this show is tedious. how long did it take june to light her red cloak on fire? 3 minutes? yes, we get the point. but just in case june will say "I am free." that was actually helpful because i had left the room while she was lighting her clothes on fire (and filling the room with smoke?) to make a sandwich, pour a beer and go to the loo so i had avoided most of the ham-fisted messaging.
and as others have mentioned, the show never met an emotional music cue it didn't like. my theory: the show is made for people who look at their phones so it doubles and triples down on every important narrative emotional beat in case the audience missed it while answering texts and tweeting about Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Michelle Wolf.
4
Whoever coordinates the music for this show has to be one of the most artless simpletons ever to work in television. This was true last year as well as in this new batch of episodes. You can feel the music supervisor trying to impress you with the peerless taste and intellect, and it's just horribly on-the-nose and cringe-worthy.
New example: June and all the handmaids are strung up on the gallows, crying and trying to comfort each other, and the soundtrack leans really hard into a soft weepy song called... "A Woman's Work." Do you get it?
It's just as bad as how Westworld uses player-piano covers of Radiohead songs like Paranoid Android... Do you get it?
5
It's heavy handed, but then again -- isn't the whole series? I am a big fan of Margaret Atwood's work, but this is literally her weakest book -- ruined by the exaggerated politics (anti-Reagan, not anti-Trump -- it was published 33 years ago!). Good books are about people and characters -- not cut out figures to make wildly exaggerated politic points. Also, the music (first season) was a LOT of 60s and early 70s stuff, totally not relevant to a show set in the 2017-2018 era (and based on a book from the EIGHTIES).
2
I don't understand this notion that the signature required by the husband to get birth control didn't bother Luke - it absolutely did, he seems shocked by it.
8
I don't understand why Ms. Valentine thinks it has ONE SINGLE THING to do with Hobby Lobby. Hobby Lobby is a progressive corporation that pays for HEALTH INSURANCE for every employee, even part timers -- how many businesses can say that? -- and that insurance covers 16 out of 20 possible birth control methods, including the Pill and both male & female sterilization. Hobby Lobby never required anybody's HUSBAND to authorize their contraception! The comparison is literally ridiculous and bogus.
2
Wake up, Hobby Lobby doesn’t want to pay for ALL its employees’ health needs. They want to pick and choose, according to their religious beliefs. This is wrong. Medical care should be between the patient and their healthcare provider, the employer should not be involved, period. You are being naive to think otherwise.
2
I don't understand the comment that the signature requirement hardly seemed to bother Luke. He thought it was insane but signed because June needed him to. What were his options there?
11
But the point is, they still seemed all cozily domestic. They were at the most non-plussed, and they did it anyway. It’s a commentary on acquiescence, lack of resistance. A requirement like that would definitely be a cue to get the hell out of there, but they didn’t.
5
It's even stupider than that. This is a world where the human race is LITERALLY DYING OUT and babies are more valuable than gold bullion and yet, the character is WORRIED about getting pregnant? In such a society, getting pregnant would be like winning the Powerball Lotto.
1
I don't think the parenting scene and the passport scene were blind spots. I think they were intended to call attention to the fact that white people were oblivious to the plight of others in the same situation - until it happened to them. The racist, misogynistic treatment of others was easy to excuse or overlook until it began to happen to them. As I watched those scenes, I was absolutely thinking of immigrants being separated from their families and poor or single mothers with no back-up care being threatened with losing their children. And the point is how easy it is for that fascist behavior to expand its influence in our society. It's happening NOW! What is so frightening about this show is that women's reproductive rights and right to control our own bodies have been under attack for decades. The progress we made in the 60s and 70s has been chiseled away, inch by inch, leading us to understand that The Handmaid's Tale is all too believable.
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@Desertbluecat: in the book, you could argue that because it said that Gilead sent all black people to work at forced labor in the Midwest, and sent all Jews to Israel (but in reality, sunk the boats they left on!). So the BOOK Gilead was very bigoted. But in the TV series....Gilead is a marvel of diversity. The Handmaids are all races and ethnicities. It is clear that Gilead is A-OK with interracial babies and WELCOMES them. It is clear they place black Handmaids with white Commanders, and when we see a group of their children born of Handmaids (at the reception)...they are all races. So your analogy does not work at all for the SERIES, which changed this considerably from the NOVEL. Also, it has nothing to do with illegal immigration. Nobody in the series is an illegal immigrant to the US or to Gilead. It is not fascism to have borders nor is it fascism to have strict immigration laws and enforce them. I read the original novel 33 years ago when it first came out, and I am gobsmacked how anyone could read it (or watch either film production) and think it was about BIRTH CONTROL. It's about a sci fi fictional future in which the human race is LITERALLY DYING OUT and most people are sterile. It is not about birth control.
2
“Interesting to see sincere expression of faith from June.” Interesting, but not sincere on the writer’s part. Just a way of cushioning the relentless indictment of fundamentalist christian hypocrisy that makes Handmaid’s Tale refreshing and absorbing. No can believe June should still harbor religious belief living in a virtual argument from evil.
2
I disagree. I think that Christians watching the show, and our country in its current downward spiral, are able to distinguish what we consider our faith from what the hypocritical right wing does.
10
The memorial scene was poignant and meaningful precisely because of the horrifying bastardization of religion that takes place in Gilead. June, in a rare moment of peace, was able to reclaim her own spirituality and make a physical show or remembrance in a way she never would have been able to prior to cutting off her tag and claiming herself as “free”.
11
I read one review that pointed out that June specifically prays to "Christ our Lord," i.e., Jesus -- who has not been mentioned previously -- while Gilead's religious overtones have an Old Testament flavour to them.
8
I disagree with the author's use of the word "fictional". I heard Margaret Atwood speak at the Women in the World summit ten days ago. She said the only rule she put on the show writers when she turned over control was the same rule she had for herself when writing the book: You may only do things that have been done to people somewhere in the course of human history. She said that rule is in place for Season 2, also. *Everything* has already been done. That's her ultimate point- to remind us of what we're truly capable of, given the opportunity. I think it's VERY important that people know this. For me, it's what makes this show truly terrifying.
39
Margaret Atwood called it speculative fiction.
3
Atwood also has said -- and here I mean, decades back, before the Hulu series became a big internet meme -- that she based the whole thing on the Iranian revolution of the 70s, where the religious fanatics did take over the government and did take away previous women's rights and force them out of their jobs. However....note that it was not CHRISTIANS whatsoever, but MUSLIMS. A courageous author would have written about MUSLIMS and Islamic culture, and how it has treated women historically. A cowardly liberal would use those facts as an attack on conservative Christianity, because she (in 1985) hated Ronald Reagan and despised America (vs. her home of liberal Canada). BTW: there is no country anywhere ever that was massively infertile and kept the last fertile women as sex surrogate slaves to the most powerful men, so that blows the "everything really happened" theory.
2
our society has gone completely off the rails. why don't you just show footage of the Holocaust and call that entertainment. We have entered the Dark Ages physically (grade school and high school slaughters with no repercussions) socially, emotionally, spiritually, and on.
Shame on all the "entertainers" who are spewing out tons of dark, evil stories and talk crap to justify it all. and shame on YOU Ms.Moss.
2
Grow up, Deedee. This is not just "entertainment". Like utopias, dystopias are meant to make us question our current societies.
If you don't like it, don't watch. Though I get the strong feeling you haven't...
26
deedee, it's called Metaphor.
11
I think what deedee is talking about it not the speculative part of the story, but the nasty way the series (and others popular dystopian series like Game of Thrones) fixates on the most disgusting violence -- adding things that were never in the books -- or dwelling on them to the exclusive of real storytelling. There is something sick about this, and it is getting worse and worse, especially on cable shows where they don't have to worry about advertisers getting squeamish.
1
Best drama... period.
2
SPOILERS FORTHCOMING
When June and company were ushered out of the vans and onto the field and I saw the Fenway Park sign as well as when June closed the garage door revealing the Boston Globe logo emblazoned on the door, my stomach sank in the most satisfying, horrifying way. I knew the setting is Boston throughout season 1, but the explicit use of major Boston landmarks in this season's opening episodes made the terrifying closeness of the world of Gilead and our reality all too palpable. Major kudos to the cinematographic and writing teams for these two
gorgeous reveals!
20
It's about time, because the first season was so obviously shot in CANADA....that my Boston-born friends were LOLing about it.
BTW: I can't be the only person who thinks it is beyond laughable to imply that LIBERAL blue blue blue Boston would ever be the capital of a radical conservative CHRISTIAN government! Maybe Houston or Dallas or Atlanta -- but BOSTON? it is to laugh.
1
Just tried to watch episodes 1 and 2 of Season 2.
Terrible HULU interface on our streaming Blu-Ray player. Only Screen shots for episodes were shown, mixed in with screen shots from Blade Runner? No display of Season or Episode numbers. So we had to guess which icons are Season 2.
Turns out only "new" Handmaids Tale screen shot on our TV was for Unwomen , Episode 2 .
So we didn't get to watch Epsiode 1, June in sequence.
Spent a while on the phone with HULU tech support. Their solution? Unplug router and modem, then reconnect. No clue. So I just cancelled our HULU subscription.
Too bad, it was/is a good series. Maybe Netflix will buy it, and we can watch it on a proper interface one day?
Haha. I would of just waited until tomorrow. Your loss
1
That usually works.
Honestly, I am so turned off by the commercial interruptions, that I'm willing to wait for this to come out on DVD to watch it.
1
Elizabeth Moss is outstanding in this role. I'm riveted to every scene.
9
Will never watch anything she is in. Her devotion to the cult that is Scientology is abominable and her celebrity allows it to proliferate abuses against its lesser known members.
1
she's a scientologist? how ironic.
6
Her parents were Scientologists—she was raised in it. She’s still a great actress.
4