Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale Returns April 25
Have you caught up with the first season of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale? The award-winning story of women living under government-controlled reproduction returns to the streaming platform on Wednesday April 25, 2018.
If you haven’t watched the series (or read the original book by Margaret Atwood, you may want to turn back now.
Here, there be spoilers. (Book and series)
We’re now entering unknown territory in the world of Gilead. The first season, for all its expansion and new plot lines, ended at the same moment the book does. Which has caused fans of the book and viewers of the series alike to wonder what’s in store for Offred’s story in the future.
The truth is, Margaret Atwood didn’t tell us what happened in the future. In the original edition of the book, the story ended with an epilogue that changed the entire tone of the story. Abruptly shifting from the female narrator to a male perspective, a professor presents his paper on the tapes discovered that recount Offred’s story. The entire novel ends with one simple line,
“Are there any questions?”
In the enhanced audio book version released in 2012, the audible team crafted questions for the professor to which Margaret Atwood herself wrote the answers. (She even asked one in the audio production.)
And yet, the extended version, which seeks to explain the final moments of The Handmaid’s Tale, doesn’t give us any new insight on where the story will go in the continuing saga on screen. From the trailer, it appears that we have a full scale revolution on our hands with the nation of Gilead on one side and quite possibly the rest of the world on the other.
The newest season offers the return of some characters, including the primary roles of Elizabeth Moss as Offred and Yvonne Strahovski as the commander’s wife. Alexis Bledel will be returning in her expanded role of Ofglen/Emily. There will also be several new characters, including Offred/June’s mother and a young girl who is loyal to Gilead and may pose a threat to our main character’s pregnancy.
The showrunners also indicate that season 2 will take a closer look at race in Gilead. In the original novel, race did play a big part of the narrative but only to the extent that the leaders of this new nation were extremely racist and therefore people of color were not selected for their programs or society. The first season of The Handmaid’s Tale seemed to throw this out the window by putting Moira in the position of being trained as a Handmaid. It’ll be interested to see, in the current political climate, how race will be addressed in this version of the story.
The second season has also expanded from 10 episodes to 13, so buckle in.
