Falling Women

The last time I bothered to sit down and write about something, I was petulantly whining about the lack of good horror on any screen, big or small, and claiming that AMC's The Terror was the closest we'd gotten in years decades.

Still very true and no one will ever take that way from it. But then The Handmaid's Tale season 2 started up, and oh my fucking god my stomach has been living in my toenails for the past three weeks.

I wasn't sure I was going to be able to watch season 2 at all, partly because the first season was so emotionally harrowing, partly because it's just too close to what is happening in the world right now, a teeny tiny minuscule bit of ew yuck why is Elizabeth Moss a Scientologist and I know I'm being every bit as bad as a Gileadian but just yuck anyway, but mostly because there's no season two of the book, and I wasn't sure it could be pulled off. Even with Margaret Atwood was on board, I wasn't sure. I've seen too many series go downhill fast, and this one may yet...but not this season. Not by a long shot.

If you haven't started season 2 yet, I'm not going to ruin it for you. I'm also not going to fault you if you should choose not to proceed. But I am about to make a spoileriffic list of the most horrifying scenes from both seasons one and two now, so consider yourselves warned.

Season One, Episode One
Offred 

This entire episode is harrowing as we are introduced to the rise of the Republic of Gilead, the fall of life as we know it and the enslavement of June, soon to be known as Offred (offered). This episode resulted in one massive panic attack and a mostly sleepless night plagued by nightmares for me, particularly the scene in which June is brought to the Rachel & Leah Center (aka The Red Center) for the first time. She arrives smack dab in the middle of a lecture given by Aunt Lydia (sux) about the evils of birth control and premarital sex. Plopped down without any inkling of what the actual fuck is happening, June listens in growing horror as she learns she is to be systematically raped and used as a brood sow, over and over and over again, for the rest of her life. Aunt Lydia assures them that even though this may seem strange now, they'll get used to it over time. Those words are accompanied by a subtle but eerie score: an ominous rising and falling of strings, an echoing howl not unlike the vocoder of The Shining. It is so genuinely unnerving that I felt my physical self responding the way it used to when I was receiving unwanted male attention - the slow slide of my guts down into the abyss of despair and fear.

Season One, Episode Three
Late

Christ, this fucking episode. I felt like the fattest pumpkin in the patch, having my guts ripped out in double handfuls by an overeager Jack-O-Lantern enthusiast. First, June and her best friend Moira are turned away from a coffee shop by a hostile Incel who calls them sluts and is totally within his newfound rights to do so. Shaken, June returns to work and is informed she no longer has a job because Vagina, and is escorted from the premises along with all of the other Vagina Bearers. A flashback shows us the beginning of the end as June and Moira attend a protest in Boston. Thinking that the army of the Sons of Jacob can simply be boo'ed away, the girls are horrified when the SOJ's simply open fire on the crowd, tossing tear gas and hand grenades around like love beads at Mardi Gras. Set to a considerably slowed down and classical'd up version of Blondie's "Heart Of Glass" it is shattering to watch the girls crouch in a corner in the coffee shop they'd so recently been expelled from, shaking and sobbing as glass breaks, blood flows and horrified screams herald the arrival of the new republic. And last but not least, fellow Handmaid Emily (Ofglen) and her lover are convicted of "gender treachery." Emily, who is still fertile, is spared. Her lover, who is barren, is not. Thrown into the back of an armored van, Emily and her lover grip each others hands and sob, giving what comfort they can before their short ride comes to an end and the barren woman is unceremoniously hauled out of the van, marched over to a waiting noose and lynched while Emily watches, screaming through her gag. The final scene, featuring a newly clitoridectomied (clitorostemicized?) Emily being told she will be returned to Handmaid detail, is almost anticlimactic.

Season One, Episode Six
A Woman's Place

Trade delegates from Mexico arrive, but they're not interested in swapping cars and coffee anymore. They want Handmaid's. Nice, juicy fertile ones who will spread their legs wide and spit out some nice healthy Juan's and Maria's. A grand (and sickening) show of happiness is put on for the visitors, one of whom is allowed to speak with June at one point. With her blinding smile, she asks June if she is happy, and June - surrounded by her captors - is forced to say that she is. But when she gets an opportunity the next day to reveal all, she confesses everything in a broken whisper, unable to hold back tears: "If we run, they’ll try to kill us, or worse. They beat us. They use cattle prods to try to get us to behave. If we’re caught reading, they’ll cut off a finger. Second offense, the whole hand. They gouge out our eyes. They maim us in worse ways than you can imagine. They rape me every month whenever I might be fertile. I didn’t choose this. They caught me. I was trying to escape. They took my daughter. So don't be sorry, okay? Please don't be sorry. Please do something." We want to believe that because she is pleading to a woman, she will be helped at last. But the woman, although seemingly horrified and apologetic, says she cannot help June. Cannot or will not, it's hard to tell. Because she immediately follows up her apology with an attempt to justify the exploitation of the Handmaid's. Her country is dying. There have been no live births for six years. She is unwilling to accept that Nature has turned on them and instead agrees to force Her hand, failing to realize that a country is murdered when it enslaves the majority of its people for the benefit of a few. 

Season One, Episode Eight
Jezebel's

So, the Sons of Jacob have torn down the old America, full of slutty women who want birth control and equal rights and won't give them sex on demand, and transformed it into a pure, wholesome, milk and honey paradise where women submit, men rule everything and there's no slutty, yucky, tarted-up whores sashaying about tempting all of the good, decent men with their big deal hair and fancy hips and la-dee-dah lipstick and stuff. All of that trashy nonsense is gone, never to return, because there's just no reason for it. Except men always want to have their cake and eat it too, with a side dish of ice cream and pie and cannoli and Pop-Tarts and whatever the fuck else they put their greedy little hands out for. June's bored Commander sneaks her out of the house and into the city for a date night, and June is shown the Palace of Hypocrisy, aka Jezebel's, a brothel for Commanders Only where women of all sizes, shapes, colors and ages parade around like prize ponies, draped in slinky, glittery garments, dripping with makeup and fucking any and all who ask because it's either Whoredom or a slow, agonizing death in the irradiated colonies for these rebellious girls. June's stricken face as she walks down the many halls of this whorehouse - almost a caricature of an actual brothel in its garishness and festoonery, as if the men who created it were going off of a teenage boys wet-dream idea of what a whorehouse should be - is underlined by The Jefferson Airplane's iconic "White Rabbit" a song that starts out soft and slow and ends up screaming at the top of its lungs as the madness firmly takes hold. It's like her first day at The Red Center, but turned on its head. Aunt Lydia was right - she has gotten used to the dry life of a Handmaid, and this reminder of the way things "used to be" (or the way men wanted them to be, rather) is shocking even to us. The depravity! The filth! Oh clutch my pearls, I do believe I have the vapors! 

Season One, Episode Nine
The Bridge

"One-Eyed, batshit crazy Janine" gives birth and is shuttled off to a new Commander like a salmon upstream, dazed and still heartbreakingly convinced that her old Commander will come for her and they will run away together with their new baby and live happily ever after. Unfortunately, she finds out soon enough that this isn't going to happen, when her new Commander casually walks into the room, unzips himself and starts porking away like a typical pig, deaf to Janine's protests, until she finally attacks the old pervert and tell him to get the fuck off of her. His look of surprise would be comical if it weren't so disgusting, and sums up a sad truth about a lot of men. We owe them sex, we should stop fighting it and just lie back and enjoy it, we should just do our duty...and when we don't, the reaction is so oftentimes the unspoken one on Commander Daniel's face: "What the fuck, you stupid bitch? You don't want ME? What's wrong with YOU? Are you a dyke or something?" Listening to her cry and scream for him to stop, that she doesn't want this, while he obliviously continues is so deeply upsetting that I started to cry, right there in front of the screen. I didn't sleep well that night, either. 

Season One, Episode Ten
Night

And I cried yet again at the end of season 1, when Moira finally makes her way across the border into Canada, escaping Gilead forever. She's lost and alone and she had to kill god knows how many people to get there, but dammit she made it. When she finds Luke (June's husband) waiting for her, she is clearly shocked. 
Moira: "How are you here?"
Luke: "They called me when your name came up, and you're on my list."
Moira: "List? List of family?"
Luke: "Yeah, of course."
And that's it. She crumples. She bursts into sobs. Someone did care about her enough to claim her as family, someone did remember that she was Moira, not a nameless Handmaid. She's safe, she's home, she's cared about and she matters. She always mattered. Luke holds her as she sobs brokenly, seemingly shocked that she could possibly think for one second that he didn't care. But what seems like an "of course" to him is everything to her. I cried like a fucking pissy-pants pansy bitch, I admit it. And I'm not ashamed. 

Season Two, Episode One
June

"There will be consequences" Aunt Lydia warned, and indeed there are. Absolutely, mutherfuckingly right. The first five minutes or so of season 2 is mass confusion. When last we left her, June was being arrested, but we didn't know by who. The book was similarly vague: was it The Eye come to take her to the colonies, or Mayflower come to free her? Now we finally have the answer. It's The Eye, alright, and they herd June and her fellow Handmaid conspirators into the corridors of Fenway Park like cattle up the slaughterhouse chute. Gagged and frightened, they are ordered up onto three pneumatic gallows, their heads shoved into nooses. Many of them are sobbing. One pisses herself in fear. June turns her face skyward, clearly afraid but determined to face whatever comes next. But what comes next isn't what any of them expected. One short drop and the gallows bounce back abruptly. The Handmaid's scream in unison, then immediately stop, confused and relieved. They have been spared, for now. It's all been a bad joke, but it's going to get worse, and those consequences we spoke of earlier? Yeah, they're coming. 

And come they do, in the shape of handcuffs and blue gas flames from stovetops, cattle prods and rocks. And June, singled out because she is newly pregnant, is forced to sit and watch it all, perhaps now hated by her fellow Handmaid's as she sits warm and fed while their tortured screams of pain echo throughout the Red Center. 

We don't even get much relief when she is finally rescued, spirited away to a safe house (in this case, the abandoned offices of The Boston Globe). Alone with nothing to do and nowhere to go, June stumbles upon the scene of a massacre: a wall full of machine gun holes, a line of nooses hung nearby, the aftermath of carnage and panic. Finally, she has time to realize the enormity of what has happened, and she breaks. Not much, but enough to convey what we perhaps hadn't yet realized - that there is no escape from Gilead, even if you do make it out alive. 

Oh man, this is gonna be a long season.

Season Two, Episode Two
Unwomen

When last we left Emily, she had killed a Guard, had her clit snipped off and been shipped to the Colonies. And now here she is again, alive and not well, forced to clean up the irradiated earth with the other Unwomen, all of them in varying degrees of radiation sickness. They will die soon, but they forge friendships anyway, and Emily - once a college professor - tends to their wounds as best she can. She too has plenty of time to think now, about her wife and son, neither of whom she has seen or heard from in almost a decade. About her friend and fellow professor, who was lynched on campus with the word "FAGGOT" spray-painted beneath his dangling feet. About the horror of being interrogated at the airport, her marriage annulled and her escape denied. When a Commander's wife shows up at the Colonies (deemed an Unwoman for cheating on her husband) Emily makes a choice. She allows the woman to confide in her, trust her and take medicine from her. But the pills are poison and the Wife's death is slow and agonizing. And Emily doesn't give a twopenny fuck. Neither do we. Sure, there will be consequences. But it feels good to get some payback for a change. 

Season Two, Episode Three
Baggage

It is revealed in flashbacks that June's mother - a strong-willed activist and abortion clinic employee, who was disappointed in her only daughter's seeming inclination to happily settle into the role of June Cleaver - has been shipped off to the Colonies, and is most likely dead by now. A photograph of her mother's face - frightened, bewildered and aged - pops up on a training film the Aunt Lydia forces them to watch at the Red Center. Both June and Moira are horrified. It is so at odds with the memories of her powerful, fearless mother than it seems at first she doesn't recognize her. Tears stream silently down June's shocked face. But there's nothing to say or do. It's already over. But finally, some of her mother's teachings seem to rub off on June, and she makes a run for it, heading for the Canadian border and damn near making it, before being recaptured at episode's end. It was inevitable. I mean, it's only episode three. We can't have her victorious too soon or the story will lose its audience. 

Or will it? 
What about all of those letters that June smuggled out of Jezebel's? What about Moira and Luke? What about Janine, newly arrived at the colonies and reunited with Emily? And most of all, what about Hannah? June's daughter is clearly being groomed for a life as a Handmaid, sporting a baby pink junior miss mockery of their habit and watched over by Mrs. Waterford with her nail file face and her ice chip eyes. Hannah is June's sole purpose for surviving. But now June has another one...the three month old fetus in her belly. What the fuck is going to happen, man? Not just to her, but to us? This show scares the shit out of me and I can't stop watching, anymore than I could give up Game Of Thrones. Will this keep me "woke?" (wtf does that even mean?) or desensitize me further? Would I end up as a Martha, past my childbearing years, or shoot off my big fat mouth and get sent straight to the Colonies? 

And should I wait to start Alias Grace? Or do I risk exploding?

If we run, they'll try to kill us.
Or worse.
They beat us.
They use cattle prods to try to get us to behave.
If we're caught reading, they'll cut off a finger.
Second offense, just the whole hand.
They gouge out our eyes.
They just maim us in worse ways than you can imagine.
They rape me.
Just every month.
Whenever I might be fertile.
I'm Sorry.
I didn't choose this.
They caught me.
I was trying to escape.
They took my daughter.
So don't be sorry.
Okay? Please don't be sorry.
Please do something.

Read more: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=the-handmaids-tale-2017&episode=s01e06