Let’s all go shopping. Again.
Before we get started with a look at the last half of Season 3 of The Handmaid’s Tale, I have to state the obvious. This part of the review cannot truly be understood without looking at Part 1 and Part 2. If you haven’t already read those articles, be sure to click on the links above to catch up.
With that said, why does this piece focus on the last half of the season instead of the three-or-four episode format of the last two? It’s rather simple. Not much happens on the story front until the last three episodes!
Episode 8 – Have You Checked The Children?
If one puts aside the anti-atheism nonsense, this episode accidentally painted Lydia as a pseudo-hero.
There are two glaring issues in “Unfit,” but some of the key plot points show off a glimmer of how good this show could be. Much like a few of the previous stories, this episode shifts between the past and the present and offers a bit of development for a few different characters.
The flashbacks focus on Aunt Lydia, who was an elementary school teacher before the rise of Gilead. Apart from the obvious reveal of Lydia’s last name, we learn a bit more about her. We’re supposed to see how an older woman could actually evolve into a totalitarian, snapper-zapping witch, but her supposed friendship with Noelle and her son accidentally justifies many of her actions.
Lydia starts off like a standard social conservative that one might find next door. She’s pious and seems to care for her students, which is nice for Ryan because the fertility collapse really brought down the student-to-teacher ratio. Still, she’s incredibly concerned about Ryan’s well-being because he almost always seems to eat fast food and wear dirty clothes. These worries seem to be justified because we all know that cooking at home costs less money and that it doesn’t cost that much to go to a laundromat.
Why are the writers trying to get us to agree with the pseudo-fascist again? I know that they snuck in some stupid plot points about a lack of faith and estrangement from romance as a way to get Lydia to report Noelle to Child Protective Services, but are people so fucking lazy that they can’t even cough up $5-10 for a week’s worth of turkey sandwiches?
In the present time, June focuses on avenging Frances by raining hell upon Ofmatthew, turning quite Machiavellian over the course of the hour. She gets the other handmaids to completely freeze her out of their caste, which leaves her socially isolated and confused. The bullying builds over time until Ofmatthew finally snaps, kills a guard, and winds up getting shot herself.
I know that the writers might have been trying to juxtapose Ofmatthew with Emily to make an SJW-style statement about police brutality, but it completely falls flat. If Gilead was an actual fascist regime, both of them would have been shot without any sort of mercy.
It’s science.
Episode 9 – Break That Fourth Wall.
Today, I learned that wamen are magical.
“Heroic” starts off with an increasingly deranged June who is beginning to have auditory hallucinations… or so we’re told. Apparently, she also knows that we’re here, and she’s a big fan of Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven Is A Place On Earth.”
Why do stupid shows always throw in songs that almost everyone likes? It kind of sullies the whole thing.
Remember when I said that not much happens in the opening? Well, any viewer can see that in this episode. As punishment for her supposed harassment of Ofmatthew, she is forced to wait in vigil for months by her bedside. With badly bruised knees and a warped mind, she tries to kill Ofmatthew twice and actually stabs Serena with a dirty scalpel.
For some reason, Serena sells the story by saying that she tried to stop June from killing herself.
Why? Because plot armor!
Anyway, Ofmatthew dies, but the baby boy survives. All of the sudden, June is magically cured of her apparent insanity and willingness to break the fourth wall… even though that’s generally not how the brain works.
If you can’t understand why I see this show as a black comedy after this section, I don’t know what will convince you.
Oh, June is going to get a bunch of kids out, too. Let’s just throw that in there for good measure.
Episode 10 – Why Must I Be Surrounded By Fricking Idiots?!
This seems like an awfully easy code to crack. If the Eyes weren’t incompetent, they could bust these people in a heartbeat.
Nothing really happens in “Bear Witness” either, but the writers have to kill time until the finale, right?
The episode focuses almost entirely on a power play that was concocted by Fred and High Commander Winslow. For some reason, they magically decide that Commander Lawrence needs to be embarrassed because he hasn’t had a kid by a handmaid. Therefore, they decide to bear witness to the religious rape session.
In a display of laughably forced interpersonal drama, Joseph and Eleanor Lawrence throw a fit. After all, they never expected that the tyrannical regime that they helped to create would inevitably force them to bend to its will. It’s impossible!
So, Joseph and June do the Ceremony in private. After that, Joseph promises to get June a truck and hands her a packet of birth control pills.
How did he get his hands on that kind of merchandise again?
Oh, Fred and Serena want to make contact with Mark Tuello (Sam Jaeger), too. You may think that the writers just threw that in there for good measure, but it’s actually a decent lead-in to the best episode of the show.
Episode 11 – What Might Have Been.
I genuinely cheered when this happened.
If all of the other episodes are poorly written messes, then it’s safe to say that “Liars” could easily be thought of as something approaching excellence. However, the above average writing of this particular story reveals two more problems with this show.
The past two seasons could have easily been compressed into one, and Mark should have been a main character all this time.
As always, we’ll start off with June. After the Ceremony, Eleanor wants to kill her husband, but June has to talk her out of it to keep things on track. After she successfully does that, she develops a plan with the Marthas to get the kids out, but she’s blindsided when Joseph shreds all of the documents and tells her that he can’t get a truck out.
Luckily, June keeps her cool and convinces Joseph to drive her to Jezebel’s. After trading away a bunch of art for a cargo plane ride, June happens across High Commander Winslow, who invites her to bed. In a display of utter awesomeness, June takes the offer and assassinates Winslow with a ballpoint pen. To make things even better, the Marthas come along and burn Winslow’s body!
Okay, who are these writers and what have they done with our boring melodrama about religious fascism?
But wait, there’s more!
In between June’s scenes, Fred and Serena make their way north to meet with Mark. Apparently, they think that they’ll be able to screw the CIA guy over and get Nichole back, but we have to suffer through a little bit of laughable interpersonal drama before we get there. For some reason, Serena is bitter that Fred and the Gilead types took away her right to write books… even though she played a role in that by colluding with the Sons of Jacob. To make things even funnier, Fred never thought that they’d actually do that to the women of Gilead.
It looks like both characters made an oopsie!
Anyway, they meet with Mark on the Gilead side of the border, and the American tells them that they can stop at a safe house up ahead. In a brilliant twist, Mark actually manages to pull them into an ambush in Canada, where he places Fred under arrest for war crimes.
Seriously, who are you people and what have you done?! I was actually entertained here!
And now, I have to be sad again.
Episode 12 – Darn.
Who is he and why aren’t we watching him?
After a reasonable dose of entertainment, “Sacrifice” lets almost all of the tension out of the room.
In the aftermath of Fred’s capture and Winslow’s disappearance, the Commanders are split down the middle. Some of them want to go to war with Canada, but Putnam and Calhoun think that it’s a bad idea. They want Joseph to talk everyone out of it. At the very least, he manages to let June get away with murder.
It’s an okay start, but June has to go shopping again. Ugh.
Anyway, Eleanor almost blows the evacuation, but Joseph manages to stop her. At first, everything seems fine, but Eleanor feels so guilty that she inevitably kills herself via an overdose. The discovery and the funeral are reasonably effective, but they lead to the silliest political moment in the story thus far.
For some reason, Commander Lawrence is able to use his wife’s death to keep the border open and stay away from war.
Why? I don’t know.
Up in Canada, Fred is left to brood in his prison cell. We soon learn that Serena made an immunity deal with the Canadians and Americans so that she might see Nichole, which makes absolutely no sense. If the flashbacks are any indication, they could easily shove her into a jumpsuit because she actively participated in a conspiracy to overthrow the United States government!
Oh, Luke and Moira are allowed to visit the two for some reason. Who honestly knows why at this point?
Episode 13 – This Is Just Silly.
That happened.
And here we are. “Mayday” concludes the arc of Season 3 by splitting its attention between Mark and June once more. As always, some parts are effective, but there are a bunch of moments that may remind viewers of the show’s accidental development into a black comedy.
In Canada, Mark visits Serena in her cell. He informs her that the CIA needs her for interviews about Gilead, but that she’ll be able to see Nichole after that. Naturally, Fred doesn’t like this turn of events, so he tells Mark that she arranged for Nick to attack June. Somehow, this leads to her arrest on that charge alone, even though we know that she has been involved with the fascists from the very beginning.
Down in Gilead, June makes some final arrangements as the kids converge on Commander Lawrence’s house. Our heroine has a few touching scenes with a girl named Kiki, but they only remind the audience of the utter lack of worldbuilding outside of the borders of Gilead. Nothing has changed anywhere else, and you’d better get used to it!
I can’t.
Of course, the writers have to manufacture some melodrama, so a Martha freaks out for reasons. June threatens to shoot her, lets her go, almost shoots Kiki, and gets over that rather quickly.
Eventually, June and the Marthas learn that the Eyes are after them, so they leave for the airport. Once they get there, June realizes that they have to get the kids past the guards, so she and the other handmaids hurl rocks at them and their vehicles. It’s important to remember that the handmaids have a tremendous amount of plot armor, so the guards don’t activate their night vision goggles and kill them all.
Instead, one of them calls it in and blindly fires his M4. He manages to hit a few people, so June responds by rising up and luring the guard into the forest. For some reason, she forgot that she has a pistol in her boot, which gives the guard a chance to kill her. All of the sudden, June snaps back to logic, draws her pistol, and tells the guard to call off his fellows before she kills him.
How does that work? Are the guards so poorly trained that they can’t roll in a few minutes after someone sounds the alarm?
Luckily, June survives, and the kids make it to Canada. Yay!
Conclusion.
I wonder how they’re going to explain this one?
Season 3 of The Handmaid’s Tale shows us a few signs of what the show could have been, but the plot holes, lapses in logic, and all-around silliness make it extremely difficult to care about what’s going on. The characters have issues, the story is a mess, and the technical work isn’t much to write home about. After all, staring into the camera doesn’t really help if the script falls apart after five minutes of basic thought.
See you for the next trash fire in a year. Probably.
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