What part of Handmaid's Tale traumatised you the most?

[user892734543544]

I love a well made TV show. I wasn't finding anything and, despite my natural aversion to the concept of HMT, I watched it to satisfy the need to see a good show.

Here are the moments I wish I had never seen. Interested to know what you found the most upsetting part.

1. Emily being taken with that other lady to be punished for being gay. Other lady was just unceremoniously strung up and hanged in seconds.
2. What happened to poor, poor Janine. When that bloke got ahold of her and just beat her and kept her prisoner.
3. When June's daughter said to her 'will I ever see you again?'
4. When Janine's child was given back at the end.

I’ve still not watched this yet because I know it will disturb me. I’ve read the books and enjoyed, no problem but the TV series, seeing it visually... Might have to put my big girl pants on.

From the World Health Organisation website...
"More than 230 million girls and women alive today have undergone female genital mutilation (FGM) in 30 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia where FGM is practiced.FGM is mostly carried out on young girls between infancy and age 15." "More than 4 million will be cut this year."

Shameful.

Yes, I stopped watching entirely after this episode!

This thread has reminded me why having loved the book I couldn’t carry on past a point in season 2 I think. I was pregnant at the time and the gratuitous cruelty was making me feel panicky and physically sick and I just thought no, enough thanks. I’ve considered going back to it several times since but I’m not going to. What I saw was brilliantly done but there are things I wish I hadn’t ever seen and would rather not have had in my head.

The episode explaining how it started was sort of calmly relatably terrifying. I’m never giving up cash!

The rings

This.

Just how normal and very possible it was. Women are always at risk of our rights being rolled back. It's terrifying.

Not knowing what happened to Esther after she was last seen tied to a bed only escaping uterus harvesting by being pregnant after being raped by Warren

This. I didn't watch it for months after that. I eventually went back to it but it was so shocking and I wasn't prepared for it.

Someone mentioned when June was taken to see Hannah and then locked in the car, but also the scene that showed when she and Luke decided to run, and they're running through the woods and caught, and Hannah is taken. A real gut punch of a scene.

Series 2 was a very hard watch - partly because of the gruesome stuff but also because the flashbacks focused on the early days of Gilead whereas in series 1, I think the flashbacks were more focused on happier pre-Gilead days.

That people don't realise that the USA is actually headed that way.

A lot of it was hard to watch.. Like when Janine was pressured by a pro life Dr pretending to be acting in her favour.. Emily’s story; Eden’s story.. The ceremony scenes… Emily’s gay male colleague being hung on the wall…But I’m most disturbed by the trickled erosion of women’s rights at the beginning & June wondering in retrospect when should she have left? It feels like we’re living in those times now. I found the atmosphere of the whole show very menacing. Atwood was pictured not so long ago drinking coffee and on her cup she had written something like ‘it was a warning, not a manual’. Great show, although it irritated me when Elisabeth Moss directed the episodes and ended them with the camera on her face.

Agree

This. Always this. I feel shaken when I think about it.

The crane dragging the women up to hang as they desperately toed the ground.

So many that have already been mentioned. I watched the first season while on maternity leave. Would often end an episode just clutching my newborn and crying; postnatal hormones do not mix well with this show!

Me too!! I can remember being frozen to the spot on the sofa, both nap trapped by baby but also shaken by what I’d just watched!

I can’t recall specific moments from early seasons very well, but from the final seasons… the scene on the train with Serena and the baby where you realise the baby strapped to her is also at risk from the other women who want Serena’s blood, and the shower scene at Jezebel’s.

Those endless, endless close ups were the worst thing of a terrific programme

The bit when you realise it's not really fiction and when MA wrote the book, all those thing have, at some point, happened to women, and are still happening. Just look at what is going on in the US and Afghanistan.

I forced myself to watch all of it.
It was so distressing and the fact that Margaret Attwood stated that everything in it had happened in real life somewhere in the world made it even more disturbing.
How easily life can change.
We are seeing it daily in the news now 🥲

The rings.
The earlier episodes pre Gilead when June was complacent and Junes mother knew you couldn’t relax.

Watching America slide towards it

The gallows scene for me as well. Mind you I've never got thru that Kate Bush song without a tear or two anyway.

Clicked on the thread because I've just added this to my watch list.. Maybe not 😐

sometimes wish I hadn't watched it, there are some parts that stay in your head.