>>46570I agree for the most part. The first season is alright where it establishes these fucked up circumstances, and it has the real chance to examine women's issues and women's liberation in this hyperbolic context. But after the first or second season it rapidly starts to fall apart because there's not really anything more to it than watching these characters suffer, and it has nothing else to say besides "see, isn't this awful?"
It's a victim of its own ideological blindness at least in part because it doesn't really waste any time thinking about how Gilead or societies in general actually work. At least in the book, the narrative focus on June creates a plausible grey area for the world to function in because she's got very limited access to information, but in the show we've got multiple characters in multiple places inside and out of Gilead, and the more we learn about the situation the less sense the world and the actions of the characters within it makes.
Like at the point I'm at in the show the political situation between Canada and Gilead is receiving attention and it doesn't really make any sense. It seems like Canada is treating Gilead like it's a real country instead of the territory of a bunch of rebels acting against its actual ally the US. They also say that Gilead is some kind of military and economic great power, which also doesn't make much sense at all because from everything we've seen Gilead has more or less destroyed capitalism as we know it and irrevocably kneecapped themselves by taking a full half of their remaining population and the majority of their credentialed professionals and declaring them to be illiterate domestic laborers into perpetuity. So between the radiation zones, the multiple ongoing civil wars, eliminating half its work force, and the evidently omnipresent police state required to keep this all working, apparently with weekly or even daily executions, how the hell is Gilead any kind of power at all?
The confused politics of the show are really on display between the interactions between June and Serena Joy. Serena is the intellectual architect of this rapeocratic slave state nightmare and June keeps trying to make common cause with her. At first I thought she was just trying to manipulate Serena for her own ends, which seems like what they were going for at the end of season 2, but then June makes the absolutely insane decision to stay in Gilead, but also keeps her child's slave name to "honor" Serena, and in season 3 keeps trying to appeal to her decency while Serena betrays her and tries to get the child back from Canada. From what I've heard, things don't really get better, and by the end of the show Serena does get her own child and she and June have apparently had some kind of reconciliation, with June saying that the child "deserves to be raised by his birth mother" or something along those lines.
You've got this woman that's basically the Goebbels of Gilead, responsible for the enslavement and instituionalized rape of tens or even hundreds of millions of women, and the woman she has terrorized, physically and mentally abused, and raped multiple times by proxy, and instead of having her executed in any one of the number of horrible ways she helped engineer for others, her victim helps her escape punishment and gives her her blessing to go off and raise her son? It's completely deranged.
And I guess that's how I would describe it, really. It's only superficially a show about feminism or women's liberation but it's really not any different from the Gilead it depicts in that it exists only to profit off the suffering of women. It doesn't have anything to say about it other than that it's horrible because anything it might explicitly condemn would indict itself.