A third season of The Handmaid’s Tale is strapping on its brown boots and marching towards us, wimple starched and eyes burning with silent rage. But viewers who endured the torments of Elisabeth Moss’s beleaguered handmaid, Offred, in Seasons 1 and 2, just aren’t sure if they can go through it all again.
I’ve lived every second of Offred’s suffering, from her initiation at the Red Centre when I read Margaret Atwood’s brilliant novel aged 15, to our heroine’s crazy decision to stay in Gilead as her friend and baby sped off to Canada at the end of Season 2. Nobody said it was going to be easy, but the constant dangling of the freedom carrot in front of her nose, only to snatch it away again, has left viewers exhausted.
But June (let’s give her her real name) couldn’t walk away from Gilead knowing others were still suffering, not to mention leaving her daughter Hannah to grow up in such a brutal regime. A third series has to bring resolution and, crucially, hope as real-life events (Alabama, Northern Ireland) come dangerously close to the fiction on our screens. God knows we need to feel like there’s a light at the end of this long, dark tunnel.
The revolution is coming.
The second season raised questions about the ethics of showing female torture on screen. Should the continual subjugation of women be such a focus of the story? Not to mention the mental abuse of a central character who finds herself repeatedly on the brink of escaping, only to be yanked back into the daily horror of life as a reproductive slave.
While I understand the reluctance of some to return to Gilead, I am determined to see this thing through because the revolution is coming. And not a moment too soon. June will lead from the front as she gathers an army of female allies around her. Some from surprising places. In the season trailer, June and Serena Waterford sit smoking cigarettes by a pool, apparently combining resources towards a common aim. Could their abusive relationship transform into an axis of power?
Apart from my desperate need to see the women band together and sock it to that squad of impotent old white guys in suits, this season will give me the chance to get to know Bradley Whitford’s Commander Joseph Lawrence. The facilitator of June and Emily’s escape in Season 2, he was a late arrival and aside from his rebellious tendencies, we don’t know much about him yet. After all the suffering and anguish, I am so down with Josh from The West Wing ganging up with the women to kick patriarchal butt. If this is how The Handmaid’s Tale bows out, it will have been worth all the pain.