The Handmaid’s Tale season 2: news and episode reviews

When Margaret Atwood first published The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, she was working with one of literary fiction’s most effective ways of looking at how misogyny is baked into the structures of our society: the feminist dystopia.

The Handmaid’s Tale exaggerated the undertones of American Puritanism that were ascendant during the Reagan era into an imagined totalitarian theocracy, one in which women were treated as chattel and forced into lives of sexual slavery. It suggested that the ideology that would allow such a world to come to pass was already more than present in our own world. It was shockingly effective.

The second season of The Handmaid’s Tale was, in almost every way, a marked improvement on the first. It was bolder in its storytelling, more incisive with its character arcs, and knitted together with stronger thematic underpinnings.

Without Margaret Atwood’s book to fall back on, for the most part, the series pulled back just a bit (literally, in the case of the camera, which dropped more often into wide shots) to examine the ways totalitarian societies hollow from the inside out, taking and taking and taking, until they become the only way of life you know. It was as timely as season one, but in a very different way, less triumphal and certain of the power wielded by large groups of people raising their voices as one.

Every week, a few members of the Vox Culture team 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 Word,” the finale of the second season.

Todd VanDerWerff: Why does June stay in Gilead?

Every week, a few members of the Vox Culture team 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 “Postpartum,” the 12th episode of the second season.

Constance Grady: About halfway through this episode of The Handmaid’s Tale, there’s a moment that made me gasp and clap in delight — and then get very, very confused that The Handmaid’s “an endless frozen scream on a TV screen” Tale would ever let me feel such a thing.

Every week, a few members of the Vox Culture team 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 “Holly,” the 11th episode of the second season.

Todd VanDerWerff: If the second season of The Handmaid’s Tale has a major flaw, it’s that the show has, in many ways, grown past its protagonist. June’s story, which drove the first season forward in myriad fascinating ways, has reached a bit of a narrative cul de sac, just as everybody else on the series has found new interesting dimensions. (Even the Commander gets some bitterly human moments in “Holly.” Ol’ Patriarchal Fred!)

“The Last Ceremony,” the 10th episode of The Handmaid’s Tale’s second season, is a gutting experience, filled with some of the darkest moments yet on a show known for dark moments.

But what’s surprising and a little uncanny about the episode is a sequence near its end, in which protagonist June, a Handmaid kept in sexual slavery by the state (and also referred to as “Offred”), is given a chance to meet with the daughter she had taken from her way back in the series’ pilot, as she attempted to flee the theocratic nation of Gilead for the relative safety of Canada.

Every week, a few members of the Vox Culture team 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 Last Ceremony,” the 10th episode of the second season.

Todd VanDerWerff: June has been in the background of this season of The Handmaid’s Tale. She hasn’t disappeared — we’ve still seen most of its events filtered through her eyes. But the story’s center has shifted to other characters.

Every week, a few members of the Vox Culture team 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 “Smart Power,” the ninth episode of the second season.

Todd VanDerWerff: The natural fear for The Handmaid’s Tale, it being based on a novel and all, is that it doesn’t have enough story to power six to seven seasons of a TV show. (Let’s leave aside for a moment if spending six to seven seasons in Gilead would only normalize its darkness. We’ve discussed that.) June’s options within the story are so limited that her choices largely boil down to “escape or not,” and that’s not so much a “choice” as it is something she will be granted via luck.

Every week, a few members of the Vox Culture team 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 “Women’s Work,” the eighth episode of the second season.

Todd VanDerWerff: Around the midpoint of “Women’s Work,” I found myself thinking, boy, baby Angela better not survive just because Janine held it for a while. By the end, when that actually happened, I was surprisingly relieved to see that conclusion arrive. There she was! Baby Angela! Alive and well! And living as a woman in Gilead, so ... you know ... this probably won’t turn out so great.

One of the biggest trends in TV storytelling in the 2010s has been the rise of character deaths as a plot device. It had become so pervasive — and so ineffective — that I wrote an article attempting to diagnose the problem in 2016.

But something welcome has happened since I wrote that article. Certainly many, many shows are still killing off characters, but more major series are finding ways to extract drama from how there are fates worse than death.

Every week, a few members of the Vox Culture team 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 writers Constance Grady and Caroline Framke discuss “Other Women,” the fourth episode of the second season.

Caroline Framke: It feels like we say this every week, but for my money, this is one of the most disturbing episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale yet.

Every week, a few members of the Vox Culture team 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 writers Constance Grady and Caroline Framke discuss “Baggage,” the third episode of the second season.

Todd VanDerWerff: One of the things I sometimes worry about when it comes to The Handmaid’s Tale is all the different layers of dystopia it has to sift through.

Sitting down to watch The Handmaid’s Tale means giving in to a slow, bruising nightmare.

No matter how beautifully rendered it can be, The Handmaid’s Tale makes for my least favorite TV viewing experience maybe ever. It’s not just bleak — plenty of shows are bleak — but also determined to impress upon its viewers that its imagined dystopian future of fertile women being kept as breeding sows and ritualized rape reimagined as patriotic duty isn’t too far off from our reality.

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 “Unwomen,” the second episode of the show’s second season.

Todd VanDerWerff: It’s gonna be weird when Alexis Bledel has two Emmys. That’s my primary reaction to this season of The Handmaid’s Tale so far.

Every week, a few members of the Vox Culture team 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 writers Constance Grady and Caroline Framke discuss “June,” the show’s second season premiere.

Todd VanDerWerff: From the very first frames of its second season, The Handmaid’s Tale wants you to know it’s bigger. As June is hustled out onto the field of the now-abandoned Fenway Park, then put through a kind of mock lynching, all while Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work” plays, it would be possible to comment on the sequence through any number of lenses, thanks to its grim content, its beautiful direction, or even its cock-eyed sense of humor. (“Seriously?” June asks the audience when she’s not lynched. “What the actual fuck?”)