The Handmaid’s Tale, season two: ‘It’s darker, much worse’

The position of women in society has perhaps never been more relevant. The reminders are all around us on lampposts at present. We’ve just come through a nine-week dissection of an ugly episode on a Belfast night out. The nastiness of Twitter commentary shows no signs of abating. The commodification of women’s bodies is ongoing. And Rampant casual, everyday harassment is finally being acknowledged.

And that’s even before we look across the Atlantic at a misogynistic president who boasts of assault.

With all of that, all around us, do we really look forward to the second season of the frightening, fascist world of The Handmaid's Tale? You bet we do.

For those who watched the superb first series of the terrifying, dystopian small-screen adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel, another series is something to look forward to, even if the chilling vision it represents makes it a kind of hate-watch experience.

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It’s upsetting and disturbing, and while it is a fiction, it skirts plausibility, holding up a mirror to horrors just beyond. It’s also a fabulous work of television, a compelling exercise in darkness, with the merest glimmer of hope.

Beautifully shot, with transcendent performances, it won eight Emmys and two Golden Globes and was one of the most talked about TV series of 2017.

As Margaret Atwood has said: “I am not a prophet. Science fiction is really about now.”

RTÉ2 will be the first broadcaster in Europe to air the second series of the drama; while the Hulu service is releasing episodes, there’s no date yet for its broadcast on Channel 4 later this year. It has already premiered in the US, to positive reviews. RTÉ2 blasts into the second season tonight with a double episode, starting at 9.30pm, with live streaming and on-demand availability through RTÉ Player.

The first season of the series created by Bruce Miller, based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, premiered in spring 2017, and watching it then, a few months after Trump’s presidency began, it had a chilling prescience. In the intervening time it rode a wave of resonance. It also chimed with a growing resistance, with the image of red-robed handmaids with white, bonnets constricting their vision becoming a symbol of protest.

Series one

The Handmaid's Tale follows life in the Dystopia of Gilead, a totalitarian society in what was formerly part of the US. We see this world through the eyes of June, who is forced to become Offred, a handmaid in Gilead.

Because of low fertility rates, handmaids, the few remaining fertile women, are assigned to bear children for elite couples who cannot conceive, in an attempt to repopulate a devastated world. This is a new, militarised, hierarchical regime of fanaticism and newly created social classes, in which women are brutally subjugated, and by law are not allowed to work, own property, handle money or read.

June/Offred (the brilliant Elisabeth Moss) is captured while attempting to escape to Canada with her husband, Luke, and daughter, Hannah. Due to her fertility, she is made a handmaid to Commander Fred Waterford (Joseph Fiennes) and his wife, Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski), and forced into sexual servitude.

She remains determined to survive the terrifying world she lives in, and find her daughter.

The season followed the lives of several others in Gilead, including Emily (Alexis Bledel), a lesbian who escaped death by being made a handmaid; Janine (Madeline Brewer) a handmaid who doesn’t accept her condition; and Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd), who manages the handmaids.

The first series ended after decisive moment and act of defiance, when June/Offred refused to stone fellow handmaid Janine. When faced with the order to stone her to death, June steps forward to say “I’m sorry Aunt Lydia” before dropping her stone.

The other Handmaids repeat, in an act of resistance, sisterhood and passive power.

Earlier June opened a package she got from Moira, with letters from Handmaids smuggled across state lines: “Don’t forget us”.

Serena Joy realised her husband the commander was infatuated with their handmaid June, and as punishment brought her on a trip where June saw but could not speak to her daughter Hannah, and remained in a locked car, screaming. The torture made June snap.

Moira offers the only shred of hope at the end of the season, apparently escaping to Canada and reuniting with June/Offred’s husband Luke.

June’s act of rebellion will not go unpunished, and back at the Waterfords, a black van pulls up outside for her. She whispered something to Rita, who retrieved the letters (surely a setup for the coming season) before she is taken away in the van.

Atwood’s novel ends at the same open juncture, with the line “into the darkness within; or else the light”, leaving an ambiguity for season two.

Series two

Showrunner Bruce Miller has said Atwood was in the writers’ room early on in the creation of the show, and played a “huge role” in crafting the second season, which promises to dive deeper into Gilead and the world beyond it.

It will explore the characters in a way that Atwood couldn't do with Offred as narrator. "We can go behind the scenes and follow characters we can't follow in the book because she cannot know what happens to them," Atwood told Hollywood Reporter.

While the first season ended the book’s storyline, it had an epilogue set 200 years later, which feeds into the new series.

According to actor Elisabeth Moss (June), “season two is going to be bad too, really dark – it’s going to get worse”.

In terms of characters in this new season, Moss returns as Offred, as do Ofglen (Alexis Bledel), Moira (Samira Wiley) and Janine (Madeline Brewer). Also still in season two will be Luke (OT Fagbenle), the Waterfords, Nick (Max Minghella), Offred/June’s missing child Hannah and Aunt Lydia.

New characters are set to appear. Veep star Clea DuVall will join the cast, Oscar winner Marisa Tomei is in the second episode tonight, and Bradley Whitford (The West Wing, Get Out) will appear as Joseph Lawrence, Gilead's architect.

“June’s mother is a big character in the book and representative of an interesting kind of feminism,” says Miller, and Cherry Jones (24) has been cast in that new, apparently pivotal, role of Offred’s mother.

What else in season two? From leaks and interviews we discern the following:

The colonies – where infertile women and Gilead opposers are sent to clean up toxic waste – will feature. Miller has also confirmed one of the show’s most brutal villains Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) may get a back story.

We’ll find out more about the resistance groups. The issue of race will feature. And we’ll find out what is happening in other countries around the world. Miller has said season two will “expand on the world created by Margaret Atwood.”

Moss has warned: “Don’t try to guess what happens in that first scene of episode one in season two. You will never get it, and I mean that objectively as a viewer. You just won’t guess, and I love that so much.”

The Handmaid’s Tale is on RTÉ 2 on Thursday, at 9.30pm and 10.40pm