Best Album from Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale from the mixtapes the story is supposedly reconstructed from according to the Historical Notes in the back

I dropped out after the first episode of season 2 cos of the torture stuff. Was wondering whether it'd be worth going back, but if that kept up then no chance.

it kept up. some of the set pieces just escalate the point that this is a terrible place with terrible people, like the way they found new and progressively more horrifying ways to stage rape scenes (not a spoiler for this show tbh).

bradley Whitford is a new kind of fucking horrible monster

or....maybe not. it's hard to tell yet.

being the architect of gilead's economy (?) puts him up there, but then every gilead architect/official is a horrible monster so

yeah I think the jury's still out on Lawrence, he could turn out to be some kind of heretic or even the covert leader of the resistance.

So it looks like I was kind of right about Lawrence. Incredible final episode.

i mean

also moss’s ~face acting~ is well beyond farcical at this point

i just, i don’t get that ending at all, i don’t get why anyone would choose to stay in THAT (avoiding spoilers here), apart from guaranteeing there’ll be a third series of this particular show and not, say, a thoughtful spinoff series set in canada

and even the notion that we’d ever feel even a tiny bit sorry for the woman who was heavily instrumental in the show’s most brutal and horrifying rape scene (which reminded me of those bits in downfall when hitler was being nice to his receptionist or whatever)

I have no problem with posting spoilers here. If you don't want to know what's happening you should avoid the thread until you've caught up. That's what I did in the Americans thread.

I think the idea is that she wants to stay behind to rescue her daughter.

exactly; in fact it would have been weird, really, for her to have left completely.

critical reactions to this finale seem really off the mark to me, saying it's left the series nowhere to go. if she'd escaped, that would have been true. there's certainly many places it can go.

think the ending made perfect sense. the first time she tried to leave, she hadn't seen her daughter except from a passing car, and Gilead was still fairly strong, so she probably felt like she had to accept starting over without her daughter.

now that Gilead's starting to crack (*26* commanders died, Canada expelled their diplomats, strict embargoes/sanctions), she's briefly reunited with her daughter Hannah, and she's formed much closer bonds with the Handmaids and knows them all by name, she's having a hard time saving herself and not staying behind to help everyone she loves in the fight against Gilead's government, now in a weakened state.

Her M.O. in almost the entirety of the last quarter of episodes is ensuring her daughter isn't born in a hostile, oppressive environment, and begging to see her first daughter. she's started to put her own needs aside and even smacked Commander Fred knowing that he could have her killed for it.

it isn't as if she's staying cos "ey, I kinda like it here now" or "boohoo Serena"....she's been through a lot with her fellow handmaids since the first escape attempt!

i agree that it makes sense that she would stay to try to rescue Hannah. I do think she can't really go back to the Waterfords' sans baby though, so might be interesting to see where she ends up - whether she'd go into hiding again or be sent to the colonies/some other horrible punishment.

Anyone still going with this? I'm halfway through season 4 and I don't think I can take another season of she gets captured, she escapes, she gets captured, she escaped, for ever and ever

A bit of discussion (not much) here:

Thread for discussion of the Hulu adaptation of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale

thanks! Thought I would've had it bookmarked but hadn't!

I see I commented there that I'd started S3 so I must have finished it, but no interest in S4 (because of what I thought of S3).