REVIEW: ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Season 5 Drips with Dark Irony

Since 2017 June Osborne’s story has been one of compelling terror, a gripping dark narrative that highlights a dangerously slippery slope and how easily it could happen in modern society. Which in and of itself is crazy given the show is an adaptation of the Margaret Atwood novel from 1985. The Handmaid’s Tale Season 5 picks up immediately after the explosive and bloodied events of Season 4 as June continues in her efforts to rid the world of the Waterfords, disrupt progress in Gilead, and continue to work to get her daughter back.

The Handmaid’s Tale, based on Atwood’s novel and adapted for TV by Bruce Miller, is set in a dystopian world in which the United States of America has fallen to a religious insurrection and from its ashes, the nation of Gilead has risen. This new country has set itself the task of repopulating the planet, after a global bout of infertility problems, while completely reforming its government, culture, and laws. In this new land, fertile women serve as handmaids for the Commanders and leaders who serve in its ranks with the sole purpose of becoming pregnant. After years of suffering from the abusive system of power, June Osborne (Elisabeth Moss) finally finds a way to escape Gilead and finds refuge in Canada with her husband Luke (O-T Fagbenle), and friends and former handmaids Moira (Samira Wiley) and Emily (Alexis Bledel). Season 4 finished on a spectacularly gratifying note after June is able to facilitate the trade of Commander Fred Waterford in exchange for the freedoms of 22 rebel women from Gilead. But Fred fails to find justice and instead lands himself in no man’s land, greeted by a mob of traumatized women eager to serve him with a cold course of karma.

While Season 4 ended with some well overdue retribution after all of the heinous acts of abuse from the prior seasons, it was an incredibly dark and heavy plot to sit through that results in a somewhat challenging watch. This wasn’t helped by the pacing which slowly focused on re-establishing a lot of character development of June and the friends after their liberation. At the time it felt like the showrunners had hit a creative wall as to where to direct the show and its people once they were free. That being said, having seen eight episodes of Season 5, it’s an incredibly helpful foundation for how the show finished and for what comes next.

The show still struggles in its direction early on, as June continues to battle with her demons and Serena faces the prospect of life alone after Fred’s murder. While it’s become a cliché review comment as far as to state “hang in there, the story gets better,” or “it’s all building to something big,” it feels like the payoffs have become less and less explosive and rewarding. Season 5 certainly found its way back to the action and the intrigue from within the narrative, but it does stumble out of the gates.

The larger problem with a show like The Handmaid’s Tale and the weekly episodic style of distribution is that the episodes themselves don’t hold enough gravity to leave you wanting to come back and tune in. The series would be better suited for either a binge watch or at minimum a hybrid between the two. There’s a lot of nuance in the story between the characters themselves and the detail of the world given the heavy narrative. You may lose a lot of that having to wait a week between episodes.

That said, The Handmaid’s Tale Season 5 does a much better job at focusing more on its protagonist June and the antagonist Serena (Yvonne Strahovski). This is where the show has been most effective at eliciting an evocate response between its hero and villain. The relationship between the two is explored far deeper in Season 5 than ever before and these moments are some of the season’s true high points. Moss and Strahovski are fantastic actors and their ability to maintain that visible animosity between the two of them is so pivitol.

A welcome surprise for Season 5 was seeing Fagbenle getting more screen time and a much juicy story to play about with as Luke attempts to reintegrate June back into the household amidst the constant obstacles they face. Luke is finally faced with the reality of their current situation as June opens the door to show her some of the horrors she’s had to deal with by herself while in Gilead. Meanwhile, one of the more ambiguously difficult characters to properly analyze, Commander Joseph Lawrence (Bradley Whitford), strikes up a power partnership with Commander Nick Blaine (Max Minghella). This is a couple I was surprised to see work so well together. Whitford is such a scene stealer and his most recent projects including this series have been some of his very best work. I’m not sure he gets the credit he deserves, but Whitford is such a deceptive force on screen—a calming delivery but his words carry such a weight to them.

The Handmaid’s Tale Season 5 gets off to a slow start but the deeper into the season you get the bigger the plot becomes, and the more monumentally twisted the rewards are. For a show that is already incredibly heavy and dark in tone, Season 5 gets ironically darker as it twists several relationships into unexpected directions. The pace can be slow to start with, and the weekly episodic release doesn’t always work, but I still think this story is one of the most uncomfortably compelling about.

The Handmaid’s Tale Season 5 is a weekly show, with the first two episodes available on Wednesday, September 14th, exclusively on HULU.