‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Season 2 Transcends The Hype — And Its Source Material

The Season 2 premiere of The Handmaid’s Tale is the best thing I have watched so far in 2018. It opens with what could very well be described as “nightmare fuel.” In the moments immediately following the end of Season 1, June (Elisabeth Moss) finds herself corralled into what might be one of the most dastardly mass torture scenes I could imagine. The rest of the episode never lets up. At times, I found myself holding on to my own body and wincing in pain. I was absolutely transported.

Visually stunning, emotionally provocative, and altogether haunting, The Handmaid’s Tale’s second season is not just living up to its stellar first season, but it’s also raising the bar once more for what contemporary drama can be.

The Handmaid’s Tale had something big to prove with its second season. It had to show that it could remain both relevant and riveting without the guidance of Margaret Atwood‘s narrative. The show all but expended every bit of story from Atwood’s celebrated novel in its first season and it was difficult to know whether or not showrunner Bruce Miller could continue the saga beyond the book’s final page. Season 1 occasionally stumbled when it tried to imagine the world of Gilead beyond June’s gaze, but Season 2 doesn’t have that issue at all. So far, Season 2 of The Handmaid’s Tale feels like a vibrant expansion of Atwood’s first person narrative, full of new frontiers to behold.

Elisabeth Moss once more throws down one of the most layered performances on television. Now June’s role has somewhat shifted. As a pregnant Handmaid, she’s got some sterling bit of worth to the awful people of Gilead. What transpires in the first run of episodes gives Moss some new dark corners to explore — and Moss is always spectacular at laying bare pure, awful emotion. Alexis Bledel is also back as Emily, the rebellious Handmaid who’s seemed doomed to suffer even worse consequences than June. Through Emily, we not only get our first look at the dreaded colonies, a radioactive wasteland where the unsavory women of society are sent to toil until they drop dead, but a glimpse of how much harder Gilead’s takeover has been for members of the LGTBQ community.

Once more, the show knows how to set up its story like a psychological horror film. It’s these visceral visuals that get your heart racing. There’s no filter to the insanity unfolding except the artsy ones layered on top of each frame. A lot of shows in this new era of “Peak TV” favor a shadowy aesthetic. It’s almost as though directors believe the darker their shot is, the more the audience will be inclined to take what’s happening plot-wise seriously. But in The Handmaid’s Tale, the inky color palate gives you the allusion of seeing life through tinted glasses. After all, that’s what this show wants to be: a portrait of our own world painted askew.

The most terrifying moments in the show this season are always the ones that recast something familiar to us as something sinister: a popular ballpark becomes a death camp, a soup kitchen turns into a place of torture, and a single high-heeled shoe is transformed into a ghost. The Handmaid’s Tale also uses flashbacks even more pointedly this season, to establish tone and to force us to examine the strains of Gilead alive and well in our own culture. These flashbacks aren’t just there to fill in the backstory; they’re illustrating just how narrow the gulf between our worlds is. It’s not a chasm, but the sharp, cutting edge of a knife.

Technical fireworks aside, what makes this season of The Handmaid’s Tale really soar is its storytelling. The show would just be a slog through misery if not for the engaging plot that pulls you in and forces you to feel everything as it hits the characters. And let me tell you: there is still a lot of misery. Only adding to the dreadful tension is the fact that we’re in uncharted territory. Margaret Atwood never took her story this far. She let readers determine for themselves what happened to her “Offred” next. Hulu’s show doesn’t flinch. It has a very clear idea of what life looks like for June and her comrades, and it’s still not good.

The first season of The Handmaid’s Tale succeeded in translating a legendary literary dystopia to the small screen. The second season is expanding that world exponentially in scope. It’s not just that the stakes are higher or that the world is more complex. This season is full of small portraits of daily life that make the world of The Handmaid’s Tale feel so much more real. Whether it’s one character meandering through a ghost town of cubicles or the scene of a small child playing with a toy, it’s these moments that make the big, bad, scary nightmare scenes all the more atrocious. The Handmaid’s Tale is no longer just a really good literary adaptation; it’s a living, breathing world of its own.

The first two episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale Season 2 debut on Hulu on Wednesday, April 25th. New episodes follow every Wednesday. 

Stream The Handmaid's Tale on Hulu