Kneeling in a stone courtyard as the rain beats down hard, the insurgents of The Handmaid’s Tale (RTÉ2, Thursday, 9.45pm & 10.40pm) have still more punishments to bear.
“Girls, there is more than one kind of freedom,” intones overseer/drill sergeant Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd). “There is freedom to and freedom from.”
In Gilead, the theocratic police state, they have the second kind – of relinquished rights and reproductive slavery. You can understand why they’d like to repeal it.
Having mined Margaret Atwood's novel for its first series, The Handmaid's Tale now finds itself in a similar position, freed from its source material and free to do whatever it chooses. Unfortunately, it seems paralysed by the liberty.
The grim timeliness of its debut last year – after Washington’s Women’s March and before #MeToo – made the show a cultural phenomenon. It helped that Offred, the novel’s unremarkable protagonist, had been radicalised for the screen. In Elizabeth Moss’s absorbing performance, we found a backstory, a growing mettle and, finally, a rebel.
The series ended with Atwood's unnerving ambiguity, but the sound of Tom Petty's American Girl was optimistic. The new series, however, dispatches her straight to the gallows, where Kate Bush yanks on your heartstrings. It's a shocking, weird reset.
This dummy execution, the first of several sequences of torture, will strike many as oppression porn. If only so much of it wasn’t horribly familiar.
Pregnant women incarcerated within stonewall institutions? Physically abused slaves, labouring for tyrants in habits? A political prisoner on hunger strike? A religious sect that values the life of the unborn far above that of the mother?
Gilead in the near future looks like Ireland, past and present.
In flashbacks, though, the show is fixated with the plausibility of the US’s slow slide, then deep plunge into totalitarianism. Indignant examples of casual sexism quickly become institutional. The shock of an atrocity pushes through calamitous transformation. Many nations have seen this happen, but the show lays its points on thick.
Hence, we find ourselves with an escaped Offred, or June, in the offices of the Boston Globe, now a grisly charnel house pocked with bullets. Where's your fake news now, huh?
By the time a brutal Isis-style university purge takes place in the second episode, even the wokest viewer may begin to get impatient for narrative advance.
Instead, the show slides into religious reverence. “Our Father, who art in heaven – seriously, what the actual f**k?” June says early, stunned to be alive, but adopting the voice of a withering undergraduate.
Throughout, we watch her in beatific beams of light, performing slow-motion rituals, and even earnest prayer, presented as either a saint or a martyr. The show, I suspect, may have run out of story. Instead it is worshipping its own symbols.
