We Don’t Deserve the Final Season of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale
Photo by Steve Wilkie, Courtesy of Disney
The Handmaid’s Tale series creator Bruce Miller has a catchphrase. Usually prefaced by an exasperated sigh and a chuckle, the affable writer-producer will say that he wishes his Hulu dystopian drama wasn’t so relevant or topical.
Six seasons in, this might as well be a cue for any progressive within his earshot to burst into tears.
When it premiered in 2017, The Handmaid’s Tale was primed to be inhaled by the zeitgeist as a short-hand for America’s real-life culture wars circa Donald Trump’s first presidential inauguration. The red dresses that characters like star Elisabeth Moss’s June were forced to wear as they were pushed into “careers” of sexual servitude for their puritanical government overlords became the uniforms of real-life armies that marched, voted, called administrators and generally just fought to ensure that we nolite te bastardes carborundorum (a phrase taken from Handmaid’s source material, Margaret Atwood’s similarly named novel, and that essentially means “don’t let the bastards grind you down”).
And it worked. For a while. Kind of. Voting increased during the 2018 midterm election and the 2020 presidential election saw the highest rate of turnout for a national election in 120 years. Movements like Me Too and Black Lives Matter fought against institutional sexism and racism even as the ghosts of Trump’s administration haunted issues like health care reform and abortion rights well into Joe Biden’s administration.
The problem was that slowly somehow, people stopped fighting. Voter turnout for the 2024 presidential election dipped. Kamala Harris lost her bid for the White House. Trump was elected for a second term. There are still nationwide marches. They’re just happening in April instead of right after the January inauguration. Everyone just seems … tired.
There’s a quote from Atwood’s book that gets used a lot in these situations:
“That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.”