The Handmaid's Tale is an American dystopian drama television series created by Bruce Miller, based on the 1985 novel of the same name by Margaret Atwood. The plot features a dystopian future following a Second American Civil War wherein a theonomic, totalitarian society subjects fertile women, called "Handmaids", to child-bearing slavery.[1][2][3] The series features an ensemble cast, led by Elisabeth Moss, and also stars Joseph Fiennes, Yvonne Strahovski, Alexis Bledel, Madeline Brewer, Ann Dowd, O-T Fagbenle, Max Minghella, Samira Wiley, Amanda Brugel, and Bradley Whitford.
The series premiered on April 26, 2017, on Hulu. The second season premiered on April 25, 2018.[4] The third season premiered on June 5, 2019.[5] The fourth season premiered on April 27, 2021.[6] In December 2020, ahead of the fourth season premiere, Hulu renewed the series for a fifth season,[7] which premiered on September 14, 2022.[8] In September 2022, ahead of the fifth season premiere, the series was renewed for a sixth and final season.[9]
As of November 9, 2022,[update] 56 episodes of The Handmaid's Tale have been released, concluding the fifth season.
In its third installment, however, the drama digs even deeper into the emotional toll Gilead has taken on everyone—both those left in what was once the United States and those who've made it out. The lives and dreams that each character lost to this totalitarian regime have been laid out in excruciating detail before—but this week, the show lays those losses bare with more subtlety than perhaps any other episode. ... (In richer households, handmaids do the childbearing, Wives raise the children, and Marthas do the housework. Econowives, in contrast, "have to do everything; if they can.")
A clear example of Atwood's focus on the Reconstructionism of theonomy is his way of representing the death penalty.
They walk past a priest, doctor and gay man hanging dead from a wall in their Cambridge, Massachusetts neighbourhood along the river; they see St. Paul's Catholic Church where Offred was baptized, being torn down.
In the screen version, Offred and her friend Ofglen (Alexis Bledel) surreptitiously lament the demolition of St. Paul's, their local church.
On their stroll, they walk past the remains of St. Paul's, a historic cathedral in Boston. Burned and bombed, it resembles the churches of Europe during WWII. June pauses to remember her daughter's baptism, which took place there years prior, and Ofglen notes that Gileadean thugs were also successful in taking down St. Patrick's cathedral in New York City. "They blew it up and dumped every stone in the Hudson River. They erased it." Upon hearing this bit of news, June asks, "How do you know that? And how do you know there's an Eye in my house?"
The group has a plan to escape, but Luke refuses to leave – until Zoe (Rosa Gilmore), one of the rebels, shows him a town that was hanged from the rafters of their church after trying to resist.
Finally, one of these guardian angels discreetly escorts him to a local church building, driving home the point of what's at stake for those who attempt to survive and resist from within. This mass-hanging in the belly of a church is more than just the episode's visual centerpiece: it is a wake-up call, underscoring once and for all that Gilead is not a religious movement or a political revolution, it is not something you can reason with or withstand on your own.
Following her great escape from Handmaid training, Moira is helped by a Quaker family.
Since we last saw the escapee, she made it to Boston, hooked up with some Quakers who had ties to the Femaleroad that helped smuggle handmaids out of the country. She did not make it farther than an office park outside the city. "They shot the guys who helped me", Moira sadly tells Offred, adding that because she was a "corrupting influence", she was interrogated and then given a choice: the colonies or the jezebels.
"Unwomen" alternates between the Colonies, where "unwomen" (gender traitors, defiant Handmaids, the infertile of low economic status, sex workers, collaborators against the republic—you know, "undesirables") are sent to perform brutal manual labor...
Offred does not have many cards left to play, and seems to be drifting toward breaking the vow she made to her child at the end of this season's fifth episode, accepting that she will inevitably lose this baby. She is looking for someone to do what she cannot. In a moment alone with Rita, Offred asks her to act as a godparent, telling her, "I want my baby to know kindness. I need her to have someone kind in her life." Rita says she will do what she can, but she is just plain scared. It is not enough. Nobody but June is going to put this baby first.
This news brings back the fire in Offred's belly and she muses, "Moira is Hannah's godmother. She got out. It was impossible, and she did it."