‘The Handmaid’s Tale’: We’ve Been Sent Good Weather With The Brilliant, Challenging Season 2 [Review]

This spoiler-free review is based on the first 6 episodes of Season 2 of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which were made available to reviewers in advance.

Seldom has any TV show found its moment the way  Hulu‘s “The Handmaid’s Tale” did last year. Ending  mid-June 2017, it occupied the precise mid-period between the Women’s March, which took place after the comparatively poorly attended January inauguration of a proudly pussy-grabbing President, and the October revelations against Harvey Weinstein. It was so of its moment, and that first season mined the entirety of the plot of Margaret Atwood‘s source novel so thoroughly, that continuing it into a second season was a risky proposition. We are certainly not at the end of the #MeToo era, but with our culture moving faster than a speeding bullet these days, ricocheting crazily off these here canyon walls, a ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ that simply stayed the course would lack the zeitgeist sizzle that electrified it before.

But if Season 1 of “The Handmaid’s Tale” was #MeToo, the brilliant Season 2 is #WhatNow. “Women are amazing. We can get used to anything,” we’re told at one point. Yet as anyone alive and awake in 2018 can tell you, that ability is also a liability, when there’s work to be done. And there is so much work to be done — the very first track (of a soundtrack selection much improved from Season 1) reminds us. Kate Bush‘s ghostly “This Woman’s Work” settles over the show’s devastating opening sequence and we shiver: Pray God you can cope.

For all the new prisons, psychological and literal, that it describes, Season 2 (at least the first six episodes) feels like a liberation. No longer tethered to a narrative that ends in the book with Offred/June (a riveting, indispensable Elisabeth Moss) being hustled toward an uncertain fate in a blacked-out van, it’s as though the hiatus — that darkened, fearful, bumpy journey from one season to the next — was used to cunningly transform the show from adaptation to multifaceted expansion. When the van doors are thrown open at the beginning of episode one, the show Moss emerges into is exponentially larger than the one she left. It is just as upsetting, even more pessimistic and it has no interest in being subtle or decorous about its real-world parallels, often punching right on the nose. But that’s also what makes it such a thrilling feat of storytelling acumen and imagination: a ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ that has thrown back its hood and lifted its downcast eyes from the page, is one that can see for miles.

One of the most welcome developments is that we are more firmly placed in a recognizable real world, meaning the “present day” segments in Gilead start to feel more like a work of alternate history and less like otherworldly fantasy. Fenway Park, the offices of the Boston Globe and even the public transport system all appear and root us indelibly in a near-future Boston. And the choice to end one of the episodes not with an archly jaunty pop song but with a snippet of real commentary from the 2013 Red Sox World Series win is inspired — something triumphant and joyful, turned utterly chilling. Later, we will even catch a flashback glimpse of a group of women standing around a celebratory bonfire burning scraps of paper on which are written the names of their rapists. There’s no denying the meaning of this alternate timeline: even with the current momentum of #MeToo and #TimesUp, all this could still be ahead of us.

We also get our first glimpse of the often-mentioned Colonies, and this does look otherworldly, or perhaps netherworldly. A blasted, ravaged landscape where the desiccated condemned break earth so rancid with radioactivity that it causes the teeth to fall out of their mouths, it’s a conception so despairing it would make Hieronymous Bosch drop his paintbrush and treat us all to ice cream instead.

Less successfully — with additional complexity comes additional unevenness — there’s also Canada where Moira (Samira Wiley) and Luke (O-T Fagbenle) were reunited at the end of Season 1. So far in this season, the writers have failed to find a real narrative function for these characters save as occasional contrast to the increasingly dire circumstances faced by June or Emily (the welcome return of Alexis Bledel). We only really get to know Luke in flashback (but then the men are all very marginalized here and I don’t really care) and we see very little of Wiley. So although the Colonies segments are fairly direct in their reference to black slavery (and also to the Holocaust) the fact that these experiences are again mediated primarily through white women, coupled with the decreased visibility of one of the show’s most prominent black characters is unfortunate.

But “The Handmaid’s Tale” has a lot on its mind in other ways. Its added dimensions are not just geographical: there is an entirely other territory mapped out in flashbacks, out here where the past is a literal other country. Most of our principals get substantial backstory segments, often featuring welcome new additions to the cast, like John Carroll Lynch, Cherry Jones, Clea DuVall, and Marisa Tomei.

All these different arenas give “The Handmaid’s Tale” many axes along which to mirror or echo events, with provocative results. There are two weddings. At one the vows are “to love, honor and cherish”; at the other, a section from Genesis is read aloud “Unto the woman, He said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow.” In flashback Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski) attempts to address a university lecture room on her aggressively conservative, biological-imperative views only to be shouted down by angry students waving “Resist” placards (this is, I repeat, not a subtle show); meanwhile scenes in Gilead show recalcitrant handmaids being literally gagged to prevent them speaking. And there are two acts of violent resistance which would be characterized as terrorism by their victims, and as freedom fighting by their proponents, and whose consequences might well be the opposite of those intended. The season’s great strength is that having lain down clear lines of injustice and repression in Season 1, it is now not afraid to muddy its moral waters. And this cannot but feel piercingly relevant to us now when the righteous certainty of the initial #MeToo first wave has necessarily given way to a more complex set of problems: how do we continue to resist? How far do we go in seeking retribution or restitution? At what point do we become as bad as the people we oppose if we use their own tactics to defeat them? At what point is just trying to live our own lives tantamount to collaboration with The Enemy?

I may be making it sound like a slog, like time that might be better spent escaping from our current quandaries rather than exploring them further. But it is exciting: there are daring escapes and acts of heroism; there are shocking betrayals and moments of pure, untrammeled malice. And despite having a different roster of directors this time out (no Reed Morano) “The Handmaid’s Tale,” is if anything even better put-together than before. Showrunner and writer Bruce Miller is clearly energized and emboldened by the first season’s success. This ambitious leap into the unknown is carried off with such confidence and fortune-telling clarity it makes me suspect the writers’ room was actually a bunch of soothsayers reading the entrails of a slaughtered chicken. Series cinematographers Colin Watkinson and Zoe White find stunning compositions in the stifling, color-coded geometric order of Gilead (production design and costuming is perfection, as ever), the parched toxic landscape of the Colonies and the glimpses of the world beyond. But most of all they rely on faces: we spend so much of “The Handmaid’s Tale” resting on women’s faces, registering horror or despair or disgust or very occasionally, happiness, for a long beat before we find out what they’re looking at.

This time it’s Serena Joy who is the most dramatically colored-in of the supporting characters and Strahovski steps up in stunning fashion, pivoting between icy, casual mercilessness and an astonishing fragility in her yearning for the child Offred carries. But again the pole star of the whole enterprise is Moss. Already an Emmy winner for Season 1, she is only getting better, as she seems to have grown into the edges of the role so beautifully she can make us believe even the most extraordinary of June’s changes of heart with little more than a flicker in her eye.

For me, the greatest moment in the first half of a very great new season, that remakes a show that slightly lost its pull by the end of Season 1 (my enthusiastic review last time out was based only on two episodes) is just a close-up of Moss’ face. Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd, killing it as always) has explained to the handmaids that they are free — it’s just they are free from not free to. Later, June is so overcome with guilt at something she has caused that she’ll do anything to be free from it, even, as this glassy-eyed, vacant close-up shows, embrace her identity as Offred. It is just one, heart-stopping moment but it evokes that other great classic of dystopian literature, “1984,” when at the end Winston Smith finally “loved Big Brother.” The most terrifying thing about Gilead this time out is not that they might trap you, isolate you, strip away your dignity, rape you, or even kill you, no. The most terrifying thing is that they might make you think you want it. [Episodes 1-6: A]