The Handmaids Tale Review: Praise Be, Season 2 Is Good

During the third episode of The Handmaids Tale second season, I made the mistake of hoping that something good might happen. The series, which won the Emmy for best drama last September, is adapted from Margaret Atwoods landmark science-fiction novel, but I think the genre best suited for it is horror. Nameless dread haunts every frame. A repeated device will show a character reacting to some unseen, terrible thing as the audience waits for the unspeakable to be revealed—a noose, a corpse, a pool of blood.

It works well—too well. But this is exactly where The Handmaids Tale wants to be: at the nexus of plausibility and horror, with just enough weird details to offer the occasional levity of camp. A Canadian refugee (Joanna Douglas), late in one episode, pushes a box of cereal towards Moira (Samira Wiley). “Blessed be the Froot Loops,” she says solemnly. In a very rare occurrence for the show, all of the characters then laugh together.

The first season of Handmaids introduced a world that responded to a fertility crisis by violently retreating into what we might call traditional family values. Our protagonist, Elisabeth Mosss June, was a book editor until the newly christened government of Gilead stripped her of her job, her money, her child, and her name, assigning her as a “handmaid”—i.e. forced surrogate—to a wealthy couple. Atwoods book starts with the slow re-awakening of Junes spirit, and ends with the events of last years season finale, in which a finally pregnant June is hurriedly bundled into the back of a black van. The novel presents this ambiguously, so that the reader can conclude that the narrator is being either freed or sent off to her death.

Thanks to the sacred laws of television serialization, the show cant really manage either of those extremes so early in its run; no matter how tense it tries to make its second season premiere, Mosss June has the unkillable aura that comes with being the Emmy-winning protagonist of an Emmy-winning series.

That puts Season 2, and show-runner Bruce Miller, in the tenuous position of trying to maintain the dramatic stakes of the first season while letting the story progress—but not too quickly, and, by the way, without the narrative spine provided by one of the best living writers in the English language. (According to Miller, Atwood—who is a producer on the show—did contribute ideas this year.) Junes monologues in Season 2 lack the poetry of Atwoods writing style, and occasionally it does seem as if terrible things are happening to everyone except her.

But given these constraints—and the unimaginable hurdle of trying to write a sequel to one of the best-known feminist works of the 20th century, Miller does good work. In the six episodes released to critics, June flees from the Commanders (Joseph Fiennes) house, with the help of her lover, Nick (Max Minghella), and tries to make a run for Canada. But its not so simple; the border is highly militarized, and as June goes, she inevitably wreaks destruction—endangering the lives of the handmaids who followed her model of resistance last season, and everyone else trying to survive Gilead without ruffling feathers.

In its first season, the show unfolded its dystopia gradually, revealing each layer of indignity and humiliation in slow progression. These sequences were often coupled with a kind of rah-rah girl power that seemed far too simple for the nuanced horrors of the presented landscape; Lesley Gores “You Dont Own Me,” for instance, scored the proceedings more than once. The second season is a lot less straightforward—and cuts much deeper as a result. This year also digs deeper into June, particularly mining her recurring guilt—her ruminations on the people she has failed, the warnings she ignored, the fights she didnt show up for. Her mother (Cherry Jones), an abortion doctor, appears in flashbacks as the feminist June ought to have embodied, and Lukes wife appears in Junes reminiscences as a woman she needlessly hurt.

But frankly, despite Mosss award-winning performance, The Handmaids Tale is better when the storytelling strays away from her. Junes story is unremarkable by design: shes not a warrior or a symbol, but a woman. She serves as the center of a sticky, fraught web of human relationships, one that The Handmaids Tale seeks to fully illuminate this season—about the strange biological processes that make us human, and how even in a dystopian future, people are at the mercy of the vagaries of fertility, the ravages of consummation.

In a sense, this whole show is ruled by the mysterious workings of Junes uterus—and The Handmaids Tale pushes farther, in terms of centering stories on the uterus, than anything else on television has. It pursues this theme with a visual language that can be breathtaking—repeated motifs of burial, obscuring, and veiling contrasting with emerging, illuminating, grasping. When Handmaid depicts sex in Season 2, its intimate scenes—even its consensual ones—feel violent. Partners clutch each other as if they are trying to rend each other to pieces; their faces contort with rage; their bodies collide with animal force. The act is revealed for what it is, even when reproduction isnt the goal: a striving toward the unknowable center of a person.

Beyond those deeper themes, theres just enough B-movie sensibility in The Handmaids Tale to really thrill, from its visceral horror to its clever plotting. And this year, the series also manages, somehow, to feel even more resonant to our current political climate than the first was. Last spring, flashbacks to a world that looks much like our own served as an emotional bellwether, a frequent reminder that these characters once had lives and expectations not dissimilar to our own. In the second, that thread continues, but with extra urgency: with pitiless detail, The Handmaids Tale examines how the slippage of civil rights in a world that otherwise feels safe can pave the way for unspeakable atrocity. The dystopia is chilling enough, but the flashbacks are even worse—an instructive road map to fascism, given just the right combination of factors.

Whether or not that leap is accurate is up for debate, but that does not mitigate the horror of its plausibility. This season invites even more panicked second-guessing of our own world—from our judgmental discourse around motherhood to the liberties granted Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. The glimpses of Gileads past are a reminder that the web around June vibrates around women in our world, too; the trick is not to get stuck.

Get Vanity Fairs HWD NewsletterSign up for essential industry and award news from Hollywood.Full ScreenPhotos:Emmys 2017 Red Carpet Photos: See All the LooksSonia SaraiyaSonia Saraiya is Vanity Fair's television critic. Previously she was at Variety, Salon, and The A.V. Club. She lives in New York.