‘Handmaid’s Tale’ Limps to the Finish Line

Marketing for the sixth and final season of The Handmaid’s Tale had an unusual starting point. A Christian Siriano collaboration at New York Fashion Week featured a draped cloak with structured shoulders and a voluminous hood, shed on the runway as a powerful symbol of liberation and empowerment. The handmaids reclaim their power not in spite of their garments, but through them, marking a pivotal moment in their journey.

I wasn’t sure what any of that meant at the time, and on the eve of the series finale I still don’t, really. The eighth episode started with a weird monologue about how fast fashion ruined the United States, allowing for Gilead to rise because of, I’m not sure, pollution? The point seemed to be that Gilead’s incredible power lies in its ability to maintain a drab dress code, freeing resources for more utilitarian needs, like air defenses.

Not in Gilead itself, apparently. Or at least the border. Despite The Handmaid’s Tale explicitly telling us in the second episode that the United States no longer exists (they now have a very sad looking two-star flag, since only Alaska and Hawaii are still around), by the ninth episode our hero June escapes execution by an air strike, of all things. 

Suspend your common sense

I gotta give The Handmaid’s Tale that much credit. For a show that’s been notorious for enabling the heroine’s increasingly implausible escapes from an allegedly authoritarian regime, the writers somehow managed to finish it off with the most implausible one of all.

I write “allegedly” because despite this show having gone on for six seasons, it’s still not at all clear how exactly Gilead works from an organizational perspective. June’s latest plan to defeat Gilead basically consists of assassinating all the commanders. Which ironically enough, is pretty much also the strategy of the United States in the War on Terror. You might have noticed this strategy hasn’t actually worked, and indeed, seems to just encourage more people to be terrorists, since more often than not we just end up killing people at random. 

The Handmaid’s Tale evades such ethical quandaries by having a mass assassination attempt at a brothel kill a bunch of unrelated jezebels. This isn’t because of the actions of June or her squad directly, but because Gilead incoherently decides to just murder all the employees when they discover the planned terrorist attack, without bothering to interrogate anyone to see if they took part in the plans.

For those not up-to-date on the exact terminology of The Handmaid’s Tale, jezebels are sex workers. Handmaids were, at some point, designated ritualistic sex slaves forced into this role owing to a worldwide fertility crisis. As of the end of the sixth season, about the only part of that sentence the writers seem to remember is the sex slave part. A jezebel can arbitrarily turn into a handmaid again and only ever seems to be raped without the ritual at all. It’s still not clear whether the fertility crisis ever existed or if it’s just something the Sons of Jacob who founded Gilead made up.

Puzzling plot choices

The show references environmental catastrophe. Apparently clean water is such a hot commodity and Gilead has so much of it that they can acquire luxury goods in a free trade zone. Although the Canada of the Handmaid’s Tale looks virtually identical to Canada today, Gilead refugees are such a huge strain on society that authorities are shipping them away by the trainload. Canada’s debating whether it even wants to bother pretending to oppose Gilead.

Let’s take a moment to appreciate that the actual Canada that exists today has been pretty forceful in response to the usual Trump nonsense. This isn’t to say that Canada is the land of milk and honey, by any means. It’s just that the Handmaid’s Tale has a weirdly cynical and negative impression of anyone who cares about anything, for no obvious reason except to make June seem like a huge badass whenever she disagrees with anyone about anything.

In this season there is a scene where, I kid you not, June (Elisabeth Moss)  learns that her mother isn’t dead, which eventually devolves into an argument about whether June should bring her baby back into Gilead with her. The terrorist attack at the brothel I mentioned earlier fails mostly because June has an argument with one of her allies about their personal feelings. When a security guard notices they’re in a room they should have already left, he’s so focused on using this as an excuse for rape he never stops to wonder why they were there or to read the document that they obviously tried to hide from him.

Mistaking noble goals for showrunning

By a continuous shifting of the rhetorical focus, Gilead is at the same time too strong to defeat yet too weak to prevail against the silliest, most poorly thought through plans. There’s particular irony to my use of  Umberto Eco’s phrasing there, as he’s describing the incoherence of fascist propaganda. Gilead doesn’t have propaganda. They don’t really need it. Their society seems to be entirely self-sufficient and they view normalized relations with other countries as mostly optional. Bear in mind the actual reason The Handmaid’s Tale doesn’t discuss Gilead’s propaganda is most likely because the writers fear it will make them seem sympathetic.

Still, that’s likely an overly charitable reading. I don’t think I can really emphasize enough just how incoherent The Handmaid’s Tale is, not just from an ideological perspective, but in terms of basic storytelling. I barely need to criticize any of these things that have happened this season. They fail to make sense in context. Long, meaningful, emotional close-ups of various characters being angry or sad that sexism exists usurp any screen time that could render them coherent. At times, The Handmaid’s Tale feels like an experiment to see just how much absurd nonsense critics will pretend is deep storytelling just because they agree with the premise that sexism is bad.

But wait, there’s more!

At this point, even Margaret Atwood‘s original novel can’t be used as a crutch to justify any of this. Showrunner Bruce Miller went out of his way to emphasize that The Testaments, the follow-up show based on Atwood’s follow-up novel, isn’t about the same world as the Handmaid’s Tale. Miller’s conceptualization of The Testaments is “Mean Girls growing up in Gilead,” a phrase he doesn’t explain and I’m not entirely sure I want to know what he thinks that’s supposed to mean.

Sigh. Well, let me take a guess. The ongoing theme of The Handmaid’s Tale seems to be that a truly awful society will inevitably be overthrown by righteous-minded rebels. And also that a paranoid authoritarian society that doesn’t tolerate dissent will allow people sympathetic to revolution into the halls of power. Again, this sounds so stupid I’m genuinely not sure how to criticize it, and a show this bad really doesn’t deserve that level of critique. The Handmaid’s Tale doesn’t deserve Umberto Eco. It deserves a riff on Mel Brooks:  Good will always triumph, because evil is dumb.