THE HANDMAID'S TALE SEASON 3 (2019)
LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION. OR THE SEEDS THAT SOW ITS BETOKENED BEGINNING. This show, based on Margaret Atwood's novel, built its recent iteration on those fundamental principles, as I see it, a revolution kickststarted from its ingress in 2017 . It is globally attuned to topical issues of the here and now.
The third season of THE HANDMAID'S TALE is aligned with my constant replaying of Tina Turner's WE DON'T NEED ANOTHER HERO, with its lyrical emphasis on future generations and especially children. In the current scenario, after all, what we yearn for is a burning conscience for change. Fitful and yet unbreakable.
Cue its lyrics,
"we are the children,
last generation,
We are the ones they left behind ;
We don't need another hero,
We don't need to know the way home
All we want is life,
Beyond the thunderdome"
Isn't the fictional republic of Gilead an inscrutable thunderdome too for its residents?
***
June's mission to transport fifty two children and Marthas to Canada from the contemporary/futuristic retrogression of Gilead fits the bill. It's frighteningly evocative of the manner in which children have to constantly bear the cost of genocide and totalitarian regimes while women like Nobel winner Nadia Murad have to bounce back from ethnic rape and captivity to train the world's spotlight on such heinous atrocities.
Many sections have been critical of certain areas of storytelling in this season, most of it directed towards June's darker descent into chaos after losing track of her first born Hannah from within Gilead. We have to realize that her animosity towards another handmaid OFMATTHEW, who was informally instrumental in that separation from her beloved daughter, is indicative of how innocence and patient resignation just cannot exist in a world like this or ours in general even if the very murmur of dissent is prohibited by virtue of higher authorities .
Desperate times have called forth for steelier resolves and greater stakes for risk taking here. Rationality cannot figure wholeheartedly even as June plots the course of this season's resistance painstakingly.
I find it laughable that portrayals of mobsters and reckless men often get away with anything in the name of authenticity and 'showing things as they are' while a tale like this involving extreme gradations of trauma for the female folk and children is met with inconclusive, judgemental reception.
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