“The Handmaid’s Tale” 2nd season turns the page
“The Handmaid’s Tale” is moving on without its most influential superstar.
That would be Margaret Atwood, whose nightmare of a novel drove the first season of the series about an America taken over by religious zealots who have forced fertile women into bondage.
But Season 2, which is available on Hulu, moves beyond the pages of the landmark 1985 book, a step every bit as treacherous as the one faced by “Games of Thrones” writers who had to move forward without further books from George R.R. Martin to lead the way.
But don’t expect Elisabeth Moss’ character, June, to find comfort in a New York advertising agency. This is still the Republic of Gilead. Within the first 15 minutes, the handmaids face harrowing consequences for last year’s refusal to stone one of their own to death. In Episode 2, the story catches up with Emily (Alexis Bledel), who has been banished with other “unwomen” to the Colonies, a concentration camp mentioned but not fully explored in the book.
“I don’t think anything we do is post-Atwood. We’re all still living in her world,” said series creator Bruce Miller. “In the first season, we diverted quite a bit from the book in ways that people didn’t notice and that made me feel really good, that we had a lot of Atwood-ness. She’s still the mother of the series.”
One player still on board is Moss. In early episodes, as her now-pregnant character finds herself on the run, June reflects on the events that led up to her ordeal and speculates about the future that her child might face.
“Bruce and I always talked about the impending birth of the child, this child that’s growing inside her, as a bit of a ticking time bomb, and the complications of that are really wonderful to explore,” said Moss, whom the website Vulture tagged last year as the Queen of Peak TV. “It’s a very big part of this season, and it gets bigger and bigger as the show goes on.”
Miller said it was clear from the beginning that Moss was the perfect actress to lead viewers on this emotionally draining journey, in large part because so much relies on her ability to express herself in a universe where handmaids are seen but barely heard.
“You’re writing dialogue that is very spare and almost inevitably the opposite of what the people are feeling,” he said. “There’s an incredible amount of tension. It’s a weird world. She’s wearing a weird hat. So the degree of difficulty is super-high. She confronts 375 problems in a scene and when she solves 374, all she’s thinking about is how to solve 375. I can’t quite get my head around how she does it.”