The sixth season of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale arrives in April, bringing its run to an end while also presumably setting up sequel series The Testaments, itself coming to Hulu soon. For all the show’s initial acclaim, many fans had sort of forgotten about it; not entirely surprising, since season five wrapped up all the way back in 2022. With its final installment on the way, we decided to look back at that fiery first season—and realized just how chillingly believable its bleak alt-reality has become.
When The Handmaid’s Tale first arrived on Hulu in April 2017, at least half of America was primed and ready for a dystopian series depicting a worst-case-scenario for the country. President Donald Trump had been inaugurated into his first term a few months prior, and everyone who’d voted for Hillary Clinton (or worse, apathetically sat out the election) had already started to contort into the cringe-ball posture they’d frequently find themselves in over the next four years.
The Handmaid’s Tale, with its themes of feminist rage in the face of extreme oppression, tapped into frustrations that many politically progressive people felt that spring. The show provided a shiver-inducing but often cathartic viewing experience; week to week, June—or “Offred,” as Elisabeth Moss’ character is first introduced, having been forced to take the name of the man who has enslaved her as a breeding vessel—adapted to her grim new normal while silently plotting revenge or psyching herself up to survive.
In the world of The Handmaid’s Tale, the United States is now called “Gilead.” It’s a society ruled by far-right Christian conservatives, where paranoia and suspicion guide every conversation, and men with machine guns and black vans roam the streets looking for dissidents… or really, anyone who dares to stick a toe out of line. Violence is the knee-jerk reaction to any infraction, with cruelty layered in to make sure anyone with rebellious ideas becomes too frightened to act on them.
The linguistic tics of Gilead—”Under his eye,” “Praise be,” “May the Lord open,” and so on—and the red dresses and white caps worn by June and her fellow handmaids immediately took their place in pop culture, with the distinctive costumes popping up at women’s rights protests, particularly when reproductive rights were involved, but also in more lighthearted contexts, including among cosplayers at San Diego Comic-Con.
The Handmaid’s Tale, in other words, was an immediate hit; at the 2017 Emmys, it became the first streaming release to be named Outstanding Drama Series, alongside wins for Moss and her co-stars Ann Dowd and Alexis Bledel, as well as for the show’s writing, directing, cinematography, and production design.
That was 2017. Eight years later, the culture has again shifted—much farther to the right than it perhaps ever has been, and that includes Ronald Reagan’s 1980s, when Margaret Atwood’s source-material novel was first published. In 2022, Roe vs. Wade was overruled by a Supreme Court that had scuttled far-right during Trump’s first presidency; just a few months ago, Trump took office for his second term and the mood out of Washington, D.C. has rarely felt so extreme as it does now… at least outside of dystopian fiction, that is.
The opening scene of The Handmaid’s Tale‘s first episode, “Offred,” follows June, her husband, and their young daughter as they’re frantically trying to escape the gun-toting men who are chasing them. “What did they do?” is the natural audience reaction, until it becomes clear that they’re being hunted because in a world where fertility rates have nearly bottomed out, children are seen as rare prizes, and women who’ve given birth to healthy kids are imprisoned as handmaidens, raped over and over until they conceive again.
Once this initial horror sinks in, viewers realize The Handmaid’s Tale is in fact a parade of horrors, with rights ripped away from everyone who doesn’t conform to Gilead’s strict moral standards. June may not be able to express herself outwardly, but her voice-overs let us know her true feelings, and we get valuable context from the frequent flashbacks to her life before everything around her was jammed into a twisted embrace of “traditional values.”
Some of these memories are happy—time spent with her family and friends, including Moira (Samira Wiley), who loses her own partner in the “dyke purges” and ends up in handmaid training camp alongside June. We learn that some people, including the wife and child of another lesbian handmaid, Alexis Bledel’s Emily, managed to escape to Canada when things started getting bad, and Canada emerges as an important second location through the series.
There’s an organized resistance that starts off slowly in this first season, as well as an intriguing character in Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski), the wife in the home where June is made to serve. We learn she was a powerful conservative leader and author in the “before,” but was swiftly shunted into a subservient role in the culture she helped create. She’s both poignant and repulsive, and therefore consistently fascinating.
The center of The Handmaid’s Tale, however, is always June, and through her we learn how Gilead forced its way into existence. First the government was dismantled through an attack blamed on terrorists—it’s implied this was a lie—that led to the suspension of the constitution. Martial law was enacted, including in what was once Boston, where June lives. Gradually, things that felt like well-entrenched parts of everyday life began to change. One day, June’s debit card was declined at the local coffee shop, and she learned women were no longer allowed to have bank accounts or own property. Armed men barged into her office and forced her boss to let all the female employees go.
“They can’t just do this,” June says to Moira, but indeed They can, and They do. “Now I’m awake to the world,” Gilead-era June narrates from the nightmare of her new reality. “I was asleep before. That’s how we let it happen.”
Doesn’t feel quite as fantastical as it once did, does it? Still… it could never really happen, right? Right?
You can watch seasons 1-5 of The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu and on Hulu on Disney+. Season six arrives April 8.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
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