‘Handmaid’s’ Season 2 verges on misery porn
Gilead is not an easy place to pay a return visit.
When The Handmaid’s Tale premiered in 2017, it presented a patriarchal and theocratic dystopia that, for some, eerily echoed today’s trends in politics, making it a touchstone for the left and a symbol of the “resistance.” The iconic red and white handmaid costume has been seen at marches, protests and Halloween parties, often used as a symbol of sexism and oppression. The world it represents is dark and terrible, full of rape, torture and slavery.
Coming off a historic Emmy win (the first in the outstanding-drama category for a streaming series) and a mountain of hype, the Hulu series returns for a second season (Wednesday, ★★★☆) that somehow finds a way to be even darker. And it doesn’t always serve the series, which is better focused on humanity’s will to endure and survive than its ability to torture and maim.
The writers put the characters through even more harrowing torments. That certainly underlines the point that this dystopia is horrific and provides shock and gore on a par with Game of Thrones. But it gives the drama, still beautifully acted and shot, an exploitative vibe that it mostly avoided last year.
Handmaid’s was too capital-I important, and too intellectual, to be pulpy and cheap. But in the first six episodes made available for review, it verges on that territory, from an excruciatingly long sequence of dozens of people being led to a gallows to another (in the same episode) of a woman being handcuffed to a stove with an open flame. Fans often noted that the violence and anguish made the series difficult to watch, and the problem has only increased this time around.
The new season picks up immediately after last year’s cliffhanger finale, in which Offred (Elisabeth Moss, with a performance that continues to earn the Emmy she won last year), a few weeks’ pregnant, was taken by the
country’s brutal police, not knowing if the van she climbed into meant her salvation or her end. The cliffhanger is resolved quickly and brutally, and without spoiling anything, our hero spends much of the new season working to free herself and her unborn child from Gilead’s clutches.
From the opening sequence, the series almost delights in putting its pitiful characters through even more horrors and abuses. We visit the Colonies, areas of extreme toxic waste where the worst offenders are worked to death, and where Emily/Ofglen (Alexis Bledel) was sent after she was arrested in Season 1. We see new and varied punishments for unruly handmaids and other citizens, in graphic detail. The somber tone is reflected in the season’s color palette, which makes some scenes appear too muddy to see what’s going on.
Handmaid’s big improvement over the excellent first season is that it more
The Emmy-winning series is better focused on humanity’s will to endure and survive than its ability to torture and maim.
seamlessly toggles between scenes with Offred and the rest of the characters, adding more flashbacks to the time “before” and giving the supporting cast greater depth. Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski) is less of a cartoon villain in those flashbacks, and Emily gets a heartbreaking backstory.
Expanding The Handmaid’s Tale into a multiseason TV series from a single novel by Margaret Atwood was always going to be tricky, and to maintain the core of the series as it moves beyond the book’s road map, its characters have to suffer. Still, there’s only so much trauma audiences can take before it becomes too much. Handmaid’s would do well with a lighter touch.