The Handmaid’s Tale Season 2

[CruCru]

I’ve just heard that this will start in the US at the end of this month but Channel 4 haven’t said when they’ll start showing it yet.

I didn't understand the sex scene, completely tone deaf.

I found myself wondering what the event was that caused the mass radiation in the colonies. Has it been explained?

My mistake her father is Stephen Duvall.

She’s in The Faculty, too.

I think this episode was a bit slow tbh. The sex scene was just a plot filler to get to the adverts, I felt.

There are little things that annoy me about June, mainly things she does. I found it a bit stupid of her to turn the lights on in the offices, someone could have seen it from the outside. Also in the last season, when she opened the package and fell asleep surrounded by those letters. They could have been found, and then destroyed, at any point.

I know it’s nothing in the grand scheme of things, but the little details just grate on me!

In the book the toxic waste was alluded to be due to nuclear facilities being damaged during earth quakes on the San andreas fault, however all the 'terrorist attacks', riots and the killing of Congress arw set up by the gilead regime and put out as fact... Rather like our fake news. This allows gilead to take control

Aren't the colonies the result of earthquakes destabilising nuclear plants in California? Are they trying to decontaminate? It reminds me of those massive rubbish dumps in South East Asia.

I have often thought the toxic waste thing was also a gilead device to control and deal with unwomen

But some one told me it was the nuclear radiation that started the decline in fertility which started long before the birth of gilead

Dh says colonies remind him of mineral mines (for phones) in South Africa.

Coltan in.Rwanda.

Season 3 has already been confirmed, so it’s definitely happening, Cru.

Yes, Emily sort of did the wife a favour, but I sort of get it. Although they’re being punished in the most horrendous way in the colonies, they have a sort of bond between the women there. A shared experience and maybe even a tiny bit of hope. For a wife to come into that must feel very wrong to them.

our guts work fine without this kinda of thing

Really? There seems to be mounting evidence that our guts aren’t working anything like optimally because the shit we eat isn’t conducive to a healthy gut microbiome.

Activia might not be the answer but there are definitely big questions being asked by specialists in this area.

For the first time I felt like "Are they dragging this out?" Because literally all the Emily scenes are taken from conversations she had with June previously.
Less is more, sometimes..

I didn’t mind June praying for those who’d died at the globe.

Whatever ‘religion’ Gilead are peddling is not Christianity. They’ve cherry picked sound bites of the Old Testament to fit a twisted, totalitarian regime that subjugates, oppresses, and tortured people.

Would a Muslim person who’d lost a family member to an Isis attack suddenly lose faith in Islam? I doubt it.

You can’t conflate terrorism with religion. I think June was making a point that they can’t take away faith even by distorting it.

The newsreel over the final credits (Boston Redsox winning World Series for first time in 95 years) got me. DH and I were in Boston at the time, on honeymoon.

This episode felt like a bit of a filler - explained Emily's back story but not much else of note. Just me?

I thought so too butnottonight

The offending Ivanka tweet.

Wrong thread - although not entirely off topic. (Ivanka flouting mottherhhod amidst the crisis of 1,500 refugee children forcibly removed from their parents by US border staff & “lost” - some fostered out to known traffickers. )

Bit of a strange episode. I kept waiting for something to "happen" apart from the sweaty sex. I was hoping maybe June could somehow rescue Emily - even though I've read the book and I know that doesn't happen...Emily's backstory was interesting though as well as her murderous tendencies but if I'd had my clitoris removed I'd probably quite murderous too.

It was all too dark, from a cinematography viewpoint. Very hard to follow.

I found S2E2 a bit slow compared to S2E1. I'm glad it wasn't such a hard watch, but it did fill like a filler episode to me too. I'm hoping the producers are filling in a bit of a back plot, so it can lead up to some good plot threads later.

I also agree about the screen being too dark in places Ursula. I found it hard to see what was happening at times.

'I found it a bit stupid of her to turn the lights on in the offices, someone could have seen it from the outside'

Yes, completely!

If she hadn't turned on the lights we'd have had even less clue what was happening

I agree with MrStark that it was too slow - and because I have terrible facial recognition I didn't realise it was Emily until almost all of her conversations with June had been replayed! So then I thought we must already know the exiled wife. Luckily for me there's this thread to keep me right.

So I'm guessing we'll see more of Emily, and we need to know how ruthless she can be. So my hunch is that he's going to do something along the lines of sacrificing the few to save the many, and possibly she'll be one of the sacrificed.

Yes, I'm finding the 'cruelty of women to other women' thing a bit much so far this series. I do hope we're going to see how the structures put in place by elite men force all women and some men into making impossible choices to survive. The men who've helped June to escape can only do so because they're in positions of comparative freedom and privilege, but we're not seeing that at all. Whilst the aunts who in reality have very little room for manoeuvre are shown as heartless, sadistic monsters.

Someone asked upthread what they're mining in the colonies. I wondered that too.