Margaret Atwood, who wrote the book on which the series is based, has said that the horrors in it have all happened in real life, somewhere, at some time. "I didn't make them up." Indeed. Anyone with a family history involving the Holocaust will be well and truly triggered by fleeing handmaids hiding in cellars, listening for the sounds of dogs and jackboots on stairs.
The series has long gone beyond Atwood's original story. June, radicalised by the inventive, fetishised brutality that systems like Gilead's specialise in, and a refusal to leave without her stolen older daughter, has rejected chances to escape to Canada and is working hard to stay alive on the run.
Appalling handmaid minder Aunt Lydia remains a cattle prod-wielding embodiment of the downside of blind faith in a twisted ideology. As one of her "girls" is waterboarded for her own good, she sits outside the torture chamber, getting on with her embroidery. Blessed evening, dear.
June is increasingly drawn into what Italian Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi called the Grey Zone, a territory of moral ambiguity in a world where she has been reduced to a piece of patriarchal property, every human right stripped away.
You flinch at what she has to do to survive, especially now she's ready to take some revenge along the way. How can you judge her? That would be like siding with Aunt Lydia, who tells June, in a frantic hand-washing exercise, "Try to remember this is all your doing … Your fault. Your choice." Gilead, as with all totalitarian regimes, hums along on weapons grade victim blaming.
Spoiler alert: in Gilead, as in the Third Reich, solutions for those who don't conform to requirements become increasingly industrialised. Once there was the illusion that a handmaid was part of her Commander's household, a powerless partner in the creation of new life. Blessed be the fruit. Now, a new plan: labour camps where women toil in the fields when not being raped by their owners in the hope of producing a child that will never know its mother. Would that count as a more "honest" solution?
As always, challenging, instructive and sometimes frustrating viewing. Why won't June take her chances to escape from this hellhole? Because she won't let the bastards grind her down. As she said to her new baby, entrusted to an escaping handmaid, "I'm sorry, baby girl. Mom's got to work."
Next week: Steve Braunias
