ZedDash

After stomach-lurching flashbacks, we plunge into the colonies to witness the fate of transgressives

Spoiler alert: this recap is for people watching The Handmaid’s Tale, series two, on Channel 4 in the UK. Please do not add comments containing spoilers from later episodes.

Another bleak week in Gilead as June swaps one form of captivity for another and Emily (Ofglen) is reintroduced, shown toiling in the colonies.

If series one offered light and shade – sunny reminiscence contrasting with the looming threat, series two looks to be heading down a very gloomy tunnel with no windows at all. Consider this blog a hand to hold as things get dark.

The before time

The flashbacks this week belong to Emily and while it is good to see Alexis Bledel again, we find her character in the most pitiful of situations. Back when she was a college professor conducting research and lecturing students on biomes, the good times came to an abrupt end the day her boss told her she wouldn’t be teaching any more.

Emily’s crime? She showed a picture of her wife and son to a student, thus flaunting her gender treachery. Her boss – who is also gay – says they all need to get quickly and quietly back into the closet.

He mentions that his own partner calls him a “collaborator”, like those Parisian women in 1945 who had their heads shaved after D-day for sleeping with Nazi soldiers. (Does anyone else have this scene from the BBC series Bluebell seared into their brain?)

The second flashback, in which Emily sees her boss hanging from a gantry, the word “FAGGOT” sprayed on the ground beneath him, is stomach-lurchingly grim. She knows she has to run.

The scene in which Emily and her family try to flee to Canada is almost harder to watch than the torture of the handmaids. Her wife and child are allowed to board their flight but Emily, informed that their marriage is no longer legal, is retained, presumably for her womb. Her leave-taking of her little boy in particular is painful as Bledel’s expressive eyes fill with tears and he disappears up the escalator.

Stop reading and find a person/cat/dog/other to cuddle. It gets worse.

Gilead

With barely a pause for breath, we are plunged into the colonies to witness the ill-treatment of transgressives, sent to toil and die in an inhospitable wasteland for their crimes against Gilead.

Emily digs at the fetid earth but whether they’re harvesting or just digging their own graves is unclear. A legion of grey-clad, hooded women hack at the ground, their faces covered in sores, their hands blistered from the endless graft. When an unnamed wife (Marisa Tomei) arrives in the latest consignment of convicts, Emily seems to show compassion towards her, lending her alcohol to nurse her blisters and out-of-date antibiotics to fortify her against the contaminated water.

But the quiet bubbling of rage behind Emily’s eyes – the stolen family, the removal of agency, the vandalised life – push her towards revenge. When she stands over said wife, who she has deliberately poisoned, her victim seems more to me like another pawn in the game rather than a just target for Emily’s anger. Then she delivers the hammer blow: “Every month, you held a woman down while your husband raped her. Some things can’t be forgiven.”

Before we leave the colonies, we see a confused Janine stagger off the repurposed school bus: a new arrival to hell on earth, her red dress startling against the grey/orange canvas of her new home. She briefly hugs Emily before being dragged away.

June

While Emily and co languish in actual hell, June remains in purgatory: free of her immediate captors but entombed in, as she puts it, a slaughterhouse. Her temporary hiding place turns out to be the Boston Globe offices, scene of a notorious purge during the uprising, one which evidently involved the murder of everyone who worked there.

Her reunion with Nick is loveless and more about control. After months of being pushed and prodded and herded, she grabs the back of his hair and takes the lead in their marathon sex session. Maybe the death all around her proved an aphrodisiac or maybe she just wanted escape. It’s at moments like this I try to hush the voice that asks, “Would Atwood have written this for June?”

June takes Nick’s keys and demands to leave, but is ultimately forced to give him back control when she sees the impossibility of leaving while the state’s hunt for her continues. In the light of day, she picks through the abandoned desks of the dead journalists, collecting personal possessions and that pair of shoes she found, one by a desk, the other in the print room where the wall is peppered with bullet holes and sprayed with blood.

She builds a shrine to the dead and says a prayer, the good it will do her. Every episode ends with a tiny victory for June, almost as if the writer knows we’re thirsting for something, anything to break up the awfulness.

The Sound of Music

A track called I’m Clean Now by Grouper accompanies June’s prayer at the end. And, in a deviation from the usual closing track of soulful emancipation, a radio commentary is heard of a baseball game as the Boston Red Sox win the world series.

Blessed be the fruit. May the Lord open.

Grim scale

This week’s episode reads a fairly excruciating eight on the grim scale, taking into account the diseased inmates, hanging academics and crucified Marisa Tomei.

Under His eye

• Emily’s final “you should die alone” to the expiring wife says everything about her lack of empathy. But I guess months of brutal treatment will do that to you.

• When the little family is separated at the airport, I’m surprised Emily’s young son is allowed to leave. Surely children are of prime importance to the new order?

• Loved the detail of June watching a Friends DVD as if it was the most delicious contraband. It has to be the most ubiquitous, often-repeated show on earth.

• June’s reflexive “under his eye” to the truck driver as she’s dropped off is met with a cheery, “in a while, crocodile”. A reminder that she’s not in harness anymore. Well, not that harness.

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