One day earlier than expected, the long-awaited (and, why not say it, promising) season 5 of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ has arrived on HBO Max and with it we we re-immerse the world of Gilead and Canada. To the world of suffering and trauma as the first two episodes of it remind us.
After the wild ending of last season 4, the first episode takes place the morning after: June (Elisabeth Moss) returns home with bloody hands, euphoric and slightly unhinged. She has served justice and this entire episode revolves around her taking on this “save” as she navigates all the trauma of her time in Gilead.
June vs. Serena
Something that the Bruce Miller series is really comfortable with. Perhaps too much since, although he continues to influence the pertinent issues that they have been working on for so many years, the general feeling is that they have little left to tell. They have made the partridge so dizzy that they can only try to burn the plot.
At this point in the series and all of us who continue to watch know that, despite continuously playing with this or that revolution, This is June’s story. And June is not exactly a hero.. What’s more, here, in fact, there is even more emphasis on the fact that everything with the protagonist is for personal reasons, even selfish reasons.
So, once the masks are uncovered, it is interesting to see where the personal war with Serena (Yvonne Strahovski) goes and the political overtones that they inevitably have. In fact, the second episode (directed by Moss) takes us through the elite Gileadian just to prove that, no matter how renowned you are, without the support of men you won’t get very far.
The tale of indifference
Although ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ knows what it wants to tell in this season 5, the execution is a bit “at convenience”. I mean, in itself it is a series in which everything is so anchored to reality, everything is intense and it tricks us so much that everything can go wrong, that the twists and turns are lacking in emotion.
This is coupled with the certainty that we will have a sixth season, which causes a certainty that things are not going to touch too much. So there is a feeling that beyond the journey into the darkness of our protagonist, the series repeats itself and, therefore, little counts anymore.
Which is not to say, at all, that ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ has become boring. No way. The script still knows how to place the appropriate springs so that, even with its calm style and within its tone, we still have reasons to see it. This includes, yes, some unusually gory scene.
The bad thing about this is that one feels that this new season is far behind the previous one. Going back to that darkness and some tunnel vision that we thought we had overcome despite having been hallmarks of the series.
So, all in all, while ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ has come back as solid as ever, that feeling of settling in can do quite a bit of damage as the season progresses. As interesting as this confrontation between June and Serena may be a priori, there is a risk of falling into indifference.