The Handmaid’s Tale Season Three Review and Retrospective

I know I said I was jumping off the Handmaid’s Tale train after the show was unable to craft a coherent story outside the confines of Margaret Atwood’s novel in season two, but Hulu generously continued to provide me with screeners for season three, so I decided to see if the show could right the ship. The answer? Nope. Season three of Handmaid’s Tale continued down a winding and confusing narrative path until it arrived at the inevitable end: June fully embracing her Savior Complex* and “sacrificing” herself so that her people could be free.

*I’m a tad hesitant to call it a full White Savior Complex. There are absolutely signs, which I’ll discuss later, that indicate the tone-deaf nature of this arc also extends to the racial make-up of the supporting cast, I don’t think the show has engaged enough with the racial elements of Gilead to call this a White Savior Complex – although I’m sure it will be a topic of discussion following the finale.

Ultimately, that’s what season three was about – the evolution of June from a broken but determined woman into a Savior, believed in with a religious fervor by those around her. Those who don’t buy into the mythos around her are forced to come to her side when she shows them just how powerful she is. (June can get a plane – what can those Martha’s get on their own? Nothing. That’s what.) Honestly, we should have seen this arc coming a mile away. Why keep June in Gilead (despite offering her THREE chances to get out)? The story of Gilead is no longer about exploring the foundations and abuses of the country (and I, for one, do not miss the show’s torture porn past), rather, it’s about the creation of a hero – a martyr – to save them all.

On a show with a strong grasp on narrative and character, June would have reached her ultimate destiny in a less frustrating fashion. We wouldn’t have needed to be teased with multiple escape opportunities, or jarringly on the nose close-out songs, to get it (while I’ve had a number of problems with the series these past two seasons, the penchant for the show to hammer home plot points to the point of causing a concussion is one of the major ones). But we didn’t get a well-constructed series, we got The Handmaid’s Tale. And with it, we were gifted the utter joy of watching June compare herself to fucking Moses in the season’s final moments, while quoting Exodus. MOSES. Who, for those who might not have had years of Catholic (or Christian, or Jewish) schooling, famously led his people out of slavery in Egypt only to die on the cusp of reaching the Promised Land (the parallels are striking, aren’t they).

Again, sure, in a better show that hadn’t exhausted all of its audience (and critical) good will back at the end of season two, this particular moment might not have felt cloying, utterly ridiculous, and absolutely like a privileged white woman taking all the credit for something that a ton of people (most of them – including the majority of the women carrying her injured (dead?) body in the final shot – people of color) worked just as hard to accomplish.* Of course the show sees nothing wrong with this reading – that the white woman was the real savior of all. Maybe I’m not giving the show enough credit, and perhaps they do want to challenge June’s lofty view of herself as the great uniter of the downtrodden and savior of Gilead’s children. But when the only person to challenge her, the Martha leading the Gilead Underground Railroad, gets clapped back at by June and then goes along with her plan, well, I’m not likely to accept that the show has issues with June’s sudden prophet complex.

*Random Fun Fact: I explained the final scene to a friend who has read the novel, but didn’t continue with the show past season one, and he burst out laughing. Because after all the pain and suffering of the series, where June got off relatively lightly compared to others – including getting a Martha killed and letting Mrs. Lawrence die by refusing to help her – of course June decides she’s Moses, destined to die before reaching the Promised Land while her precious people manage to make it there.

And season three would have been frustrating if this was the only arc that had serious narrative and tonal issues. But alas, so did every single other arc. The show hid Serena Joy’s hand so deftly that it wasn’t even clear what her endgame was until after Joseph was arrested (I suppose one could have inferred something was up after her actions in Canada, but still, so little time was spent with the character alone that we didn’t get a chance to watch Serena Joy debate this decision). I would have loved to have seen Serena agonize over what to do, and slowly become fully invested in getting “her” daughter back – or at least see any of her thought process. Instead, we were given almost no indication that she was ready and willing to throw her husband to the wolves. After the shoddy character work done by the writers in season two, I’m hardly shocked that they didn’t bother to give Serena any outward motivations or inner turmoil.

Are we supposed to root for Serena? Are we supposed to think she deserves forgiveness and a free pass in Canada? Because, sure, she is arrested in the finale for something that was, in the grand scheme of things, one small element in her sordid and blood soaked past. I found myself shrugging my shoulders at her arrest and thinking “Good. Serves her right.” The writers’ inability to figure out how to craft a character with depth and consistency failed Serena the most. And like every other cast member, Yvonne Strahovski tried to give us a character with some emotional depth (a shout-out to Elisabeth Moss as well, who did excellent work, despite June’s character being so inconsistent throughout the season) while be presented with a completely different character to play each episode.

I was happy to see the show exploring the massive mindfuck of leaving Gilead and being free in Canada through Alexis Bledel’s Emily, only to become frustrated as the show completely dropped that arc midway through the season. Emily was potentially going to be charged with her Gilead crimes and deported back, she was having some trouble reconnecting with her son and wife, and then nothing. The next we saw of her she was working as an aid worker. That’s it. The only silver lining to June potentially dying (and if the show has the guts to actually kill of its lead, well, I will gain a ton of respect for the writers for realizing there are plenty of interesting characters and stories they can tell that don’t include June at this point) would be that the show could refocus and move beyond the structure of June’s story – something it will seriously have to consider if the show wants to move forward.

Hell, in Samira Wiley and Bledel the series has two actors that can carry a series and have in the past. There’s Bradley Whitford and Strahovski, both who have been de facto leads on ensemble shows in the past. There’s enough talent in this cast to survive removing June from the story* and letting the narrative move into the next phase of things. The Revolution has begun, and a martyr gets people engaged a lot more than June continuing on as the Savior of Gilead ever really could (despite what the writers seem to think). Plus, at this stage, how the hell is June going to get access to anything or have the ability to really create an underground revolution? She’s radioactive at this point and could never show her face in public again.

* Losing June means losing Moss, which would be a major blow to the series – and be hard for their awards season hauls. While there are a number of actors who could become the face of the series, Moss has the bonafides in a way no other cast member does. That being said, Moss is smart enough to know when it’s time to cut and run, and as an executive producer on the series, she might realize the story is better served by her stepping behind the camera completely.

I will say that I’m cautiously intrigued (definitely not optimistic) at what a fourth season of The Handmaid’s Tale might look like, which is something I couldn’t say at the end of season two. If the series opts to make the hard decisions and sticks with them, rebooting the series as something bigger and more complex than the continue journey of June the Savior could potentially change the series for the better. But if the writers opt to keep pushing forward with the status quo (more time spent dealing with minutia in Gilead, more time with Aunt Lydia, more time with the Canadian branch of the tale spinning its wheels while it waits for more characters to arrive from the south), then the show will continue to simply be a series of poorly constructive narratives that force characters to sit and wait for the proper moment in the season to move forward. It can be hard for a show to realize it needs to change to survive and remain relevant. This is the last chance for The Handmaid’s Tale to take the leap. I really hope it does.