We are all, when push comes to shove, just waiting for death. Here we are, hurtling through space on a disintegrating planet, presided over by maniacs, hunkered down in front of the TV with our loved ones, hoping for the odd moment of levity before the end comes. What are we given by way of a salve? The Handmaid’s Tale, that’s what.
Watching the second series, in which Offred/June (Elisabeth Moss) gets within spitting distance of freedom before being dragged back to Gilead by her ankles, has been like witnessing a road accident in which the family pet is run over and the driver, a sadist with a grudge against the animal kingdom, gleefully reverses over the hapless creature again and again.
We have seen women gagged and lined up on a scaffold in a mock execution in order to school them in the consequences of dissent. Flesh has been burned, tongues cut out, spirits broken. We have endured the agony of a pregnant June zapped by a cattle prod, force-fed and shackled. Out in the Colonies, we have observed the “unwomen” – the old, the transgressive, the barren – hammering at the radioactive earth as their fingernails rot and tumours grow on their faces like mushrooms.
Like so many others, I was awestruck by the first season, which captured a moment in time and successfully funnelled its rage outwards at a world in which women are indeed silenced, controlled and killed by men. Crucially, in keeping with Margaret Atwood’s novel, it offered a glimpse of salvation in its final scenes as June was bundled into a van, possibly on her way to a new and better life. But in its second phase, The Handmaid’s Tale has stripped away all hope, swallowed its fury, abandoned Atwood’s social commentary and descended into cynical, pointless cruelty. It has left us as mere rubberneckers, peering stupidly at the carnage.
Should we be surprised? It is not as though we haven’t seen this stuff before in glossy, grand guignol crime series such as Luther and Ripper Street, with their artful depictions of lady corpses, all alabaster skin and wonkily splayed limbs, as men stand over them stifling their erections. But where those dramas fetishise dead women, The Handmaid’s Tale revels in keeping its protagonists alive – but only just.
In an ideal world, the series would have ended triumphantly after one season. But television is stupid. It is now in the show’s interests to thwart June’s attempts at escape, with each failed breakout prompting a fresh round of high-spec torture. There will come a point, around series 15, when, having had all other body parts lopped off, June will be simply a disembodied womb on legs – the dystopian answer to The Addams Family’s Thing – staggering across Gilead’s hellscape and cursing Aunt Lydia while making her 297th bid for freedom.
Meanwhile, inured to the brutality, audiences will yawn absently and check their phones as the womb is retrieved from the border, slapped around and sent back to the Waterford household in order that the cycle can start again. Blessed be the fruit, suckers.
Sunday, 9pm, Channel 4