sam Bain, goes where few rib-ticklers have previously dared venture in exploring the funny side of life-threatening illness. Broad chuckles are interspersed with squishy body horror across three one-hour episodes (all available on the iplayer and to be broadcast on BBC Two at a later date).
As with Peep Show, the characters are uniformly unpleasant, tripped up by their egos and neuroses even when trying to do the right thing. Tom Riley plays Charlie, an oblivious hippy whose blissful family life is derailed after he is diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Scarred by the memory of his own mother’s experience with chemotherapy, he rejects conventional medicine and vows to fight the illness with smoothies and acupuncture.
This prompts his friends Tess (Jessica Regan) and Joel (Chris Geere) to bundle their pal off to a country house for a crash course of involuntary chemotherapy. Noble intentions don’t make them any easier to root for. Joel is a nostalgia-obsessed man-child recently divorced by his megabucks wife, Tess a frustrated IT drone dabbling in “robot porn”.
Lizzy Caplan (Masters of Sex) also pops up as an alcoholic oncologist who furnishes the conspirators with purloined medicines. Caplan is great at playing drop-dead cynics. However, she’s jarring here, her hard-nosed performance at odds with a comedy which, serious subject matter notwithstanding, is largely concerned with gross-out gags and puerile back-and-forths. Episode one, in particular, zipped along – but how much of Bain’s freewheeling nihilism can we stomach before turning green at the gills and requiring a lie-down?
The Handmaid’s Tale Ill Behaviour