The Handmaid’s Tale season 1: news and episode reviews

This Wednesday, Hulu’s acclaimed and bleak Handmaid’s Tale is coming back to your screens. And if you’re just looking at the source material — Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel — it’s an open question where it goes next.

Last season’s finale, “Night,” ends exactly where Atwood’s novel does. (Aside from the epilogue. We’ll get into that below.) Offred (Elisabeth Moss) is locked into the back of the van, and that van belongs either to the Eye, the police force of Offred’s dystopian totalitarian state, or to rebel forces in disguise. As Moss recites the last words of Atwood’s novel in voiceover, the camera pushes in on her face, and we’re left guessing: Is Offred about to be led to unimaginable torment? Or is she getting her chance for freedom?

Every week, a few members of the Vox Culture team gathered to talk out the latest episode of The Handmaid’s Tale, Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel. This week, critic at large Todd VanDerWerff and staff writers Constance Grady and Caroline Framke discuss the season finale, “Night,” and the first season in full.

Caroline Framke: Over 10 episodes, The Handmaid’s Tale has done its utmost to be a study of power: how to attain it, how to keep it, how it can lead to widespread corruption that seeps into every splintering crack. Like Margaret Atwood’s original novel, the series has been a study in how finding a will and a way to be defiant under oppressive rule can be all the oppressed have — and how the reality of having to be a hero can be both harder and easier than you ever imagined. It can be as hard as trying to smuggle a package out of an underground brothel, or as easy as looking at a stone you were supposed to throw at someone’s skull and just dropping it onto the frozen ground.

Every week, members of the Vox Culture team will gather to talk out the latest episode of The Handmaid’s Tale, Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel. This week, critic at large Todd VanDerWerff and staff writer Caroline Framke discuss “The Bridge,” the penultimate episode of season one.

Todd VanDerWerff: The second half of this first season of The Handmaid’s Tale has done something interesting and probably necessary: It’s gotten us out of Offred’s head to explore the perspectives of other characters. We’ve had flashbacks to the lives of Serena Joy, Luke, and Nick in the past three episodes, and now this ninth installment crosscuts between various perspectives and completely ditches Offred’s narration in favor of forward narrative momentum.

Every week, a few members of the Vox Culture team will gather to talk out the latest episode of The Handmaid’s Tale, Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel. This week, staff writers Constance Grady and Caroline Framke discuss the eighth episode, “Jezebels.”

Constance Grady: There’s a lot going on in this episode, some of it great (we get to see Moira in the present!), some of it disturbing (yes, hello, I will never be able to erase the memory of that man licking the stump of a woman’s arm), and some of it downright dull (really, we’re still pretending people care about Nick and his flashbacks?), but the thing that’s sticking with me most is Offred’s hair.

Every week, a few members of the Vox Culture team will gather to talk out the latest episode of The Handmaid’s Tale, Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel. This week, critic at large Todd VanDerWerff and staff writer Constance Grady discuss the seventh episode, “The Other Side.”

Todd VanDerWerff: The deeper we get into season one of The Handmaid’s Tale, the more I see this middle section as the “let’s figure out how this thing is a TV series and not just a miniseries” portion of the program. As such, all viewers’ results may vary.

Every week, a few members of the Vox Culture team will gather to talk out the latest episode of The Handmaid’s Tale, Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel. This week, critic at large Todd VanDerWerff and staff writer Constance Grady discuss the sixth episode, “A Woman’s Place.”

Todd: “A Woman’s Place” is the first Handmaid’s Tale episode that, so far as I can tell, has basically nothing to do with the book the series is based on, outside of the core premise and plot elements. And it’s basically fine!

Every week, a few members of the Vox Culture team will gather to talk out the latest episode of The Handmaid’s Tale, Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel. This week, critic at large Todd VanDerWerff and staff writer Constance Grady discuss the fifth episode, “Faithful.”

Todd VanDerWerff: So many of our favorite TV shows are built atop the architecture of soap operas, which is to say that they’re fundamentally about relationships that grow and change and die off. Sure, The Handmaid’s Tale is a compelling political story, and an even more involving socio-cultural one. But it’s also, somewhere at its core, a story about a loveless marriage and an outsider who enters that dynamic and changes everything and then still another outsider whom that first outsider falls for.

Every week, a few members of the Vox Culture team will gather to talk out the latest episode of The Handmaid’s Tale, Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel. This week, critic at large Todd VanDerWerff and staff writer Constance Grady discuss the fourth episode, “Nolite Te Bastardes Carborundorum.”

Todd VanDerWerff: If there’s one thing I’ve heard complaints about when it comes to The Handmaid’s Tale, it’s that the closing pop songs are hard to take. As someone who kinda likes them in theory — I appreciate the jarring wakeup from the hypnotic world of the show — the fourth episode helped me pinpoint why they mostly don’t work in practice: They’re way too on the nose.

Elisabeth Moss gives what might be the TV performance of the year in Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

The actress is probably best known for her work as Peggy Olson on AMC’s long-running drama Mad Men. In her new role, she plays the character of Offred — a woman forced to live as a “handmaid” and valued only for her fertility — in the alternate reality of the series, which is based on Margaret Atwood’s classic 1985 novel. Much of the adaptation is filmed in extremely intimate close-ups on Moss’s face, leaving her no room for anything false. Every eye twitch, every facial muscle shifting — they all register.

Every week, a few members of the Vox Culture team will gather to talk out the latest episode of The Handmaid’s Tale, Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel. This week, staff writers Caroline Framke and Constance Grady discuss the first three episodes (“Offred,” “Birth,” and “Late”), which were released simultaneously on April 26.

Caroline Framke: The Handmaid’s Tale tells the kind of story that curls up in the pit of your stomach, settles into a gnarled knot, and stays for a long, long while. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel is as visceral as it is personal, sharp and cynical and nonchalant when it tells us that few are as brave under pressure as we all like to think we could be.

When Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, she created one of America’s most enduring dystopian myths. The book, which will be adapted into a TV series on Hulu this April, takes place in a late-20th-century America — now called Gilead — governed by a far-right religious group.

In Gilead, a small group of straight, wealthy white men hold all the power. People of color have been relocated to internment camps or deported. Gay people are executed. Religious heretics are tortured into conversion or executed.

In the third episode of The Handmaid’s Tale, Hulu’s extraordinary new adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s enduring 1985 dystopian novel, women throughout the United States take to the streets, marching to make their voices heard.

They’re protesting the rise of an authoritarian religious conservative state, one that has stripped them of many of their rights and promises to strip them of more. Among their number is our hero, played by Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss, who shouts and pushes back, even as the police arrive and meet the protest with violence.

When I stepped out of the elevator at the Wing (“a home base and social club for women in New York”), I could’ve been walking into any trendy New York City party packed with women in ankle boots and fitted overalls, held in a venue where the walls are lined with bookshelves painstakingly organized by color.

But I wasn’t there to drink spritzers or eat charcoal emulsions in cucumber cups (though, okay, I did that, too). I was there to see a panel on Hulu’s new adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale and to talk to actor Samira Wiley (Orange Is the New Black) about her crucial role of Moira, who was best friends with main character Offred (played by Elisabeth Moss) before their world went to hell.

If you currently have any free time to speak of, prepare for it to be sucked up by the gaping and undeniably magnetic black hole that is television.

April is a particularly packed month for TV, and not just any old TV. We’re talking about the kind of TV worth making time for, the kind you shouldn’t let pile up on your DVR or lie festering in your “Oh, I meant to get around to that” queue. Some of the year’s best shows will bow in the next few weeks, thanks to April’s emergence as TV’s “prestige season” before the Emmy nomination ballots are due in June.

Which Margaret Atwood dystopia do you want to live in? If we’re very lucky, soon you won’t have to choose.

The author’s most famous dystopia is the one in The Handmaid’s Tale, which Hulu will soon be adapting into a series starring Elisabeth Moss. The novel imagines a world in which the value of North American women has been reduced to their reproductive capacities and their bodies are owned by men. The protagonist is known to us only as “Offred,” because she is the handmaid (read: designated birthing receptacle) “of Fred.”