‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Season 2 Review
Season Two of The Handmaid’s Tale has concluded. Blessed be the fruit (Spoilers below!).
It’s been a little while since our last episode review of The Handmaid’s Tale, but since the season has now wrapped up this week I wanted to try and organize my thoughts in one single place.
The first season of this show was a relatively cohesive experience to the point where it almost felt like a season-contained story, as it should have been. It’s based off the dystopian Margaret Atwood novel in its entirety, after all. This year’s season felt very, very different. Sometimes this was a good thing, sometimes bad.
Because I like saving the best for last, let’s get the “bad” out of the way first. And honestly, this might be pretty subjective, but one of my biggest issues with this season is that the only running thread through it was Offred’s pregnancy. Everything else moved at such a breakneck pace that in retrospect it’s frankly amazing that the season was only 12 episodes long.
Remember the threads with Offred trying to escape from Gilead via plane, or Serena and Offred’s plan to try and work together and undermine Commander Cushing? Because good lord, those were things that happened this season. Remember Janine and Emily working in The Colonies, the bomb going off at the new Red Center, or Fred and Serena going to Canada? All this season, too.
And as a fan of Star Wars Rebels, I realize that complaining about “filler” content before a series has totally wrapped is unwise, and some of this (particularly Emily’s time at the colonies, which we’ll discuss soon) may well come into play again sometime. But as of right now, with the second season over, almost none of this has had an effect on where the series currently is now. So yeah, despite my better judgment, I am concerned that this season did contain quite a bit of filler.
Now, that being said, I’d also like to point out that almost every “filler” event that I mentioned is also a a solid bit of world-building, and I think that the show could really use that. Even in the finale of this season, June mentions to Nick about running away to Honolulu, and I wasn’t sure if she was joking or if Hawaii had managed to escape whatever weird political shift happened in the states to allow for Gilead to rise. We have very little geographic or political context because Atwood wasn’t focused on creating some big epic series in her novel, and the first season saw Gilead very much through that lens as well. But now, I think it’s helpful to have.
In addition to geographic world-building, this season delved quite a bit into the weird culture of Gilead. We saw funerals, a chilling wedding, executions, business trips, and so much more. The show really is starting to develop a strong sense of identity, and I think that could work really well for it going forward. One of my favorite additions this season was the focus on more Commanders outside of the Waterford household. See, Fred was built up to be such an imposing force in Season 1, but now that we’ve seen the other commanders I think that we may have misread him a bit. Commander Cushing is clearly vying to bring the joy house down, even if his new “orders” have currently slowed him down. Meanwhile, Commander Lawrence acts as a sort of terrifying Nazi-esque presence, a force potentially far more violent than Fred ever was. And make no mistake, Fred is an absolute garbage human being, but even so I feel like the ante of evil may have been upped beyond his capabilities now.
In fact, Lawrence is perhaps what I’m most excited for looking to next season. He’s got Emily as a new handmaid, which should make for a sort of Apt Pupil situation given how he was apparently responsible for the creation of the Colonies worksite. Add in a wife whose defenerative brain disease has taken her back mentally to a time when she had a conscience and a creepily shadowy house, in addition to Bradley Whitford’s (from Get Out) stellar performance, and you’ve got a showdown to look forward to next year.
Other than that, I don’t feel like I can really say what will happen going forward. This finale seemed to really focus a lot on Eden’s fate, which was fine and certainly moving, but I don’t see how it’ll impact the characters much now. In fact, I couldn’t help but wonder if Offred really had Eden’s best interests at heart when she offered her advice to follow love, given how things ended up with Eden, in addition to the fact that the girl’s mere existence clearly offered some problematic implications to Offred and Nick.
I guess the biggest moments of development this season with Offred actually happened with Serena, but the show seems reluctant to ever let that relationship develop too far. Much like how Offred pinballed between her haidmaid persona and her identity as June, her relationship with Serena constantly ricocheted between friendly and bitter. The final scene with them, in which Offred feeds Holly (or whatever the Waterfords end up calling her) since Serena cannot, implies a kindship between the two women. But we’ve seen it before. There’s no reason to think it’ll last.
Just a few final thoughts on this year’s season:
- The eleventh episode, “Holly”, was incredible. For being a relatively quiet, contained hour of TV, it moved along at a really enjoyable pace.
- I’m sorry, but Luke’s gotta start trying harder to get Offred back. I get he’s got to risk it all, but he just seems complacent at this point.
- I also wish we’d seen more Moira
- I’m hoping that the next season has more focus. Not just a random desperation to escape, but an actual plan again for June
- Bring on the blood. I want some more cathartic Commander deaths.
- Offred’s offer to play Scrabble with the Commander was sassy as hell and I loved it
- Pretty bold to release this finale on the 4th of July. I approve of this cheekiness.
Hulu has renewed the show for a third season, but no release date is currently set. Here’s to hoping the wait isn’t too long!
