When the first season of Handmaid's speech premiered, Trump had been elected US president a few months earlier. The American left was still taken to bed over the fact that someone who flung themselves with terms like "grab women by the pussy" could have become president. The presidency also included proposals for canceled grants for Planned Parenthood (About US RFSU) and restricted abortion law.
With that in mind, Handmaid's speech met disappointed Trump critics right in the heart. Women as sex slaves without rights suddenly felt like a dystopian end station in the era that was just beginning in reality, though the United States is, of course, and remains far from the theocratic Gilead of the series.
However, it is hard to see that season three would hit anyone right in the heart.
In addition to the timing , season one was a well-made, incredibly neat portrayal of that fear, but also boredom, indifference and deceit an oppressive society can lead to. When the first season was over (roughly where the novelist The Handmaid's Story ended), the screenwriters began to carve the story on their own. The result: A more violent, brutal and technologically blunt, but still exciting, season about Junes (Elisabeth Moss) escape from Gilead. At the end of season two, she has just handed over her infant to a friend and has chosen not to flee to avoid leaving her older daughter on the wrong side of the border.
And then? It's not just what I'm thinking, but also what the creators behind the series seem to have thought for season three. The first three episodes released to the press in advance gossip about the weakest season so far. The claustrophobic grip Gilead has kept around its inhabitants seems to have been relaxed properly and I am not sure it is a deliberate grip, but just a shortcut to pushing in more events for a short time. June, for example, breaks into her daughter's foster parents' house to talk to her daughter and the penalty is to scrub a floor. In a state that cuts off a finger if you try to read a book.
In addition, some sort of mysterious sisterhood occurs between June's daughter Hannah's foster mother and June in a scene, because they still care most about the child. It goes against everything we previously learned, both about June and the ruler-servant system instituted in Gilead. It is always said that one can be killed for disobedience, but it is difficult to feel that something is at stake when June almost becomes polar with both old and new leaders and their families and puts away the titles. "How is Serena doing?" She asks Captain Waterford about his wife at one time.
In addition, June has gone from being a "could-have-been-anyone-role-figure" to a rock-hard anarchist hero who wants to gather a resistance guard and it's not as interesting. One is thus wiping away one of the series' greatest holdings: Elisabeth Moss's ability to convey vulnerability and a thousand emotional nuances in her face game, because there are no real nuances left.
A vain wish: After Game of Thrones and Handmaid's speech, perhaps the streaming services can stop going beyond the publishing house when they choose to film books in the future?
The handmaid's speech premieres on HBO Nordic 6/6.