Vox - The Handmaid's Tale season 1: news and episode reviewshttps://cdn.vox-cdn.com/community_logos/52517/voxv.png2018-04-24T09:59:09-04:00http://www.vox.com/rss/stream/151789632018-04-24T09:59:09-04:002018-04-24T09:59:09-04:00Handmaid’s Tale season 1 covered most of the book. Here’s what’s left.
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<p>The show still hasn’t touched the book’s epilogue. And then there’s Offred’s mom.</p> <p id="sHUY3z">This Wednesday, Hulu’s acclaimed and bleak <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/4/24/15414922/handmaids-tale-hulu-reviews-news-episode-recaps-margaret-atwood"><em>Handmaid’s Tale</em></a> is coming back to your screens. And if you’re just looking at the source material — <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/6/27/15675874/margaret-atwood-explained">Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel</a> — it’s an open question where it goes next.</p>
<p id="VdBJE0"><a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/6/14/15782104/handmaids-tale-hulu-season-1-finale-night-recap-review">Last season’s finale, “Night,”</a> ends exactly where Atwood’s novel does. (Aside from the epilogue. We’ll get into that below.) Offred (<a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/4/27/15437272/elisabeth-moss-the-handmaids-tale-interview">Elisabeth Moss</a>) 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?</p>
<p id="8XqT4F">That’s where Atwood chooses to leave readers dangling, and where the Hulu show will pick up in the new season. The show already forged its way through most of Atwood’s novel in its first 10 episodes, so it’s safe to say that the new season will focus on expanding the world of the novel and digging into its unexplored corners. </p>
<p id="0mi8EI">But there are two major pieces of Atwood’s material that the TV show has yet to explore. Here’s what’s left of the book for <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em> to work with.</p>
<h3 id="93M6eR">We still haven’t seen Offred’s mother</h3>
<p id="oufr1a">On the Hulu show, Offred’s mother has yet to make an appearance, but in the book, she’s a major part of Offred’s backstory. </p>
<p id="YfNTOx">Book-Offred’s mother is a second-wave feminist who took Offred to marches and protests as a child. Offred, a child of <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/3/20/16955588/feminism-waves-explained-first-second-third-fourth">the post-feminist ’80s</a>, finds her mother’s radicalism silly and faintly embarrassing — until she finds herself living in the misogynist dystopia of Gilead. In the “present day” of the narrative, she repeatedly has conversations with her mother in her head. </p>
<p id="7z54fE">She’s fairly certain her mother was sent to the so-called Colonies to clean up nuclear waste in what was essentially a death sentence, which is Gilead’s preferred means for dealing with radicals, but she can’t be certain.</p>
<p id="BIjbGe"><a href="https://www.popsugar.com/entertainment/Who-Plays-Offreds-Mother-Handmaids-Tale-44527173">Showrunner Bruce Miller has already announced</a> that he’s cast <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0427728/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Cherry Jones</a> as Offred’s mother Holly, and IMDB has Jones appearing in the fourth episode of season two, so it looks like season two will start digging into Holly’s story in earnest. What we don’t know is whether we’ll be seeing her solely in flashbacks into Offred’s past or whether we’ll also catch a glimpse of her in the present, in the Colonies or elsewhere.</p>
<h3 id="levfit">There’s still the problem of the epilogue to deal with</h3>
<p id="Zoz9Ov">Atwood’s novel doesn’t end where Offred’s story does. After Offred’s last chapter, the reader is transported to a conference of “Gileadean Studies” in 2195 and presented with a transcript of remarks from a male scholar of Gilead.</p>
<p id="SWhsqw">Offred’s tale, we learn, was in fact spoken by Offred, recorded on a collection of cassette tapes. What we just read was an edited transcription of the tapes created by this scholar, and he is now placing Offred’s story into “historical context” for us. Said context mostly consists of light mocking of Offred’s repeated rapes and warnings to the audience not to judge her rapists too harshly. It’s a chilling coda to the novel, <a href="https://electricliterature.com/the-epilogue-of-the-handmaids-tale-changes-everything-you-thought-you-knew-about-the-book-82c67bc42888">one that reminds us that the history of women is generally written by men</a>. </p>
<p id="lOjwF1">This frame story has yet to appear as part of the Hulu show, but the show <em>has</em> left enough wiggle room that it could conceivably come into play in the future. Offred’s voiceover generally plays like inner monologue, but in theory, it could also be her recorded thoughts spoken into a recorder. And just before her voiceover begins in the first episode, there’s an audible click. It could just be part of the sound mix, but it could also be the sound of a tape deck beginning to record. </p>
<p id="v8xaI4">Working the Conference in Gileadean Studies into the show would be tricky: The show has already developed a dependable rhythm of moving between past and present, and delving into the conference would mean adding a third timeline to the language of the show. But the epilogue is the richest vein of Atwood’s novel that remains untapped, and it’s arguably essential to a full understanding of the book. If the TV show is looking for new book lore to delve into, the epilogue is the place to go. </p>
https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/4/20/17258518/handmaids-tale-season-2-book-vs-show-hulu-margaret-atwoodConstance Grady2017-06-14T07:40:02-04:002017-06-14T07:40:02-04:00“Night” is the best season finale The Handmaid’s Tale could have had
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<p>A strong episode lets the Handmaids find strength in unity.</p> <p id="8TEpQL"><em>Every week, a few members of the Vox Culture team gathered to talk out the latest episode of </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/4/24/15414922/handmaids-tale-hulu-reviews-news-episode-recaps-margaret-atwood"><strong>The Handmaid’s Tale</strong></a><em>, 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.</em></p>
<p id="M2ET14"><strong>Caroline Framke:</strong> Over 10 episodes, <em>The Handmaid’s Tale </em>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.</p>
<p id="Xuqnv8">But outside of those grander themes, <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em> is also just about a mother being desperate to find the daughter who was taken from her, and the hell she endures in the aftermath of that heartbreaking event.</p>
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<p id="gOen6e"><em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em> has an awful lot of tricky elements to balance, and the strain of that task showed in the middle of its first season as flashbacks and tangents focusing on people other than the actual Handmaids overshadowed most everything else. But “Night” is a really good season finale, if only because it manages to tie together so many of the season’s most pressing conflicts and themes and the characters they center on: June’s fear versus her determination, Serena Joy’s impotent fury, the Commander’s willful oblivion. The season’s final scene is almost exactly like the book’s, with June being taken away in an Eye van. The biggest difference, though, is a crucial one: A test confirms that June is pregnant.</p>
<p id="PLd1l4">Between that, Moira’s escape to Canada, Serena trying to keep her Handmaid in line by almost literally dangling June’s daughter in front of her as collateral, and the Handmaids’ refusal to stone Janine to death, there’s a lot to talk about. How did you both like the finale? Was it a satisfying end to the season and/or a decent setup for season two?</p>
<p id="tfLhPc"><strong>Constance Grady: </strong>For me, this was the most successful ending — and the most successful use of ironic pop music — that the show has managed since its <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/4/26/15412454/handmaids-tale-hulu-recap-offred-birth-late">stunning first three episodes</a>. The final shot of June's serene face in the Eye van struck exactly the right note of ambiguity: She is either about to be punished horrifically for her crimes or to escape because Nick is secretly an undercover member of the Resistance (and let's face it, that's the most likely outcome), but either way, she has decided she will not be ground down. And in Gilead, that is a radical act.</p>
<p id="y1e19q">When <em>The Handmaid's Tale</em> first introduced the idea that there could be something subversive and powerful about being a Handmaid, <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/5/3/15523626/handmaids-tale-episode-4-recap-nolite-te-bastardes-carborundorum">back in episode four with that triumphant power walk</a>, it did so clumsily. June's exultant, "We're Handmaids. Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, bitches" — after she convinces the Commander to let her leave the house — felt at best unearned and at worst malignant. It felt like part of the same ideology that suggests that soft power, which is the ability to influence those who actually have power to act on your behalf, is secretly preferable to hard power, which is the ability to actually act on your own behalf. Who needs the right to vote if you can convince your husband to vote the way you want him to, right? Who needs to be legally considered a person if you can manipulate your owner into overruling his wife and letting you walk outside?</p>
<p id="I6GYzb">But in "Night," <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em> works its way back around to finding an emotionally true way of thinking about the power of the Handmaids as a caste. It's a power that lies less in the ability of the Handmaids to manipulate their way to survival, and more in their ability to find solidarity with one another, to stand together and resist.</p>
<p id="wvutky">Of course, June is most likely going to miss facing the full consequences of that resistance, because she is probably on her way to Canada. So next season, I hope the series somehow finds a way to show us what happens to the other Handmaids who followed her lead.</p>
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<p id="naMTSk"><strong>Caroline: </strong>I was <em>really</em> encouraged by the way the stoning ended up unfolding (which is not a sentence I ever saw myself writing). Both on the show and outside of it, via statements from its creative team, Hulu’s adaptation of <em>The</em> <em>Handmaid’s Tale</em> has gone out of its way to emphasize women’s culpability in their own subjugation, addressing the lengths some people will go to to maintain their own power by pitting women against each other (such as with the Commander’s wives often being more ruthless with the Handmaids than their husbands). </p>
<p id="KxSg8Y">Like you said, Constance, the Handmaids’ refusal to stone one of their own shows how powerful unity can be. This may be an outcome Aunt Lydia and the others in charge of Gilead once feared, but as we saw in a flashback to June’s first day as a Handmaid, those in power also assumed they could shock and beat the fight out of the Handmaids. Whatever happens to the Handmaids next — and as Lydia says, “There will be consequences” — they’ve at least proved their oppressors wrong.</p>
<p id="bwS0pP">However, we're going to have to agree to disagree on the music, because <em>man</em>, did this episode's song choices bring me out of the episode. Nina Simone's "Feeling Good" — a powerful song when used right — just about killed the momentum of the Handmaids leaving the stoning, and Tom Petty's "American Girl" was timed so bluntly at the end that it left me frustrated and rolling my eyes. </p>
<p id="0VgNHJ">But I know Todd feels differently. So Todd, won't you please tell us why these music choices were great and the finale was great and stop hating good TV, Caroline, <em>god</em>?</p>
<p id="cqcZKF"><strong>Todd</strong><strong> VanDerWerff</strong><strong>:</strong> "Feeling Good" I can defend less strenuously. I tend to think about music on TV not as how the showrunner wants us to feel, but as how it feels to be inside the character's head at that moment. So I bought June being jubilant in that moment. Her life doesn't leave much room for such emotion, and this is a big win for her. I've also always found that song a little sadder and more desperate than most people do, I think. Nina Simone's voice is so world-weary that it's not hard to find those hints here and there.</p>
<p id="dUPgk2">But "American Girl" I thought was pretty much perfect. Talk about a song that’s laden with melancholy but hides it via seemingly enthralling melody! And I thought it worked well here, in particular, because director Kari Skogland staged the scene so that as the doors of the Eye van close, cutting us off from seeing June, Elisabeth Moss gradually turns to look<strong> </strong>directly at camera. But you can barely <em>see</em> it, because the light is being removed from the shot. It does what I want a TV season's final shot to do, in summarizing essentially the entire season to this point, and I don't think it would’ve worked if the music didn't seem so effusive.</p>
<p id="iROsf0">That said, I thought "Night" was pretty close to the best finale this season could have had. I might quibble with a few decisions here and there, but I have no outright complaints. The episode isn’t at the level of <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em>'s pilot or that devastating third episode, but it's right up there. Between it and <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/6/7/15748100/handmaids-tale-episode-9-the-bridge-recap-janine">the ninth episode</a>, I imagine there will be a few sighs of relief among those of us who bet on the show, then worried slightly as various midseason missteps seemed to portend worse things to come.</p>
<p id="gd4es6">Indeed, I can't count all the times this finale walks right up to the edge of doing something disastrous, then backs away. The package June secreted away in her bedroom, for instance, simply turns out to be a huge bundle of letters that Handmaids have written to tell their stories, rather than a bomb or something. Choosing the emotional beat over the action beat at this point in the show's run is the smart move, <em>and</em> it gives the non-stoning additional heft. (Similarly, Moira and Luke reuniting in Canada benefits from being played in a more muted fashion than you might expect.) This approach doesn’t apply to every storyline — we saw Warren get his hand cut off! — but it applies to most.</p>
<p id="sua81I">Or maybe I just loved that “Night” put June right back at the center, and Moss's tremendous performance with it. Watching her dissolve at the sight of Hannah in one of those tiny pink robes was almost too much to bear. Something that's so close is still so far out of reach, indeed.</p>
<p id="bneNDV"><strong>Constance:</strong> I agree that the last shot of “Night” is just about perfect, and part of what makes it work so well is the way it plays off a shot of June that we see halfway through the episode: She's walking down a staircase, and the camera lingers for just a beat too long on her stomach, cropping<strong> </strong>her head out of the frame. Gilead wants to turn her into nothing but a pregnant womb with no identity of her own, and June keeps fighting to assert herself, to bring her identity and her face back into focus — and at the end of the episode, she's finally able to do so.</p>
<p id="xy1SZN">This episode made me think about showrunner <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/6/7/15736998/margaret-atwood-bruce-miller-handmaids-tale">Bruce Miller's recent remark</a> that the most intimate relationship in <em>The Handmaid's Tale</em> is the relationship between June and Offred, between June's desire to escape Gilead and assert her own personhood and Offred's desire to comply and stay safe. Because totalitarian states destroy trust, the only "person" June can trust to be completely open with her is herself — and ultimately, her struggle isn't with Gilead in the form of the Commander or Serena Joy, but with Gilead in the form of her own fear.</p>
<p id="v848jz">That idea puts June's regular stream of inspirational speeches and voiceovers into some context, in that the show seems to be thinking about them as a series of episodes in her fight with herself, but I still think a lot of them were too clunky to be as dramatically effective as they were intended to be. That said, when June dropped the stone in "Night," it felt earned: She was choosing to direct her anger toward Gilead, instead of letting Gilead redirect her anger onto a probably blameless target the way she did during the Salvaging all the way back in episode one, and we could see the emotional impetus for it.</p>
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<p id="lPO4eP"><strong>Todd: </strong>I should say here that my assumption is that June will be back in the Waterford household next season, reporting on Waterford to the Eyes. Her pregnancy is too good of a screenwriting "ticking clock" for the show to put her in another location. So take all of the below with a grain of salt if she does end up in Canada.</p>
<p id="tbeUgR">But I loved the way "Night" framed June's pregnancy as something that finally weaponized her, in a way. She doesn't want this pregnancy in the slightest. But if she was already unlikely to lose her life for stepping out of line as a fertile woman, there's <em>much</em> more she can get away with now that she's pregnant, and some part of her must know this. For nine months, she has an added layer of protection that will let her, say, scream curse words at Serena or try to pit the Commander and his wife against each other. </p>
<p id="vk5pRg">Now, it's not like June is going to suddenly become a revolutionary. The conflict inside her is still there, and Gilead almost assuredly has thought of ways to subjugate pregnant women, despite their value to the country's overall fertility project. June's life won’t stop being an unending nightmare. But the first half of this episode is just a long series of shoes dropping, and June's dropping a lot of them. Pregnancy hasn't given her anything even close to freedom, but it has given her the opportunity to be a little more reckless. I'm excited to see that side of the character.</p>
<p id="QXjF7p"><strong>Caroline:</strong> June’s pregnancy is one of the most shocking things to come out of this season, but in retrospect, I really should’ve seen it coming. If <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em> is to live beyond the scope of its source material, it was only a matter of time before a pregnancy re-complicated things. This development puts a huge rift in June’s world. But we looked on as she desperately, ferociously snarled at Serena that Serena is an “evil bitch” and a “motherfucking <em>cunt”</em> while they drove away from Hannah; June knows she can be bolder now that she’s fulfilled the one duty Gilead believes in the most.</p>
<p id="EkrRCZ">“Night” also contextualizes the fact that June’s biggest, boldest action to date happens after finding out she’s pregnant, after spitting fire at Serena and getting nothing but ice in return. Even though it’s incredibly brave to drop the stone, June knows she can do it and walk away, even if there are other consequences. The fact that the rest of the Handmaids immediately follow suit is what makes the moment extraordinary.</p>
<p id="roGZOc">It also brings the subtext of the Handmaids’ collective horror — previously traded through quick glances from behind their bonnet wings — into stark text that’s impossible to ignore. It’s the kind of action that, like Constance said, might have felt cheap or unearned earlier on in the season, but 10 episodes later, we not only know the weight of this action but <em>feel</em> it. </p>
<p id="NCXCEK">I think that’s partly why I wasn’t quite as moved by the final sequence as either of you were. The moments leading up to June making her slightly smirky way down the Waterfords’ staircase and the credits smashing to “American Girl” were saturated with voiceover, verbatim from the book, telling us exactly what we’d already understood from June’s face before, during, and after the stoning. It was an unnecessary recap that, for me, undercut the power of the moments themselves — a deflating balloon instead of the piercing burst it could’ve been.</p>
<p id="bTXlMt"><strong>Constance:</strong> That final voiceover is absolutely overly literal, but I was honestly a little relieved to hear it. It's just about word for word the last few lines of the book, before the epilogue, in which Offred heads off to her final ambiguous fate, and I think part of the reason the final sequence works so well for me is that it’s devoted to hitting the creepy, anxious release of tension that makes the end of Atwood's book so moving. We've talked a lot in these recap discussions about how much <em>The Handmaid’s Tale </em>has struggled to make its end-of-episode catharsis tonally consistent with the claustrophobia of the rest of the show’s universe, but that kind of release — which is also somehow a little oppressive — is exactly the kind of emotional register Atwood excels at capturing.</p>
<p id="FC83Jk">Would it have been more artistically compelling if the show had found a way to hit those notes without having Moss recite Atwood's exact words at the same time that we saw them dramatized? Yeah, probably. But to be honest, I don't entirely trust this show to get there on its own. I'm okay with it keeping the Atwood training wheels on when the song it's playing (to mix my metaphors wildly) is this impressive.</p>
<p id="UzZJJ8"><strong>Caroline: </strong>I can accept that! And I can also agree with Todd that “Night” is by and large the best finale this season could have had. It centers June and the Handmaids in a way the middle of the season largely forgot to do. As those letters in June’s bundle reminded June of the fact that she and her fellow Handmaids were and are <em>people — </em>each starring in their own <em>Handmaid’s Tale </em>— it felt like the show was remembering the same. If season one was all about deconstructing how power shifts and steals agency and pushes people to their moral edges, I hope season two’s story finds a way to give power back to those who need it most. </p>
<p id="BbV7Dx"><em>The entire first season of </em>The Handmaid’s Tale<em> is now available to stream on Hulu.</em></p>
https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/6/14/15782104/handmaids-tale-hulu-season-1-finale-night-recap-reviewCaroline FramkeConstance GradyEmily St. James2017-06-07T08:20:02-04:002017-06-07T08:20:02-04:00The Handmaid’s Tale stares into the face of death — and beyond
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<p>The season’s endgame is pushing everyone as close to the edge as they can stand.</p> <p id="c5zCkS"><em>Every week, members of the Vox Culture team will gather to talk out the latest episode of </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/4/24/15414922/handmaids-tale-hulu-reviews-news-episode-recaps-margaret-atwood"><strong>The Handmaid’s Tale</strong></a><em>, Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel. This week, critic at large Todd VanDerWerff and staff writer Caroline Framke </em><em>discuss</em><em> “The Bridge,” the penultimate episode of season one. </em></p>
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<p id="fHKbyD"><strong>Todd VanDerWerff:</strong> The second half of this first season of <em>The Handmaid's Tale</em> 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.</p>
<p id="vo6zqk">It’s also a significantly grimmer episode than some of the more recent ones (which is a feat when it comes to this show). Janine, unable to handle the transition between households, jumps off a bridge and almost takes her baby with her, while Offred tries like hell to be a spy for the resistance and finds herself mostly failing.</p>
<p id="WtEXBq">Caroline, I’ve found these experiments in point of view a bit all over the place, even as I understand why the show needs them. But I thought “The Bridge” was pretty terrific. Tell me how I’m wrong.</p>
<p id="qajUgI"><strong>Caroline Framke: </strong>I think “The Bridge” was a necessary episode — a bridge, if you will, between the first season and whatever the second is going to be. At first I was skeptical that the show could believably stretch the story beyond the confines of the book; that’s certainly not the case anymore. The show’s been careful to keep us grounded in June’s mind while giving the people in her orbit time to reveal their own stories. In doing so, we’ve gotten a much more complete picture of how Gilead came to be and why it has any staying power at all — and “The Bridge” is a powerful example of its cost.</p>
<p id="45dhRg">Honestly, the only point I’d fight you on so far is your assertion that this episode is any grimmer than the others. Yes, it drives just about everyone to their respective brinks, and Janine’s suicide attempt is wrenching. But one side effect of this show being as relentlessly dark as it is is that even as I watched Janine and June’s back-to-back rapes, I was mostly just exhausted.</p>
<p id="OhA6kO">On the one hand, <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em>’s commitment to keeping the Handmaids’ circumstances bleak feels true to the material; my exhaustion at watching scenes like that can feel like an eerie mirror of the exhaustion evident in June’s face during said scenes. On the other hand, there’s very little this show could do at this point that could jolt me into horror like the first few episodes did. When June got out of the car to see Janine standing on the bridge railing — her Handmaid robe streaking the blank white sky with scarlet — it didn’t feel shocking. It felt inevitable. </p>
<p id="W3fOGt"><strong>Todd: </strong>The thing I find most gut-wrenching about this episode (and this series, really) is that it’s turned something I usually find irritating about TV — for the most part, the characters don’t die, even when they are in mortal peril — into something genuinely horrifying.</p>
<p id="BNujCj">I wanted Janine’s choice to kill herself, because she saw no potential escape from her nightmare, to <em>mean</em> something, but Gilead robs her of that moment, takes away her agency even when it comes to life and death. </p>
<p id="zErwEY">And, of course, we know that Gilead does its best to keep the Handmaids from killing themselves, and we know why as well. But the fact that the state does everything it can to keep Janine alive as a slave, even when she plunges off a bridge into a river, feels like another level of horror to me.</p>
<p id="DMQ7qT">The deeper it gets into the season, the less <em>Handmaid’s Tale</em> is being read as a very specific indictment of our current era and the more it’s being read as an indictment of all eras. One of the show’s key arguments is that it didn’t take much to turn the US into Gilead, which is to say that it could happen both here and, really, anywhere.</p>
<p id="wXJLoE">And “The Bridge” is, in some ways, the show’s lowest ebb for many of the characters. Moira has lost all taste for the fight. June can’t manage to get out of a bedroom to get a package. Nick is watching his life spiral (though he gets to enjoy some sweet pasta). Even Serena Joy has to know that her husband is having an affair. Only the Commander skates by, blithely indifferent, though he continues to act as if he’s horribly put-upon.</p>
<p id="A98HvQ">Really, Serena struck me most in this episode. That scene where she commiserates with the house Martha about the death of the latter’s son in the war is pitch perfect, especially how Serena cuts her off before she can say anything that might suggest her son <em>wasn’t</em> fighting for the forces of Gilead. <em>The Handmaid</em><em>’</em><em>s Tale</em> has generally gotten better at these little telling moments throughout the season, and director Kate Dennis has an eye for how to shoot these flashes of forced intimacy to underline the lack of real intimacy.</p>
<p id="E0AGcW">Were there any of those smaller moments that stood out to you?</p>
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<p id="Wg5vn7"><strong>Caroline: </strong>Dennis’s work in “The Bridge” is probably my favorite <em>Handmaid’s Tale</em> direction since Reed Morano’s in <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/4/26/15412454/handmaids-tale-hulu-recap-offred-birth-late">the first three episodes</a>. That scene on the bridge has some beautiful long shots of Janine, a lone red figure standing on the edge of the world surrounded by an icy stillness. The scenes at Jezebel’s are fittingly claustrophobic, pressing in on June’s face and clipping corners when Moira walks in, sucking the air out of both the room and June’s panicking lungs. </p>
<p id="WDqrfS">When I watch shows with the intent of writing about them later, my notes tend to be the scraps of dialogue, passing images, the twinges on people’s faces that might recontextualize a scene beyond its words. This makes <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em> — which loves dropping symbols and tight-as-hell close-ups whenever possible — a particularly good fit for my style of note taking. </p>
<p id="GhR2dC">So here are just a few of the moments I thought worked best in “The Bridge”: </p>
<ul>
<li id="4ofxi4">Aunt Lydia (welcome back, Ann Dowd!) being as warm as she’s ever going to get in this episode — by which I mean she’s still downright chilling — when Janine whimpers that her new house is “really far.” Lydia simpering back, “From what, dear?” is the cruelest kind of faux affection, a deliberate erasure of the fact that Janine only <em>just</em> had to give her daughter away.</li>
<li id="2fm7hY">June getting the nerve to say that she wants to help with Mayday, then starting with shock when her Handmaid contact almost immediately gives her an assignment. Some of the best parts of the book are the moments when Offred expresses the wish that she could be a stronger person, the kind who can anchor a revolution; Elisabeth Moss is (once again) brilliant as June absorbs the enormity of what’s being asked of her and briefly stutters in fear. </li>
<li id="zoCxPN">Samira Wiley’s performance as a defeated Moira (called “Ruby” at Jezebel’s), her eyes flickering as she struggles to keep her fucking shit together.</li>
</ul>
<p id="HVEQDI">And speaking of Moira: When are we getting <em>her</em> flashbacks, please? Her grand (and bloody) escape at the end of this episode<strong> </strong>signals that she’s going to be a bigger part of the season finale, but man, if there’s one person I wish got more depth as the show expanded, it’s her. </p>
<p id="XTJDZ4"><strong>Todd: </strong>My assumption is we’ll pivot back to June’s POV for the finale, but yeah, if there’s a consistent complaint that I hope the producers and writers hear as we head into season two, it’s that viewers would love to get a glimpse into the backstory of the other Handmaids. I thought for sure we’d get a look into Janine's past in this episode, but nope.</p>
<p id="DYHv84">I get this, to a point. If you want to explain the rise of Gilead, doing so through the perspectives of Serena Joy and Nick makes more sense than doing so through the perspective of, say, Emily. But it also flirts with the idea of protagonist bias — the idea that the protagonist is the most special character just because the show says she is. (Also: Just putting it out there, but if season two doesn't give us more Aunt Lydia, I will be very sad.)</p>
<p id="sfCgKX">That said, I really am ready to get back into June’s head. How is she feeling about all of this? When she gets that package from the butcher at episode’s end, what does she think it does? The show built an intimacy with her, and it’s been fascinating to see it stripped away. But I hope the finale lets us back in.</p>
<p id="0ymwf8"><strong>Caroline: </strong>Would you believe that I didn’t realize there was no June voiceover until you pointed it out to me? Because I didn’t! But now I miss it, and will be very happy to have it back. </p>
<p id="cr2GJH">I do think that if the show is trying to sustain the story beyond the book’s narrow focus, shading out the people who built and keep Gilead afloat is pretty crucial. It’s far scarier to not just experience someone like Serena Joy but understand her. The most frightening thing about <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em> has always been its plausibility. Understanding how it came to pass, and how ordinary people made extraordinary decisions in the name of a cause, is a vital component of making its horror seem that much more possible.</p>
<p id="dZlkMx">But now that the season is almost over, I can officially say I’d happily trade Luke’s standalone episode and Nick’s flashbacks for more insight into Moira, or Emily, or Janine. As June forges deeper into the Resistance, giving us more insight into the lives of her fellow Handmaids and the driving forces that keep them going despite every skin-crawling terror thrown their way should absolutely be a priority.</p>
https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/6/7/15748100/handmaids-tale-episode-9-the-bridge-recap-janineCaroline FramkeEmily St. James2017-05-31T08:20:01-04:002017-05-31T08:20:01-04:00The Handmaid’s Tale takes a disturbing field trip that leads to an unlikely reunion in “Jezebels”
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<figcaption>Let’s talk about this hair. | Hulu</figcaption>
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<p>Too bad the episode is too scattered to be truly powerful.</p> <p id="nDz5GF"><em>Every week, a few members of the Vox Culture team will gather to talk out the latest episode of </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/4/24/15414922/handmaids-tale-hulu-reviews-news-episode-recaps-margaret-atwood"><strong>The Handmaid’s Tale</strong></a><em>, Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel. This week, staff writers Constance Grady and Caroline Framke discuss the eighth episode, “Jezebels.”</em></p>
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<p id="TSmuZp"><strong>Constance Grady: </strong>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.</p>
<p id="UIX9fU">Generally when we see Offred with her hair loose in the present, it's straggling down her back in a limp mass, all split ends and frizz, because that is what happens to hair as fine and straight as Offred’s when it isn't cared for, and Handmaids aren't allowed to care for their hair. They are supposed to be above vanities like grooming: They're supposed to be clean, but they aren't supposed to care about how they look. But at the beginning of "Jezebels," as Offred climbs out of bed with Nick, her hair cascades across her back in a perfect Veronica Lake wave, the kind that no one's hair achieves naturally, the kind you get with a curling iron.</p>
<p id="bQOUi9">It's because later in the episode, the Commander is going to dress up Offred in a glamorous flapper dress, and the show wants her hair to be glamorous to match, but it also doesn't want to show the labor that goes into glamour onscreen. For just this week, <em>The Handmaid's Tale</em> takes place in a world in which Offred's hair is naturally heat-styled; in which her ear piercings don't close up after being unused for five years; in which, when she cries as the Commander starts to undress her, her face is perfectly set and lovely, with a single perfect tear highlighting her high cheekbones and not so much as a wobbling chin to undermine her beauty. </p>
<p id="S27H73">It's a world in which women's beauty is both effortless and constant, up to and including the moments in which those women are raped. The rapes in this episode are eroticized to a level that <em>T</em><em>he Handmaid’s Tale</em> has previously avoided with some skill, and I don't love this new aesthetic.</p>
<p id="JsxORH">It's a very, very odd choice for the show, especially since its source material is so interested in the labor and resources women pour into their grooming. In Atwood's novel, there's a sad little subplot in which Offred, desperate for moisturizer for her parched skin, steals pats of butter from the kitchen to use on her hands and finds herself smelling faintly of vegetable oil. (Later, moisturizer is one of the things she asks the Commander to get her in exchange for their games of Scrabble.) And in the novel, Jezebel's — a brothel that exists in what used to be a hotel, into which the Commander smuggles Offred for the night — isn't glamorous at all: It's tawdry. All the clothes are threadbare, with missing sequins and broken straps, and the makeup is old and has a tendency to clump.</p>
<p id="CVThup">But on the show, Jezebel's has a faint tinge of aspiration. It's luxurious, the clothes are beautiful, and the makeup is perfectly applied. It's disturbing, of course, but it’s presented as though it should also be faintly titillating, and I can't quite figure out why.</p>
<p id="KZJpBD"><strong>Caroline Framke: </strong>I had the same confusion. It’s not that everything in the TV show has to be true to the book; we’ve seen many times over these eight episodes how diverging from Atwood’s original text has served Hulu’s adaptation well, especially as it expands the world of Gilead and beyond. But the shift in tone for the brothel itself really is jarring enough to make me look at it more skeptically in terms of what the series is trying to say here. It was obvious from the second the Commander pulled out a beautiful beaded dress for June that this particular part wasn’t going to mimic the book, which instead had June shrug on a hasty smear of lurid red lipstick and fraying Vegas showgirl castoffs. </p>
<p id="2BzTxM">I can see an argument for slicking up the place insomuch as the TV show’s version of Gilead is basically pristine, give or take a bloody wall. Everything is so painstakingly in its right place, so built on ceremony and prestige, that I could believe the Commanders the show depicts would want even their secret brothels to follow suit. </p>
<p id="dvdLpq">But like you said: Giving Jezebel’s more of a luxury sheen makes the whole trip feel like a fantasy in the way that the men who frequent the place no doubt see it, as an establishment where women dressed like sexy Handmaids (coming to a terrible novelty Halloween costume shop near you, probably!) lead men to dark corners to act out their latent desires. And if there was one moment that really got to me, it was the one where June asked the Commander who everyone was and he assumed she meant the men; who else matters, after all?</p>
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<figcaption>June and two men who don’t deserve her.</figcaption>
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<p id="YSZJFP">The show is also shading out the Commander in a way I’m not sure I can quite track, though I’m interested enough to give it the benefit of the doubt, for now. (This is, not for nothing, in part thanks to Joseph Fiennes’s impressive performance, which has so far let the Commander walk a knife’s edge between passive smarm and active villainy.) Waterford likes to keep his Handmaids agile, likes to flirt with them enough to believe they “understand” him, that they’re having fun making reckless trips to brothels instead of fearing for their lives with their hearts beating in their throats. </p>
<p id="IcfSzo">Despite everything he says about Handmaids being women acting out their “biological destinies,” Waterford treats them like actual mistresses. So I’m guessing — based on the reveal that Nick was installed as an Eye in the house to keep an eye on Waterford in particular — that Waterford is in for a fall sooner rather than later.</p>
<p id="NYaFiG">On that note, I agree with you that Nick’s flashbacks can basically be summed up as “Ugh, whatever,” especially because Max Minghella, to be frank, doesn’t seem to have the range that <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em>’s other actors do. But I still want to talk about them in a <em>little</em> more depth, because I can see a case where they add value to the show rather than trying our patience. Honestly, I think I would’ve been more interested in them if they were used in a more logical way than they were in this episode; they just didn’t seem to fit with the rest of it at all. </p>
<p id="A3JhnM"><strong>Constance: </strong>There's a nice touch in Nick's flashbacks in that the thing that gets the Sons of Jacob interested in him is that he's trying to provide for his family. That's their glorious and pure ideal in a nutshell — the virtuous patriarch working hard to protect the innocent women in his life — but it also means that Nick is a vulnerable mark, the kind of lost and powerless soul that cults traditionally target. I would, in theory, be interested in what happened to the family he was so desperate to protect (did they survive Gilead's purges?), but not if it's presented the way it was this week.</p>
<p id="tKbjR3">Making Nick's point of view so prevalent in an episode that is already committed to the idea of women as beautiful aesthetic objects adds more than a touch of male gaze to a show that originally defined itself through its <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpetersen/blessed-be-the-fruit?utm_term=.mi3P31RWl#.sy9zW3oNg"><em>female </em>gaze</a>. We keep cutting away from the Commander caressing a flinching Offred to Nick watching them in the background, glowering, with the result that the show feels more interested in Nick's possessiveness and jealousy than in Offred's feelings about her bodily autonomy.</p>
<p id="fgPdwC">Much more interesting is the return of Moira. <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/4/24/15405960/handmaids-tale-hulu-samira-wiley-interview">Samira Wiley</a> does a fantastic job at preserving Moira's take-no-shit black humor while adding a new layer of defeat to her: Gilead has just about broken this unbreakable woman. She has no hope of escaping her life now, and is just praying for a few good years at a brothel with all the booze and drugs she wants before she dies. It's one of the most tragic moments of the show so far.</p>
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<figcaption>There were no available promo photos of Moira, so here is Nick.</figcaption>
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<p id="6Yb1xw"><strong>Caroline: </strong>Absolutely agreed, and thank you for identifying the issue I couldn’t quite put my finger on. For an episode that’s all about how women are cast aside in favor of serving men, “Jezebels” kinda casts its women aside in favor of serving the men! Even June and Moira’s reunion is treated like yet another complication in the grander scheme of the Commander’s treacherous outing than the huge revelation it actually is.</p>
<p id="b44U4r">So let’s indeed talk more about Moira, because she and Wiley deserve it. June seeing Moira from across a crowded room, in a transparent white shirt and Playboy bunny ears, is as exciting as it is devastating. Wiley and <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/4/27/15437272/elisabeth-moss-the-handmaids-tale-interview">Elisabeth Moss</a> act the hell out of their brief, tearful encounter, both their faces shaking with equal parts relief and horror. And when Moira tries to shrug away June’s concern by saying that at least being a Jezebel beats dying in the Colonies, I felt their shared grief like a slap to the face. </p>
<p id="uwKSXu">In the book, this moment is the last time June ever sees Moira — but since the series <a href="http://variety.com/2017/tv/news/the-handmaids-tale-renewed-season-2-hulu-1202407505/">now has a second season in the works</a>, it’ll be shocking if that’s the case here. So I can’t wait to see Moira’s part expand in the series, but I really hope the show figures out what it wants to say about her and her fellow concubines’ experience beyond, “It<em> really sucks.</em>”</p>
<p id="DKZ5HT"><strong>Constance: </strong>What I'm hoping for beyond anything else is that whatever new material the show creates for Moira, it's as smart and as compelling as the expanded storyline it created for Alexis Bledel’s Emily/Ofglen/Ofsteven. What set the Emily storyline apart from the rest of the TV adaptation’s additions is that it made Gilead <em>more</em> specific and <em>more</em> violent in its brutality than we already knew it to be, while the other additions — like the flashbacks for Luke and Serena Joy and now Nick — have tended toward vague, generic dystopian and post-apocalyptic tropes. They've been less interested in how totalitarian governments control people in general and women in particular than in how onscreen violence and rape can be entertaining and sexy.</p>
<p id="rXzOpb"><strong>Caroline: </strong>I’ve heard from a few people that <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/4/26/15412454/handmaids-tale-hulu-recap-offred-birth-late">Emily’s anguished scream at the end of episode three</a> was about all<strong> </strong>they could take of <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em>; I don’t blame them, if only because her story is so stark and brutal in a way that was only suggested in the book. But I agree that the deviation in her story is at least rooted in what makes the book so searing even 30 years later, namely Gilead’s casual dismissal of anything that makes the Handmaids more than breeding sows, or even just a little more human.</p>
<p id="TJ7mRk">That’s something “Jezebels” could have hit home if it wanted to, and even suggests in some asides. When the Commander shrugs off June’s questions about how a place like this could even exist by saying that “everyone’s human,” I wanted to scream for her, because of course he was only talking about the men who were there to thrust out their frustrations. When he stroked the red tag on June’s ear that signifies she’s a fertile Handmaid, I crawled out of my skin right along with her. </p>
<p id="lXO16J">The episode ultimately stops short of getting more specific in favor of continuing to broaden the world of Gilead. That’s served <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em> beautifully before, but here it mostly feels like a distraction from what could have been a particularly powerful experience for June, and for us, the “someones” hearing her tell this story.</p>
<p id="jsIQX1"><em>The first eight episodes of </em>The Handmaid’s Tale<em> are currently available to stream on Hulu. New episodes are released every Wednesday.</em></p>
https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/5/31/15714246/handmaids-tale-hulu-episode-8-jezebels-recapCaroline FramkeConstance Grady2017-05-24T07:30:01-04:002017-05-24T07:30:01-04:00The Handmaid’s Tale takes us out of Gilead to check in on a familiar face
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<figcaption>Hey, what’s Luke been up to all this time? | Hulu</figcaption>
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<p>This might be the series’ best break from its oppressive setting yet.</p> <p id="pVbZCR"><em>Every week, a few members of the Vox Culture team will gather to talk out the latest episode of </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/4/24/15414922/handmaids-tale-hulu-reviews-news-episode-recaps-margaret-atwood"><strong>The Handmaid’s Tale</strong></a><em>, 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, </em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5943928/?ref_=tt_eps_cu_n"><em>“The Other Side.”</em></a></p>
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<h3 id="aO31Cf">Checking in with another familiar face</h3>
<p id="iTeDLl"><strong>Todd</strong><strong> VanDerWerff</strong><strong>:</strong> The deeper we get into season one of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5834204/?ref_=nv_sr_1"><em>The Handmaid's Tale</em></a>, 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.</p>
<p id="G5j4Ew">And I think, generally, "The Other Side" succeeded in convincing me that there are lots and lots of stories to be told in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Handmaids-Tale-Margaret-Atwood-ebook/dp/B003JFJHTS/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1495580868&sr=1-1&keywords=the+handmaid%27s+tale">Margaret Atwood's world</a>, not just Offred's. It took something I was certain I wouldn't give a shit about — Luke's struggle with resistance forces in Canada — and made me a convert. This isn't the best episode of the season, but it's a really great episode about Luke, and that might be a higher bar to clear.</p>
<p id="F2TEHG">Coupled with last week's Serena Joy flashbacks, it also underlines that Hulu’s adaptation is going to do its damnedest to make us care about the non-Offred characters in its orbit, or at least make us understand who they are. While that's necessarily going to turn off some fans of the book (I actually hate the idea in theory but have been more or less fine with it in execution — at least until the inevitable Nick episode), it's ended up being a smart way of expanding the show's scope.</p>
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<figcaption>Luke finds himself in a safe haven, uncertain of what to do next.</figcaption>
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<p id="yREgpo">I'm talking a lot about this episode in terms of season structure and TV theory when, really, I was mostly impressed by how willing it was to be <em>dark</em>. And I don't just mean in theme — there are literal scenes in “The Other Side” where you can't see anything onscreen and instead can only hear the actors' voices. </p>
<p id="g4gTuf">Yeah, there's a lot of hard-to-see TV out there, but this episode feels like it's scaling new heights in that regard. What did you think of all the pitch-black images?</p>
<p id="Qo4iOB"><strong>Constance</strong><strong> Grady</strong><strong>:</strong> It was surprisingly compelling to watch Luke muddle around in the darkness of this episode, but what struck me was how much less oppressively cramped "The Other Side" felt compared with the show’s first few episodes. </p>
<p id="jThzIg">In making the move that you aptly describe as the transition between miniseries and TV series, <a href="https://www.hulu.com/the-handmaids-tale"><em>The Handmaid's Tale</em></a> has had to sacrifice a lot of <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/4/26/15412454/handmaids-tale-hulu-recap-offred-birth-late">what made those first three episodes so terrifyingly different and great</a>, like watching a silent, frozen scream. We were trapped almost exclusively in Offred's horrifying perspective, and even when we ventured out into different points of view, like Emily's or Janine's, we were still seeing the world through a Handmaid's eyes. And that world was characterized by a feeling of being trapped, of being ground down.</p>
<p id="q7oBB4">That's obviously not a sustainable perspective or mood for a full TV series! The story is opening up and becoming <em>The Handmaid and Company's Tales</em> — and it should, if it wants to continue. But it does mean moving away from some of what was most aesthetically interesting about those earliest episodes.</p>
<p id="lL50VF">So here we get Luke's adventure. Which is … fine? Luke is a likable enough character, and his traveling companions are scrappy and compelling. But for my money, his arc is a little generic. </p>
<p id="iVlXNq">By which I mean, as a person who has watched any TV show or movie before in my life, I have seen a fair number of stories about a good brave man struggling through the wilderness, with the help of an unlikely group of companions, to save his wife and child. It's a good story! There's nothing wrong with that story! But I don't need to come to <em>The Handmaid's Tale</em> to find it, and it's never going to give me anything as shocking or sickening as, for instance, Moira and June trading wordless looks of horror at the Red Center as they realize exactly what their new role as Handmaids entails. </p>
<h3 id="MoQXES">Is this episode’s generic nature a bug — or a feature?</h3>
<p id="muDlKu"><strong>Todd:</strong> I suppose that's what a lot of this midsection of the season has struggled with — how do you tell a story about Handmaids while giving the audience some (completely necessary) space to take a breath and remove themselves from the world of the show? <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/5/3/15523626/handmaids-tale-episode-4-recap-nolite-te-bastardes-carborundorum">Episode four</a> tried a pop music montage. <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/5/10/15601756/the-handmaids-tale-episode-5-recap-faithful">Episode five</a> tried sex. <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/5/17/15649494/the-handmaids-tale-episode-6-recap-a-womans-place">Episode six</a> tried giving Offred a big speech. And this one removed us from the world of the Handmaids entirely. </p>
<p id="Tv3wQ1">And I think I liked “The Other Side” a lot more than you. It's probably my favorite since episode three, perhaps <em>because</em> it has a touch of the generic to it. After all, the resistance to Gilead (which apparently takes the form of a US government in hiding) would probably be a fairly standard resistance movement. Luke would probably move on with his life a little bit. The letter June wrote to him would probably be as short and to the point as possible.</p>
<p id="E8cB1X">I also liked that the episode reframes the stakes for Luke — he's no longer in it just to save his wife or even his country. He needs to get to his daughter and make sure she isn't forced into horrifying servitude like her mother has been. </p>
<p id="GdpNa0">As we've discussed before, June might already be too enmeshed in Gilead's way of life, no matter how much she wishes she weren't. But Hannah might still have a chance of living a full, happy life somewhere far, far away (though as we know from the situation in Mexico, Gilead's tendrils might be spreading).</p>
<p id="t6aPyN">Or maybe I'm just into the way director <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0797455/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Floria Sigismondi</a> uses narrow shafts of light and the gray winter sunlight of Canada to create a dystopia that feels at once familiar and still horrifying. I do hope we return to Offred’s perspective soon (or maybe we could check in with a character in a similar situation — like the supposedly-dead-but-c’mon-she’s-played-by-Samira-Wiley-so-she-can’t-be-dead Moira?), but I found “The Other Side” to be the best respite we’ve had from that world so far.</p>
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<img alt="The Handmaid’s Tale" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/pOi2sH07Wu3WP9Tgjsd1l6nX_BY=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8567707/HMT_107_GK_1212_0079rt_f.jpg">
<cite>Hulu</cite>
<figcaption>There’s one in every town.</figcaption>
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<p id="8S1s1E"><strong>Constance:</strong> I agree that this is probably the best tension relief <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em> has found. We talked a little last week about how the show has struggled when it’s tried to end episodes on a cathartic note, but that final scene of Luke laugh-crying in bewildered relief over June's note is a lovely moment, with a little edge of darkness to it: He doesn't know, entirely, what's being done to her, and he probably hasn't let himself imagine anything as bad as her life actually is. And for once, the ironic pop song playing over the credits sort of worked.</p>
<p id="koqRmj">But the most interesting thing for me about spending an hour in Luke's mind was getting to see how he sees June. His version of her is a lot less bitingly sarcastic than the version we see every week. </p>
<p id="z2HhHx">In part, that's circumstantial — she's not being ritually raped on a monthly basis in his memories, so she has less to be biting about — but it's also the result of sarcasm not fitting neatly into the way he wants to remember her. Luke sees June primarily as a mother. June in his memories is always backlit so that her hair becomes a golden halo. She is always murmuring sweetly to Hannah. When she turns a gun on an intruder, it's in a protective mama bear stance. In Luke's head, she is the Angel in the House.</p>
<p id="mIMQ5J">That same way of thinking is what led Luke to react to the news that June could no longer own property by saying, "You know I'll always take care of you," and then to laugh when Moira got offended. Luke respects and loves June, but he also objectifies her a little bit. </p>
<p id="X1ws8x">He doesn't quite think of her as a human being so much as someone to put on a pedestal, to love and cherish and protect. He may not be a Gileadean misogynist, but he's still steeped in the worldview that made Gilead possible, just like anyone else. </p>
<h3 id="iQ68YA">Welcome to the resistance</h3>
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<img alt="The Handmaid’s Tale" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/xOtt_lxnQB6_MJw-IK0XZqu45ik=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8567703/HMT_107_GK_1212_0107RT_f.jpg">
<cite>Hulu</cite>
<figcaption>The very fun actress Erin Way turns up as one of Luke’s new friends in the resistance.</figcaption>
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<p id="LbSl9I"><strong>Todd:</strong> That's a great reading of this episode. Luke might not be into what Gilead is all about, if only because the entire power structure of Gilead — made up of white men in natty suits with slicked-back hair as it is — wouldn't seem to have much room for him. But he can't entirely escape the objectifying impulse, because the country he grew up in is the same one that gave birth to Gilead in the first place.</p>
<p id="KKMEJx">That kind of insight is, to me, why shifting the perspective in a TV show is often so vital. Knowing how Luke thinks about June doesn't give us more insight into her — we probably could have guessed that she was fiercely protective of her daughter before this — but it does give us more insight into him and especially the world he was raised in. </p>
<p id="GqGQgu">I keep thinking of <em>Mad Men</em> while watching this show, and I think it's because both series, by turning to periods of more overt sexism (one imagined, the other real), force us to confront the tendrils of that sexism in our own lives. </p>
<p id="umYZRl">That’s why I was so terrified at the prospect of a Luke episode: because the temptation of an episode about him would be to turn him into a big hero. Instead, he escapes by accident, falls in with the resistance by accident, then mostly just hangs out. He's not the hero. He's just lucky, as so many of us are.</p>
<p id="mfg2ug">But with that said, did you like his traveling companions? I was most fond of the mute (probably tongueless) former Handmaid played by Erin Way, who's been so good on <em>Alphas</em> and <em>Colony</em>.</p>
<p id="4WeRjJ"><strong>Constance:</strong> I won't lie, I would spend a rainy Saturday afternoon watching a cable movie about that scrappy band of outsiders driving their assisted living facility bus up the East Coast, dodging Gileadean forces at every turn. I'm looking forward to seeing more of the mute Handmaid in future episodes (great catch that they must have cut out her tongue, I hadn't put that together), but I also enjoyed Zoe, the self-sacrificing leader who you could tell immediately would have to die, and Christine, the nun who does not give a single fuck.</p>
<p id="2OL5z0">Actually, I would love an episode of <em>The Handmaid's Tale</em> about nuns. Much of the rhetoric and the aesthetics surrounding the Handmaids is drawn from the rhetoric and aesthetic of nuns — the veils, the seclusion, the talk of religious sacrifice — but historically, nuns have consistently found ways of defying authority and claiming power for themselves. And in Gilead, nuns are on the hit list, because they are papists and that's basically the same thing as pagan to the puritanical Sons of Jacob. </p>
<p id="djO1MC">Give me an episode about how a religious order of women thought about the rise of this religious cult centered on controlling women's bodies.</p>
<p id="RdRu7R"><strong>Todd:</strong> Constance, I think you have yourself a spinoff (just as I've come to wonder if <em>The </em><em>Handmaid's Tale </em>and <em>Children of Men</em> take place in a shared universe).</p>
<p id="JpBt4g">What I liked best about this episode is how it shows that those words scratched into Offred's closet — “nolite te bastardes carborundorum” — might be ironic commentary on what's coming for Offred (in that the bastards really did grind down her predecessor), but they apply just as well to everybody living in Gilead and outside of it. It’s easy to feel ground down, but resistance is necessary if you’re to stay human.</p>
<p id="7wMc4f">This midsection of <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em>’s first season has been lumpy, but it's convinced me, more or less, that there are more stories in this world than Offred's. And that was probably the most important thing the series could do.</p>
https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/5/24/15682174/handmaids-tale-episode-7-recap-the-other-side-lukeEmily St. JamesConstance Grady2017-05-17T07:40:01-04:002017-05-17T07:40:01-04:00The Handmaid’s Tale digs into Serena Joy’s past
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<img alt="The Handmaid’s Tale" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/PERlF2qrnsgmcUUz5rb4ufX5Jf8=/0x0:1536x1152/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/54818503/HMT_106_GK_1220_0022rt_f.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Serena Joy oversees a dinner party. | Hulu</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Plus: Are the show’s too-triumphant endings its fatal flaw? Or just a miscalculation?</p> <p id="O2e7Zo"><em>Every week, a few members of the Vox Culture team will gather to talk out the latest episode of </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/4/24/15414922/handmaids-tale-hulu-reviews-news-episode-recaps-margaret-atwood">The Handmaid’s Tale</a><em>, 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, </em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5943926/?ref_=tt_eps_cu_n"><em>“A Woman’s Place.”</em></a></p>
<h3 id="AHCJZc">After last week’s mild misstep, this episode is basically fine</h3>
<p id="mvaO6p"><strong>Todd: </strong>"A Woman's Place" is the first <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5834204/?ref_=nv_sr_1"><em>Handmaid's Tale</em></a> 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!</p>
<p id="ETJZsB">That sounds like I’m damning the hour with faint praise, but it's a bigger deal than you'd expect. The problem with any TV adaptation of a more finite story is figuring out how to open up the world to find more stories in it. </p>
<p id="O1af1P">“A Woman’s Place” doesn’t totally work — the flashbacks to Serena Joy's past feel a little too thin, and the episode continues <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em>’s weird string of final scenes that don’t quite jell (though this one falters for more understandable TV reasons of "we need to move the plot forward by any means possible," in contrast to the past couple). But the majority of it offers a chilling look at what's happening in the world at large while Gilead is violating human rights all over the place.</p>
<p id="OBU7kz">The episode gets at one of those questions I had when reading Margaret Atwood’s novel: Would the world community, no matter how strained by the fertility crisis, really let the US collapse into a religious theocracy without seeming to have much to say about it? Granted, the book drastically limits our perspective to Offred’s point of view, but a TV series necessarily has to touch on this stuff, because its perspective can't remain that contained forever. </p>
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<img alt="The Handmaid’s Tale" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/QYcFm6u7kZCftG3GvrLmJQ26RLQ=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8531683/HMT_106_GK_1220_0168rt_f.jpg">
<cite>Hulu</cite>
<figcaption>Scenes from a Gilead Dinner Party.</figcaption>
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<p id="315SLN">And the answer is pretty grim, even if I don't 100 percent buy that it would never occur to Offred: The world community is happy to turn a blind eye to what’s happening in Gilead because it seems to have solved the fertility crisis. Human rights are the first thing to go.</p>
<p id="CIDKbQ">I have conflicted feelings about the last 10 minutes of this episode, especially, but I'm encouraged by the way that <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em> has been slowly evolving and mutating over the past few weeks into a TV show, instead of an adaptation of the book. </p>
<p id="sLpke9">First season stumbles are inevitable, but "A Woman's Place," even with my quibbles, did a lot to make me think the series is pointed in vaguely the right direction for the long term.</p>
<p id="efnLTF"><strong>Constance:</strong> I agree that “A Woman’s Place” is basically fine, and the way <a href="https://www.hulu.com/the-handmaids-tale"><em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em></a> is developing the world outside of Gilead — and more broadly, outside of Offred's head — is really thoughtful and well done. </p>
<p id="IkU04H">But the episode also helped me pinpoint what seems more and more like the show's fatal flaw: The series excels at creating a sense of claustrophobic oppression — all those stark and screaming reds against the white backgrounds, the characters crammed into the corners of the frame, that shot of the Wives segregated into a silent little corner during the dinner party, it all works beautifully — but lately, it has also wanted to end each episode in a cathartic release of tension, and it doesn’t seem to know how. When it tries, the results tend to feel cheap and false, despite Elisabeth Moss's superhuman powers.</p>
<p id="Vhagrq">The most egregious example was probably that <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/5/3/15523626/handmaids-tale-episode-4-recap-nolite-te-bastardes-carborundorum">"we're Handmaids, bitches" power walk in episode four</a>, but this episode featured Offred's tearful speech to the Mexican ambassador about the horror of her life, climaxing in, "What are you going to trade us for, fucking chocolate? We're human beings!" </p>
<p id="3G5b57">That's an unfortunate line both politically (the chocolate trade is largely <a href="http://fortune.com/big-chocolate-child-labor/">based in slave labor</a>, so human beings actually do get traded for chocolate today), and artistically, because it gives Offred an easy heroic moment that the story has not quite earned and that we all know will change nothing.</p>
<p id="ibZRlz">It makes sense that <em>The Handmaid's Tale</em> wants to find some moments of optimism and catharsis, because it would be unbearably bleak if there were none, but the show needs to figure out how to earn them if it wants to keep putting one at the end of each episode. </p>
<p id="AcCgWe">Otherwise, it would do better to stick to brutal gut punches like <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/4/26/15412454/handmaids-tale-hulu-recap-offred-birth-late">the final scene of the third episode, "Late,"</a> which land in exactly the register the show has perfected.</p>
<h3 id="B9GM35">Are the moments of catharsis hurting the show? Or just miscalculations?</h3>
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<img alt="The Handmaid’s Tale" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/SGzIBqlsZDxpdN4FdCd-ocbiP-Y=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8531677/HMT_106_GK_1202_0018rt_f.jpg">
<cite>Hulu</cite>
<figcaption>Offred takes the stairs.</figcaption>
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<p id="jI9rNc"><strong>Todd:</strong> I would argue that the catharsis of this episode is meant to be <em>thwarted</em> catharsis, but it's far too early in the series for Offred to have what amounts to a big speech, so it all feels muddled. Regardless, it’s weird that the show's attempts to end each episode in a moment of catharsis are what's hurting it in this midpoint of season one, because the show has so much <em>other</em> stuff going on that succeeds in breaking the tension. </p>
<p id="3TurW2">It has a wonderful sense of gallows humor, for instance, and the soap opera plotting is really great. There's also the constant, tricky intrigue of Offred trying to navigate all these corners of her new world. All of it is more than enough to remind you that you're watching a television show, to cut through the claustrophobia just enough to keep you from finding it unbearable. (I'm also open to the thought that <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1543747/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Reed Morano's</a> direction of the first three episodes was <em>so</em> intimate and intense that they felt more overbearing than they actually were.)</p>
<p id="gzmQNv">So I agree with you, while also not finding this particular problem to be especially concerning. It strikes me as very similar to the way that <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0804503/?ref_=nv_sr_1"><em>Mad Men</em></a> spent most of its first season dropping in random references to the way things were different in the '60s, just to remind you it was set in the '60s. And the show mostly stopped doing that in season two, when it realized it didn't need to. My guess is that <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em> will rein itself in a little in this regard, because, hey, it's basically just a problem of degree, not even of intent.</p>
<p id="Z77A86"><strong>Constance: </strong>This is where I remember that I dropped <em>Mad Men</em> in disgust four episodes in because I could not take all the "Hey! It's the '60s!" moments, and then did not return to the show until season four, so I am perhaps given to dropping shows over issues they end up fixing. (In my defense, I was in college and I had things to do.) </p>
<p id="62zxPW">And there truly is a <em>lot</em> of good stuff here: Serena Joy's flashbacks are thin, but it's fascinating to watch her in the present grabbing at the opportunity to take charge so publicly. And that look of grudging respect on Offred's face as Serena Joy starts in on her showbiz razzle-dazzle at the banquet is a lovely grace note.</p>
<p id="wVOlw6">The Nick plot line also worked a little better for me this week, mostly. (Although, speaking of unearned moments: "Nice to meet you, June" was not earned.) Anytime <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em> tries to convince me to care about who Nick is as a person I am bored, but anytime it tries to convince me to care about how he's affecting Offred — as a site for her small rebellions, as a place where she can perform vulnerability in a way she can't anywhere else — I am fascinated.</p>
<h3 id="yB777Y">Serena Joy is becoming a hugely compelling character</h3>
<p id="w6UNvq"><strong>Todd: </strong>Yeah, I feel a bit churlish complaining about an episode I liked much more than last week's on the whole, because I wasn't wild about how it wrapped up. It's just that the moments that go one step too far feel so out of place, because everything else is so hypnotically handled.</p>
<p id="55Fo7e">You're right about Serena Joy. I think <em>The Handmaid’s Tale </em>is walking a very delicate line with her — she's part of the monstrousness of this society, but she's also hurt by it. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2088803/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Yvonne Strahovski</a> is playing her as the show's Don Draper (to return to <em>Mad Men</em>), where you can tell that this life wounds her, but she would never admit it to herself. </p>
<p id="HWq0qZ">The moment when she and Fred go to see a movie and he's discussing how Gilead will rise by taking out the White House and Capitol, like he's reciting the grocery list for the week, is just this perfect little bit of acting from her, where she's at once anticipatory and a little nauseous. </p>
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<img alt="The Handmaid’s Tale" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/2Vy5__bI5_RxsOclG5k3IWOs8NM=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8531659/HMT_106_GK_1220_0007rt_f.jpg">
<cite>Hulu</cite>
<figcaption>This is a great episode for Yvonne Strahovski.</figcaption>
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<p id="fRdFwP">I'm just as fascinated by the Mexican ambassador, and I love the early scene in “A Woman’s Place” where Offred mistakes her assistant for her. One of the things this show can do very well is flip around how we think about situations in other countries by setting them "here" (not really here, but you know what I mean). This episode helps to illustrate every time the international community has turned a blind eye to some atrocity because it's more profitable and/or expedient. </p>
<p id="XeHk0k">The only thing that makes Offred's speech work for me is that the ambassador already <em>knows</em> all of this — she's not stupid — but doesn't really see how she can do anything. And maybe she's right!</p>
<p id="8HfH7S"><strong>Constance:</strong> I also love that the Mexican ambassador is in a pantsuit for the whole episode: It's so subtly jarring to see a woman wearing pants, with her hair down, while the Wives and Handmaids flit silently around her in their enveloping and identical gowns — especially since this episode is particularly concerned with the caste uniforms. </p>
<p id="YYhcrs">Offred keeps wisecracking over hers ("Red's my color," and "I wore it just for you"), and there's that lovely flashback to Serena Joy throwing out all of her old power suits and turning to her new wardrobe with a look of shuttered resignation on her face: Her side won, and she's excited, and she sincerely believes in "traditional values," but also, dear lord, those clothes are boring. </p>
<p id="Zbytt6">The destruction of the fashion industry is a silly and frivolous concern among all of the atrocities of Gilead, but it <em>does</em> mean that women have been deprived of an aesthetic outlet and means of performing power, and “A Woman’s Place” takes a moment to quietly mourn that loss.</p>
<p id="qSZJiN"><strong>Todd: </strong>That’s maybe why I’m left more reassured by the episode than you are. Even the most confident TV shows need to figure out how to actually <em>be</em> TV shows, and <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em> has a steeper learning curve than most. </p>
<p id="w1DRBz">It’s making mistakes, sure, but it’s also making lots of lovely little choices around the edges of its story. (I found myself thinking that the shot of Serena Joy’s book sitting in the trash would have been an amazing closer.) The world and the character detail and the performances and the <em>look</em> of the thing are so compelling that I’ll forgive some storytelling hiccups.</p>
<p id="fw8Hck">That said, we’ve reached the middle of the season, and it feel like it’s about time for the show to start wrapping things up, if only a little bit. There are an impressive number of balls in the air; here’s hoping <em>The </em><em>Handmaid’s Tale </em>knows where all of them are going to land.</p>
https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/5/17/15649494/the-handmaids-tale-episode-6-recap-a-womans-placeEmily St. JamesConstance Grady2017-05-10T07:30:01-04:002017-05-10T07:30:01-04:00The Handmaid’s Tale tries to add a little romance, with mixed results
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<img alt="Alexis Bledel in The Handmaid’s Tale" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/NeEx5XoWruTCkaO0zFzxnm8RwD4=/936x0:6000x3798/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/54705229/HMT_105_GK_1123_0063rt_f.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Emily takes drastic measures in “Faithful.” | Hulu</figcaption>
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<p>Why is Nick so dull when everybody else on the show is so compelling?</p> <p id="YX1MEv"><em>Every week, a few members of the Vox Culture team will gather to talk out the latest episode of </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/4/24/15414922/handmaids-tale-hulu-reviews-news-episode-recaps-margaret-atwood"><strong>The Handmaid’s Tale</strong></a><em>, 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, </em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5941434/?ref_=tt_eps_cu_n"><em>“Faithful.”</em></a></p>
<h3 id="N28Mn7">Is the TV <em>Handmaid’s Tale </em>adding too much hopefulness to Margaret Atwood’s book?</h3>
<p id="2Fj85M"><strong>Todd </strong><strong>VanDerWerff</strong><strong>:</strong> 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, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5834204/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_3"><em>The Handmaid's Tale</em></a> 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 <em>another</em> outsider whom that first outsider falls for. </p>
<p id="lat6p5">"Falls for" is a strong word for what really seems like Offred desperately clinging to whatever lifelines she can find, after she learns that one of those lifelines just happens to look like Nick. But "Faithful" is all about these increasingly tangled relationships and especially, I think, about Serena Joy's complicity in this new world order and the tiny rebellions she uses to display her individuality.</p>
<p id="FSDrPx">This is probably the episode of <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em> where I most felt like the show was marking time a little bit (all those shots of a thing that <em>might</em> happen, only for it not to happen), which feels weird to say about an episode where a Handmaid ran over someone with a car, but that's perhaps because the relationship between Offred and Nick didn't feel as inevitable to me as I think it was supposed to.</p>
<p id="3UAVL8">We've gotten a few scenes between the two up to this point, but I'm not sure the chemistry between the actors carried us to a point where I was hoping they would get to spend more time together, much less fall into bed. It all felt a little perfunctory, like this was the point in the story where Offred was supposed to fall for Nick, so she did.</p>
<p id="Iv1z6K">This is not to say "Faithful" was bad or anything, just that that one central element felt unearned to me. There's still a lot to talk about here, from Ofglen ... sorry, Ofstevens's car ride to the surprising (to me, at least) use of nudity.</p>
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<img alt="The Handmaid’s Tale" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/TrHjT6D8yBww8bY6qWPoLvRtxWA=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8491761/HMT_105_GK_1110_0118RT_f.jpg">
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<figcaption>The Commander has some thoughts on the matter.</figcaption>
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<p id="crE6n7"><strong>Constance</strong><strong> Grady</strong><strong>: </strong>I have to agree that the relationship between Offred and Nick isn't quite hitting its marks. I think the TV show is asking that storyline to play a role that's quite different from the one it plays in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Handmaids-Tale-Margaret-Atwood-ebook/dp/B003JFJHTS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1494376205&sr=8-1&keywords=the+handmaid%27s+tale">Margaret Atwood’s book</a>: There, Offred falls a little in love with Nick, but the reader is never asked to do the same. </p>
<p id="BSjBde">Atwood's Nick is not around to provide a romantic thrill, and his sex scenes aren't sexy; he's supposed to be a distraction and a danger and a possible escape. The TV show seems to want him to be all of those things and romantic, too, but the structure of the world it's established isn't quite allowing that to happen, because Gilead is so claustrophobic and oppressive for Offred that it's hard to imagine the idea of love or lust being all that powerful or meaningful for her.</p>
<p id="sXTH3G">Which isn't to say that there <em>can't</em> be love stories on this show. Even though the tragically doomed and thwarted romance between the Martha and Alexis Bledel's character (who I think I'll just be calling Emily) got barely any screen time, it was still incredibly compelling and deeply felt. But the Offred/Nick storyline is just not constructed to do the work it's being asked to do here.</p>
<p id="8BtEcs">In general, I've been noticing a tendency on the show’s part to want to be more optimistic and romantic and swooning than Atwood was when it comes to Offred's inner life, and I'm not entirely certain that it works. Last week's "We're handmaids, bitches" ending was a rare false note, and this week, it was joined by Offred's starry-eyed summation of Emily's car chase: "There was a part of her that, in the end, they couldn't reach. She looked invincible." That's not something that Atwood's Offred would ever think, and if she did think it, she would be shown to be wrong almost immediately.</p>
<p id="HLaOnw">Atwood, like George Orwell in <em>1984</em>, believes that the state has the power to crush the individual. There is nothing inside her characters that Gilead cannot destroy, given enough time. That's the tragedy of that sad little "Nolite te bastardes carborundorum" carving in Offred's closet: The bastards <em>did</em> grind Offred's predecessor down. They reached the part of her that was holding out. They made her kill herself. That is what Gilead does, because that is what oppressive dictatorships do. There is no love story or romantic joy ride or illicit graffiti that Gilead cannot, in the end, corrupt.</p>
<p id="SI3Ys1">And that makes the stakes of Atwood's book incredibly high, because Offred was in deep existential danger, not just of death or torture but of losing her grasp on her identity. As the book opens, Gilead has reshaped her mind significantly, and it is only going to keep doing so. You're rooting for her to escape not before she's killed, but before she's ontologically dismantled.</p>
<p id="Szq3Aw">If the TV show posits that Offred has some invincible inner core that Gilead can't reach, that lowers the stakes significantly. Then she's just marking time, more or less, and dealing with an ineffectual not-that-scary government. To me, it makes the whole story a lot less horrifying and a lot less compelling. How are the stakes landing for you, Todd?</p>
<h3 id="8TV5hl">Or is the show contrasting who Offred <em>thinks</em> she is with who she actually is?</h3>
<p id="rFHwv3"><strong>Todd:</strong> I'm actually reading some of this a bit differently from you, I think. In particular, I thought of Offred's summation of Emily's act of rebellion as a sort of self-chastisement. <em>This is true for Emily</em>, she thinks. <em>It's not true for me</em>. Notice how she hesitates after Emily reveals her given name. Offred has already been warped by Gilead more than she thinks she has.</p>
<p id="7atRFp">This is to say that I think the series has bought into the irony of Offred's vivid inner life, contrasted with how meek she behaves in reality. She thinks a bigger game than she dares act, and when the chips are down, she steps back from the brink and acquiesces. She talks back, here and there, but never in a way that risks true punishment.</p>
<p id="nnlnH6">I have a theory that all good TV protagonists are deluded on some level, and I think this might be Offred's central delusion — she thinks she's a revolutionary, but she's really a cog in the system. Even if she somehow escapes the Commander's house, she'll always be stuck there. </p>
<p id="Vcw7aU">To be fair, some of this read might come from the fact that these past two episodes have been directed by <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0054954/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Mike Barker</a>, who is more fond of going wide than <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1543747/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Reed Morano</a> (who directed the show’s first three hours). Some of Barker's compositions are breathtaking — that shot of Serena Joy trying not to watch as Nick and Offred had sex, the diagonal lines of his attic apartment giving shape to everything — but wide shots have a tendency to distance us from the characters. After Morano's claustrophobic intimacy with Offred, we're now suddenly being asked to consider her outside of her own inner monologue.</p>
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<img alt="The Handmaid’s Tale" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/0SAmF10aVVK9GGIo8XqOJ9FAVA8=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8491773/HMT_105_GK_1123_0107rt_f.jpg">
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<p id="tTpSjW">This is probably a good thing, on some level. Barker's episodes have done wonders for the Commander and Serena Joy, and episode four was quite good (outside of that closing moment). But Barker’s more zoomed-out approach also leaves us with scenes like the final one of “Faithful,” where we're suddenly asked to read a whole bunch of emotion that didn't previously exist into the relationship between Offred and Nick, which leaves a jarring note.</p>
<p id="7qAQr6"><strong>Constance:</strong> I like your reading a lot, and I hope that's where the show ends up leading itself. I'm finding myself a little discouraged by this week's "invincible" theme in combination with last week's ending, which seemed to be attempting to find something empowering and subversive in the act of being a Handmaid and didn't provide enough distance to make that attitude read as ironic.</p>
<p id="hg5LEy">But enough about weird murky narrative framing questions! How great was that extended, incredibly creepy wide shot of June and Luke at their "innocent" lunch, with the children in their Handmaid-red coats frolicking in the background? </p>
<p id="xiUMrQ">The show has done a terrific job of seeding little hints of the Gilead that is to come into all of the flashbacks: You can never fully relax into their warmth, because you are always forced to remember exactly what's about to happen to these people.</p>
<h3 id="J8viPG">“Faithful” underlines Gilead’s horrible ideas about love</h3>
<p id="9aPOPE"><strong>Todd:</strong> Yes, the flashback story this time was my favorite one yet (or, at least, my favorite one set before the rise of Gilead), perhaps because it focused on the evolution of June and Luke's flirtation turned suggestion turned real relationship, rather than jumping all around. Her love with Luke was supposed to be contrasted with her more desperate hook-up with Nick, but when she suggested that she felt like she was cheating on Luke, I thought, "Wait, what?"</p>
<p id="kfeOLF">That said, I love the way that the flashback plays around with the idea of transgression, with Luke being married when he and June first meet. It's another little bit from the book that works slightly better for me on the show, where we get to feel the weight of the character leaving his unseen wife because he loves June that much. </p>
<p id="7g950U">And yet as the Commander says, to him, every love story is a tragedy. If he has his way, June and Luke's affair will be rewritten entirely to be about the fact that Luke cheated on his wife. Indeed, it already might have been for Luke’s ex-wife and her friends. Unless we're in the midst of it, it's awfully tempting to find transgression fascinating.</p>
<p id="eRKQXE"><strong>Constance:</strong> The scene where the Commander talks about June and Luke's affair really was fascinating: For the first time, he became clear to me as someone who probably sincerely believes that Offred is a sinful slutty adulteress for sleeping with a married man, and who also sincerely believes that repeatedly ritually raping a woman he owns in front of his wife just makes him an upstanding husband. What a creepy little piece of doublethink he's constantly performing.</p>
<p id="XlnsV1">It's clearly not one that Serena Joy is able to entirely embrace, but she's got her own: one that allows her to think of Offred as simultaneously a seductive tramp, an empty vessel without a mind, and as her surrogate daughter.</p>
<p id="4t0ySM">That might be part of why Nick falls so flat in this episode. “Faithful” spends most of its time with these characters who are constantly playing three-dimensional chess against themselves in an attempt to believe five or six contradictory things at the same time, and then it leaves us with poor, dull Nick and his blank cipher of a psyche. It's a bit of a letdown.</p>
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<img alt="The Handmaid’s Tale" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/xi58OL6RZk_B5b6zowY5BjoBibw=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8491775/HMT_105_GK_1121_0113rt_f.jpg">
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<figcaption>The Handmaids watch Emily run over a soldier.</figcaption>
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<p id="Ye0iFt"><strong>Todd: </strong>I guess we're left with the thought that he's an Eye, which is potentially interesting, especially in the wake of Emily's warnings and actions. </p>
<p id="dZD0T0">(Sidebar: Is there any way she's still alive? I sort of feel like it would cheapen her actions if she were, but the show has also so brilliantly established that fertility is <em>everything</em> that it could probably get away with her reappearance. Maybe cheapening her action is the point in that scenario — when the state is as vast and overbearing as Gilead, any rebellion taken against it is harshly punishable but also eventually subsumed into a Weird Thing that Happened One Time.)</p>
<p id="tY7Chv">But, to return to Nick, it definitely feels like we've gotten his story all out of order. He was the brooding guy on the sidelines, and now that he's becoming a bigger player, he's suddenly in the vague realm of "love interest." Even another episode or two might have made this shift play out slightly better. </p>
<p id="Kp3xk1">That said, I want to take a brief moment to talk about the nudity for both characters, which was the one thing that worked about that scene for me, because seeing nudity in a sexual context on this show was <em>so strange</em>. When I <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/4/27/15437272/elisabeth-moss-the-handmaids-tale-interview">talked with Elisabeth Moss</a> about the show shortly after its debut, she pointed out that one of the things Gilead manages to criminalize without even really trying is pleasure derived from sex. As such, seeing a rather conventional sex scene felt downright rebellious, playing into the episode's overall theme. There's a version of this scene that works, one that heightens Offred's desperation and gives us something to cling to with Nick's motivations. We just didn't get it.</p>
<p id="jQfmhr">So maybe this scene falling flat really all comes down to cast chemistry. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005253/?ref_=nv_sr_2">Elisabeth Moss</a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1282966/?ref_=nv_sr_1">O-T Fagbenle</a> have it; she and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1540404/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Max Minghella</a> don't as much. That's fine, as it goes. But I hope there's a plan to either dimensionalize this relationship or dimensionalize Nick before too long.</p>
<p id="HrxIgM"><strong>Constance: </strong>God I hope Emily is still alive. I've never seen <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0088127/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Alexis Bledel</a> be as interesting as she is on this show and I want it to keep happening. It doesn't necessarily have to feel like a cop-out; Gilead can punish her pretty badly and still leave her as a functional childbearing vessel if they need to.</p>
<p id="kdWK9x">“Faithful” did some interesting things with the idea of how pleasure functions with sex in Gilead. Besides the nudity in Offred and Nick's scene — which, you're right, was very striking — there's that moment where the Commander touches Offred's thighs during the Ceremony, and everyone is appalled by how dangerous and taboo his actions are. </p>
<p id="Z82rr9">This marks the second episode in a row in which the Commander has casually broken a basic rule of the Ceremony. The rules don't really seem to apply for him, and the scene suggests that he's going to continue pushing steadily through boundaries for as long as he pleases.</p>
https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/5/10/15601756/the-handmaids-tale-episode-5-recap-faithfulEmily St. JamesConstance Grady2017-05-03T07:20:01-04:002017-05-03T07:20:01-04:00The Handmaid’s Tale sends Offred some much-needed words of wisdom
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<img alt="The Handmaid’s Tale" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/3Xyn5sR2EPujoThnGKn8MCKHDfo=/0x0:3000x2250/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/54594157/HMT_104_GK_1108_0003rt_f.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Offred finds a message from her predecessor. | Hulu</figcaption>
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<p>But maybe cool it with the triumphant music at the end of every episode, okay?</p> <p id="B1Uzv3"><em>Every week, a few members of the Vox Culture team will gather to talk out the latest episode of </em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5834204/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_3"><strong>The Handmaid’s Tale</strong></a><em>, 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, </em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5937294/?ref_=tt_eps_cu_n"><em>“Nolite Te Bastardes Carborundorum.”</em></a></p>
<h3 id="wq9dZi">Maybe <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em> could cool it with the triumphant music for a second</h3>
<p id="FLteMb"><strong>Todd</strong><strong> VanDerWerff</strong><strong>:</strong> If there's one thing I've heard complaints about when it comes to <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5834204/?ref_=nv_sr_1"><em>The Handmaid's Tale</em></a>, 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.</p>
<p id="y5riBr"><em>The </em><em>Handmaid's</em><em> Tale</em> is evidently following the <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0141842/?ref_=nv_sr_1"><em>Sopranos</em></a> model of having every episode end with a song that comments on the action at hand. But <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0153740/?ref_=tt_ov_wr">David Chase's</a> genius in that earlier show was to have every song offer <em>ironic</em> commentary. He only went on the nose once or twice per season, and those moments are the ones that stick in the memory because they were so powerful. A show that’s not known for being emotionally direct will always make an impact when it goes straight for the jugular.</p>
<p id="WnjU9y"><em>Handmaid's</em> isn't really doing any of that, and that makes the sudden arrival of triumphant music at the end of every episode extra jarring. That was particularly true here, in "Nolite Te Bastardes Carborundorum," where the episode ended with a bunch of Handmaids walking down the street together as if they were reenacting <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086197/?ref_=nv_sr_3"><em>The Right Stuff</em></a>, to the tune of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvbCV6E0Wro">Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s “Perpetuum Mobile”</a> (or, as I always call it, “that song in all the commercials”). It just felt completely out of place with the rest of the episode, and I like it a little less every time I think about it.</p>
<p id="WOF6sh">But that's just it: It's the one jarring moment in what was otherwise a terrific episode, one that underlined the many levels of power Offred lives under and how her captor thinks of himself as a wise, nice man. It explored the different layers of manipulation between those levels of power and a bunch of other interesting stuff. So it feels wrong to boil it down to the one out-of-sync moment, but that's why they call me a critic. </p>
<p id="ToMjEQ">What did you think, Constance? Were you as jarred by that ending moment as me? And what do you make of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001212/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Joseph Fiennes’s</a> performance on the show? I'm starting to come around on him.</p>
<p id="n9e5A5"><strong>Constance</strong><strong> Grady</strong><strong>:</strong> What's compelling to me about Offred's victory at the end of this episode is how small it is: She gets to leave the house and walk outside. That's it. It's a hard-fought victory, and she accumulates some tactical advantages in the process — she knows how to work the Commander now, and get him to intervene with Serena Joy on her behalf — but it's a very basic, tiny freedom she's won for herself. </p>
<p id="GbuPbz">The idea that Offred has to work so hard for such small wins is really resonant, but that final shot of the Handmaids power-walking down the street inflates the victory — which, ironically, undercuts what's most interesting about it. And in large part, that interest stems from watching Offred figure out how to manipulate Fiennes's Commander.</p>
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<img alt="The Handmaid’s Tale" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/o2SAGjB-UbqDMwMbzZhDUF-iFvk=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8455439/HMT_104_GK_1116_0055rt_f.jpg">
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<figcaption>Offred attempts an escape.</figcaption>
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<p id="ZCfoqk">I've been enjoying how detached and almost bored Fiennes seems in most of his scenes. Mostly he sits around murmuring about work, like a parody of a 1950s patriarch. It's not a particularly flashy performance — certainly nothing on the writhing piles of frustrated rage lurking behind <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2088803/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Yvonne Strahovski’s</a> eyes in the role of Serena Joy — but it doesn't have to be. The Commander holds all the power, and he knows it. (Check out the look on Serena Joy's face when he finds her in the sitting room — <em>her</em> room — before he's supposed to be there. She knows it too.) And part of the privilege of power is that you don't have to emote wildly when you have it.</p>
<p id="IGxyqB">One of my favorite moments in this episode happens toward the beginning, when the Commander and Serena Joy are having breakfast and he mentions an international publicity scandal. Serena Joy knows just how to handle it, and you get the sense that she must have done publicity work before Gilead (in the book, she had a successful career as a televangelist). </p>
<p id="raB6Mf">"The important thing is not to discredit her message," she says authoritatively, "but discredit <em>her</em>." The Commander shuts her down. It's not her business anymore. Her job is to be a Wife now, and while he lets her run the house to keep her happy, he's the one who gets to care about media strategies and international crises. It's a small moment that speaks volumes about the state of their marriage and where the power lies.</p>
<h3 id="4iAUox">This is the big lie the Commander tells himself</h3>
<p id="m7c0ET"><strong>Todd:</strong> One of the things I've been wondering about is why the show so often frames the Commander onscreen so that he has very little power in the context of any given shot. Frequently, he's this tiny, insignificant speck at the bottom of the frame, as if he's been ported over from an episode of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4158110/?ref_=nv_sr_1"><em>Mr. Robot</em></a>. (I should mention, here, that "Nolite Te Bastardes Carborundorum” is the first episode of <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em> not directed by <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1543747/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Reed Morano</a>, though director <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0054954/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Mike Barker</a> acquits himself well. The episode was written by <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1771570/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Leila Gerstein</a>, perhaps best known for creating The CW’s <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1832979/?ref_=nv_sr_1"><em>Hart of Dixie</em></a>, which is a very different show from this one in almost every way.)</p>
<p id="dLI8I7">"Nolite Te Bastardes Carborundorum” made me realize that this is how the Commander sees <em>himself</em>. He believes the women in his life "run the show," because it's convenient to tell himself that. But even though Serena Joy has a lot of power compared with, say, Offred, he still holds all of the cards, as you point out. That he yields his power to the women in his life is a convenient fiction he tells himself.</p>
<p id="yU7A8h">As such, Offred realizing that she can use that quality of the Commander against himself is key, and it's all thanks to Previous Offred, a silent ghost haunting the house. We learn in this episode that she killed herself, but just seeing Martha's reaction of horror when she sees Offred lying on the floor in her closet hinted at her fate long before. </p>
<p id="0spJSh">Offred’s new realization contrasts nicely with this episode's dueling flashbacks — to Offred in her life as June, hanging out at a winter carnival with her husband and daughter, then of June and Moira attempting to escape the Handmaid training facility, with only the latter making it out. </p>
<p id="TuUBR2">Before the rise of Gilead, June didn't have to train herself to find the weak points in a setup, to be ready to exploit them in need of escape. But as soon as she has to, she's able. The catch is that in a world where men like the Commander hold all the power, any escape will, ultimately, be temporary.</p>
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<figcaption>Offred goes to the doctor’s office.</figcaption>
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<p id="SmJ2uR"><strong>Constance: </strong>This episode also shows us that Offred has had to figure out what risks are acceptable to her. As June, she wasn't much a fan of any risk, but she also didn't have a concrete idea of what the consequences might be: She scolds Moira for taking the risk of writing graffiti in the Red Center — an offense for which the punishment would mean losing a hand — but she goes along with the escape attempt anyway. </p>
<p id="6Ns0jK">As Offred, she's experienced Gileadean discipline — that shot of her bloody, flayed feet is truly gruesome — and she's decided what lines she's willing to cross. Playing a transgressive game of Scrabble is an acceptable risk for her, because it gives her power she can exploit elsewhere. But having sex with a doctor so she can get pregnant isn't. "It's too dangerous," she says.</p>
<p id="kdNfvs">And speaking of framing, that scene between Offred and the doctor features some killer camerawork. </p>
<p id="gM5wNJ">The bulk of the scene is shot entirely from Offred's point of view, with the doctor a vague silhouette behind a white curtain, unseen and thus powerfully mysterious. But once he propositions her, he pokes his head around the curtain and becomes a regular middle-aged guy; all of the menace his silhouette had assumed drains away. </p>
<p id="C0GbvG">That's when the camera cuts to a side view, and we see Offred in profile, draped in her red gown and bisected neatly by that white curtain, like a slab of meat on a counter. The doctor might be just a regular guy, but he's still in complete control of the situation.</p>
<h3 id="9oUpCr">How the TV show is making the world of Gilead feel more fleshed out</h3>
<p id="uwEeZl"><strong>Todd:</strong> I loved that shot of Elisabeth Moss from overhead, which only served to highlight the extreme blue of her eyes against the white hospital background. It was some gorgeous stuff. But I also liked how the scene highlighted that in the world of this show — and, honestly, in our world — even the guys who purport to be on the side of women are ultimately a menace. On some level, the doctor really thinks he's being a good guy by offering to help her in her “situation.” (After all, if she gets pregnant, she buys herself more survival time.) Yet he's anything but.</p>
<p id="gHvr8t">This storyline also touches on a fascinating element from the source material: The cause of the drop in pregnancy and birth rates is probably linked to an outbreak of male sterility, and not solely a function of women's infertility. But because it's harder to see male sterility — as opposed to how a woman changes very visibly if she gets pregnant — the people behind Gilead use the crisis to strip women of their rights. </p>
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<cite>Hulu</cite>
<figcaption>A quick, terrifying jaunt into the heart of Gilead.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="t6SjFr">There's something about seeing this concept illustrated onscreen<strong> </strong>that makes it click for me in a way the book didn't quite. (There, I just went along with it as endemic to the book's premise.) The brief glimpse Moira and June get of Gilead's rule, presumably for the first time, is absolutely terrifying, especially that sequence in the subway station, with the sound of hammering adding an unnerving score to June's aborted escape attempt.</p>
<p id="SDHCDH">But that also leads into the sequences in the Commander's home, where June realizes that her only path to survival is to keep the Commander happy with her for as long as possible. And since he's having trouble mustering an erection without having some sort of connection to her, she has to, in some ways, befriend him. It's a dark, fascinating power dynamic, one I'm excited to see play out in the weeks to come.</p>
<p id="GfyDkQ">I really do like the little trickles of world building we get in this episode — like the Aunt who escaped to Canada and gave an interview to a Toronto newspaper. It's not overwhelming, while still providing just enough information to make Gilead make sense. Are any elements of the world and setting tripping you up at this point?</p>
<p id="dlWQYW"><strong>Constance:</strong> <em>The Handmaid’s Tale </em>does a really beautiful job of portraying how bits of information trickle out to the rest of the world, and the show’s approach to this slow spread of details is unsettlingly reminiscent of the recent stories of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/21/world/europe/chechnya-russia-attacks-gays.html">Chechen concentration camps</a> that have been slowly making their way to the US. </p>
<p id="L4rTTz">It's also, I think, slightly more believable than the world presented in the book, in which Gilead has within five years become the travel destination of choice for poverty tourists, who gawk at the veiled women the way Americans gawk in the Middle East. Not that that wouldn't happen — but it feels right that it takes a little longer than five years to get there.</p>
<p id="a8BW8r">What I'm finding fascinating is how jarring it feels every time we see modern technology in Gilead, like the Commander's laptop: The overall aesthetic so effectively mimics a nightmare version of the 1950s that most of the show feels displaced from time, and it's not until you see a computer or a phone that you remember, <em>Oh, right, this is the future</em>.</p>
<p id="HSl3ds">And every reminder adds to the oppressive sense of claustrophobia that this show evokes so well. It's the future, not the past, and it's a lot more plausible than we might like.</p>
<p id="uLjpse"><em>You can watch </em>The Handmaid’s Tale <a href="https://www.hulu.com/the-handmaids-tale"><em>on Hulu</em></a><em>.</em></p>
https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/5/3/15523626/handmaids-tale-episode-4-recap-nolite-te-bastardes-carborundorumEmily St. JamesConstance Grady