THE HANDMAID’S TALE (season two, episodes one and two). Premieres on April 29 on Bravo at 9 pm available to stream on Crave TV on April 30. Rating: NNN
I know at least four people who never got to the end of The Handmaid’s Tale’s first season. Too intense, they said.
The Emmy-winning series, based on Margaret Atwood’s 80s bestseller, is set in Gilead, where extremist Christians have forcibly seized power and advanced their strategy of kidnapping fertile women – rare in the ecologically ravaged state – so they become handmaids and bear children for their commanders.
Protagonist June Osbourne, one such unfortunate woman, tries to survive and then to escape. But what was at first exhilarating in the new age of Trump became, after about five episodes, too much to bear.
Season two won’t do much to cheer anyone up. Based on the first two episodes I saw (that’s all reviewers were given), the series just gets darker, both literally – there are a lot of gloomy spaces and unlit buildings – and in terms of its content.
Episode one picks up where the first season left off, with June (Offred, played by Elisabeth Moss) being hauled away in a van to who knows where. There are signs she may be on her way to freedom.
There’s a flashback to a sequence when about 30 handmaids are being punished for refusing to stone one of their sister handmaids, a sequence that’s horrifying.
The action eventually shifts to the Colonies, referred to with dread in season one but never seen, where Gilead’s sinners breathe poisoned air and drink contaminated water, while working on the equivalent of a chain gang. There, Emily (Oflgen, played by Alexis Bledel), a sister handmaid to June, and who had befriended her before being carted away, has taken on the role of healer. Her backstory reveals that she was a biology professor, which is how she has knowledge of curatives and pharmaceuticals, and, as a lesbian, was guilty of gender treachery.
Oh, and at another point, June engages in some desperate sex.
You get the picture. It’s all very grim, unfolding as it does in grey and dreary locations – you don’t even get the mild relief of the airy spaces in the Commander’s home. A lengthy sequence in which June searches the building where the van driver has left her is so dark you have to squint to see it. And the Colonies, where the prisoners are forced to dig up parched earth for no particular reason except to torture them, are appropriately bleak.
For sure, the series is extremely well made, the cinematography is superb – those kaleidoscopic shots of the handmaids taken from above are awesome – and the performances remain strong.
However, the excellent actors in the cast have to register only outrage, terror and despair. Can this kind of thing sustain an audience?
One thing in its favour is that season one’s plot ended where the book ends: just before the epilogue that only suggests an outcome, so even if you’ve read the book you really have no idea what’s going to happen.
The need-to-know factor could keep audiences involved. But they may need to self-medicate to get through it.
susanc@nowtoronto.com | @susangcole
