Becks

Okay, with the info here I think I've partially figured out how it is I'm not seeing the same season 22 episodes as other people. I watch the show via the Nat Geo Wild site. There, S22 E1 is listed as being 'Purranormal Activity', with an airdate of 1.07.23. S22 E2 is 'The Biggest Little Fair', with an airdate of 1.14.23. Both are recycled footage episodes, not new content. After reading everyone's posts I checked Xfinity Stream for S22 E1 & S22 E2, and the titles are different: 'Mission Impawssible' for E1 and 'Oh, You Paw Thing' for E2. The two from the Nat Geo site are listed under 'Deja Moo!', with no episode numbers. So, whoever runs the Nat Geo Wild site has screwed up and posted the wrong episodes for the new season...and apparently no one has noticed. Might need to shoot them an email.

So does anyone know what's going on with the new season? Both the first and second episodes so far have consisted of recycled footage from previous shows (hello, Dr. Emily!) despite being promoted as 'all new' episodes of the new season. I saw discussion earlier in the thread about how some of these repackaged episodes aren't given season/episode numbers, but these two episodes are clearly named as S22 E1 and S22 E2 on the Nat Geo Wild site. It makes me wonder if something is wrong behind the scenes. (I'm relieved to find a place where people are actually discussing this show, btw! It's so under the radar that it's hard to find much info about it.)

It felt very oogy to learn that a particular handmaid who has proven to be a successful 'breeder' will be sought after by other high-ranking families, to the point of bribery. I mean, it makes perfect sense, but I never thought about it before. Just more objectification and dehumanization. With baked goods. Even as Fred's creepery continues to ascend (getting turned on by the milk), his cognitive dissonance seems to be going off the charts - first his comment to Serena last episode about showing June kindness shortly after brutally raping her, now with talking about somebody else's 'selfish lust'. Here, Fred, have a big bowl of irony. You need it, trust me. How did I know that we were going to get a scene at some point of Serena attempting to nurse the baby? I guess that was inevitable the minute they had her retcon her own reasoning for why she's done everything she's done. Sigh. Loved Rita ratting out Serena to June in the kitchen (she changes the baby's outfits 10 times a day!). I like it when they show camaraderie. I think the Jane Eyre vibe was very deliberate - from Whitford's whole look (the neckwear suggesting 19th century attire) to the fact that he was somewhat reminiscent of George C. Scott (who once played Rochester), the abrupt, uncomfortable questioning of Emily, the look of the house and how it was lit, the 'crazy' wife wandering around in her nightgown... I think Yvonne Strahovski's performance is award-worthy and I agree that Serena is complex. But whatever her complexity, it doesn't make my feelings for the character complex or conflicted. When I think of the suffering she has helped to create and prop up and personally inflict, I don't care. Her bad karma is through the roof and I am Team Karma. With you. I mean, objectively, I was horrified at such a brutal death for a young girl who was only young and lonely and foolish. But Eden/Isaac felt underdeveloped to me, and Isaac a poor choice for a sympathetic Romeo, frankly - his bashing Janine across the face pretty much precluded that for me. The whole arc was underwritten, and we have been exposed to so much brutality on this show, it didn't wreck me like I expect they intended. I remember spoilers saying this episode would blow episode 10 out of the water in terms of devastation - for me, it wasn't even close. But I do find relief in the fact that we no longer need to speculate about who was in the pool.

I am in the same boat - I like O-T as an actor and he's interesting offscreen as well, but I just find Luke totally bland and his relationship with June not all that engaging. I got such a Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest vibe from that "OFFRED!". Which is fitting, since Faye was the OG Serena Joy... I place my cursor at the beginning of the next line, just below the quote box, and then hit the backspace key twice. It seems to work.

This is so nitpicky, and I know my own grammar is not perfect by any means - but then, I'm not supposed to be a book editor, either. When June was trying to convince Hannah to go to school and she said 'Daddy and I' (we) when it should have been 'Daddy and me' (us), I could feel the smoke coming out of my ears. I know, I know - get a grip. But still. 'Forbidden garages of self-loathing'. Snerk. More and more it feels like this is what the writers do - conceive of individual scenes and then attempt to weave the narrative around them, rather than creating scenes that exist to serve and maintain the narrative. They could get away with it occasionally - what show doesn't do that from time to time? - but it seems to be the rule, not the exception here. It was hugely apparent this episode, which was beautifully acted and shot, but ultimately was mostly filler, and momentum-killing filler at that. The stakes felt artificial - June was not going to escape (yet, at least), die in childbirth, get eaten by a wolf, shoot either of the Waterfucks. About the only thing that really felt up in the air was whether the baby would be okay. It was gorgeous awards-bait, but as we approach the end of the season, it felt like wasted opportunity. I couldn't with the black wolf of protection (™AnswersWanted). Really, show? Struggling here with the depiction of Fred...first he had an utterly uncharacteristic attack of conscience regarding his latest rape of June, to such an extent that he risked letting her visit Hannah, at least according to the writers (don't you have to have a conscience in order to suffer an attack of it?). Then in this episode, in his throwdown with Serena, he actually sounded bewildered and hurt when he said 'Nick wouldn't be disloyal', like the concept had never entered his mind before. He knows Nick fathered 'his' baby, FFS! Are we supposed to believe that Fred has this untapped store of naivete within? Nevertheless, for me, the best part of the episode was Fred and Serena letting it rip and at last beginning to cannibalize each other. The love is well and truly gone, y'all. After all that's come before, there was something quite satisfying about them letting it out and turning their venom on each other. Yes, this - and using that which feminism had won for her to do so. And I really hope that her claim that it was all about a baby for her is just her own self-delusion and not an attempt at retcon by the show itself. It feels regressive to boil everything down to her desire for a baby, when the truth is a lot more complex, and less stereotypical. I was also pleased with the more realistic birth scene...until they had her immediately turn over and pull up the blanket. Uh...AFTERBIRTH. You're not done yet, June. Not that we wanted an extended scene of it or anything, but some indication that the birth was not over yet would have been nice, considering the realism of what had come before. I did appreciate Moira's attempt to cut the tension in the flashback ('...and she YouTubed it!') and the 'cameo' by you-know-who. Elisabeth Moss was amazing as usual, even though I was keenly aware the whole time that I was watching something specifically crafted to win her more awards. I think I would have appreciated an episode like this one a bit more if we hadn't been struggling all season with getting things to hang together cohesively, and for real forward momentum.

PREACH. In the script for the pilot, Nick's age is given as 26. Not sure how much time has passed between the first episode and this one, but I would guess he is probably at least 27 now, with 30 still a few years away. I very much think you're onto something here. Many of those scenes are so well-executed, it's easy and perfectly understandable that it can take a while for it to click that things are not hanging together. But it's becoming undeniable now that a number of the things we thought were really going to matter are probably going to prove to be just scenes - meant, apparently, for short-term effect and not long-term plotting. I'm with you - I rarely pay attention to the behind the scenes stuff, because in the end, the show has to stand on its own and convey its intentions through the screen, without the writers talking us through it, though I do understand why people enjoy mulling all that information over. There will always be varying interpretations of any episode by viewers, and that's part of the fun of engaging in discussion with others who watch. But when there's such a divide between the writers' intentions and the way an episode is taken by a significant number of those watching, as seems to be the case with this one, then the writers have to examine why their intentions weren't conveyed as effectively as they'd believed. As you say - it's on them.

Yes, exactly. The writers are having the characters do incredibly sloppy, dumbass things for plot purposes/short-term satisfaction moments that do not square up with what we know of their intelligence and what they've learned from their time under these conditions. I mean, I get that June had just been through the fake labor and was not at her best. I'm glad she's still got enough inner oomph to want to pull Serena's tail, but come on. Same thing with confirming for Fred that he is not the baby's father in a moment of spite. The brain, let's use it, please. As I watch I'm always asking myself, 'Would this be different if...?'. I can't help thinking that as well-meaning as Miller is, there are subtleties that are missing, aspects that are going unexplored, and emphasis that is being misplaced because a man is the captain of the ship on a very female story. See what I wrote above. No woman watching this show needs that message that Miller felt he should to deliver to us. We KNOW. We walk around in these female bodies every day. Who was that reminder for, really? This. I definitely did not get that Fred and Serena were just so shocked by June's fighting back - both of them knew that this wasn't just another ceremony. Underpinning the whole thing was anger - it was clear just from Fred's roughness that he was working out the lust that had been frustrated all season, and his fury at her for the humiliation of the false labor and the confirmation that he wasn't the baby's father. Serena's partial motivation for even suggesting it was her anger at June for the false labor and I don't buy that Fred was swimming in guilt at the end - why? This man has no functioning moral compass. I'm certainly finding myself more interested in Nick's dilemmas than Luke's, for example...but it has been my experience with TV shows based on books by female writers with a female lead that male showrunners, consciously or not, will frequently glom onto a secondary male character and build him up, emphasizing him in a way that isn't done in the source material. Do they need that male character as a way 'in' to the story for themselves? IDK. But it happens a lot.

I absolutely can't get over Fred's 'if you had only shown that girl one ounce of kindness...' from the promo. Truly, WTF? Dude is just bananas.

Well...that happened. And I wish I could unsee it - it was just as brutal as we'd been warned. What a horror show Fred and Serena are - and SJ sitting there on the bed with tears in her eyes from the start, as if she even had the right to cry over what she was about to do. The only positive I can pull from it is that the notion that Serena can be redeemed is now DEAD, and the number of people who twist themselves into pretzels in order to downplay her role in bringing about Gilead will hopefully drop. I still feel there was no need for the show to go there, and continue to question whether it would have been done with a female showrunner in charge - but there it is. I also think that Emily's sweet, furtive revenge was intended at least partly to help the bitter taste of the June rape go down...but I'll take it in any case. (And BTW, the birthing ceremony for Serena was truly grotesque - not that it wasn't when we'd seen it before, but somehow this time it felt abhorrent rather than just bizarre. I just wanted to jump in there and scream, 'You're NOT having a baby, you nut!') There were a lot of WTF moments for me this episode - including Nick with his hand intimately low on June's back in front of EVERYBODY; June's unabashed, ill-judged smugness with on-the-edge Serena when they were talking about the false labor; the fact that nobody in or around the perimeter of the Waterford house seems to have heard all the commotion during the rape (remember, this house is dead silent at night - you can hear somebody walking down the hall, but nobody heard June screaming?); and June confirming absolutely for Fred that her baby isn't his. Because at that moment, for all she knows, the child is going to be raised by Fred and Serena, so maybe it's not a good idea to remove any privately-held hope Fred may have had? I was really frustrated that during his talk with Eden, Nick had a glaringly perfect opening to tell her exactly what his issue is with her (aside from being in love with June) - that he's freaked out by her age, and that this whole thing has been difficult for him too. Just a few words could have bought him some slack from her. Sigh. The bit about the Commander who was promoted to his rank due to his wife's pregnancy feels like something that we should file away for later. What truly broke my heart about the June/Hannah reunion - other than the parallels with current events - was June's Herculean effort to stay calm and keep Hannah the same, telling her to do things, like embrace her 'new parents', that we knew were destroying her to say. She slipped back into mom mode just like that. This season has belonged to Yvonne Strahovski acting-wise, but Elisabeth Moss slew here - it was a sharp reminder of why she won practically every award there is for the first season. She showed us both what Hannah was seeing and what June was really feeling inside, all at once.

Yes, this was the impression I got with the flirting - maybe it was premeditated as part of his whole spy schtick, but I did feel that there ended up being some chemistry and he did genuinely see her as a desirable woman (perhaps even despite himself, given his disdain for Gilead). I would not be surprised if something came of it - there were bits of possible foreshadowing throughout their conversation.

To me, it's a mixture of both - the colors/fabrics of the 1950s, with that overall beautifully finished look of the era (matching/complementary heels, gloves, cape, headband) combined with the plain severity of a strict religious code - no makeup or cosmetic adornment, hair scraped back to within an inch of its life (absolutely no flowing tresses up in here), clothing very modest and unrevealing. Yes, Chinese foot-binding occurred to me too. And like your anecdote about the effect of high heels on a woman's body and walk, the appeal of the foot-binding was not only that it was considered a mark of beauty (and wealth/status), but the mincing gait it created - a woman was only capable of tiny, short 'feminine' steps as she walked, no striding purposefully or anything like that (that is, when she was actually capable of walking at all, which some weren't). Forget about running. And surely the only reason we're still subjugating ourselves to high heels is because they look good. It certainly isn't because they feel good, or at least I've never owned a pair that did after more than an hour or two. So for them to be the main style of acceptable footwear for the Wives speaks volumes to me. I remember a conversation here from last season in which we observed that the Handmaids' dresses are awfully sexy for Gilead - besides the evocative color, they're quite form-fitting, with a wide neck that shows plenty of upper chest and back. It's not what I personally pictured from the book (always thought the dresses would be more sack-like, similar to those of the Marthas) and it certainly not what one would expect from a theocracy so concerned with controlling sexuality. And yet...there they are.

There's probably something of the June Cleaver ideal about it, as well as it being sort of a class marker (compare and contrast with the handmaids' dumpy boots). But also - as a woman who detests heels and is appalled at how they keep getting absurdly, ever more painfully high - I always say that a woman who struggles to walk in her shoes, much less run if she needs to, is right where they want her: hobbled.

That is the question I've been wrestling with all season, especially in the earlier going with the torture porny elements that were included. As the world worsens around us, I've wrestled with how much actual entertainment I'm finding in this show, with its relentless darkness. I've always been someone who's capable of enjoying the dark, so to speak, but the brutal rape of a nine-months-pregnant woman, who has already had to endure God knows how many rapes for years now, is just...why does this particular thing need to happen? How is it entertainment to lay waste to this woman like this? I'm a GOT fan as well, I can handle the rough stuff. But I just don't understand why this particular writing choice needs to occur, other than for shock value. 'Ooh, you thought our main character had plot armor - look what we'll do to her!'. Would this be happening with a female showrunner? I don't know, but I desperately wish they weren't going there. And thank the spoiler gods that we can be prepared for it, because I would NOT want to go into this episode blind.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who was underwhelmed by Luke's confrontation with Fred. It should have been epic and it just wasn't. I like the actor who plays Luke but the character himself is just such a blah to me compared to his more vivid wife. The show seems to increasingly be pushing the idea that Luke and June are TruLuv4Eva and that their reunion is everything, and I just can't get invested. I find Nick and June more interesting together simply because of their circumstances, but I think that possibility has died with this episode. It would be more interesting, and more realistic to me if June and Luke reunited and she found she couldn't return to the relationship because she has changed too much, been through too much. The only way I can really get behind the two of them is that it's something June wants, and because I care about her character I want her to have it if that's how she feels. But for its own sake, I don't care. I don't know whether to blame some of Nick's issues on Max Minghella's acting or the direction that he's receiving. But I agree that the choice to have him present near-relentless stoicism seems to have kept many in the audience at arm's length from the character, and it's too bad. He conveyed genuine sorrow, tenderness and resignation in that scene with June, but it sorta got buried underneath her reactions. The sloppiness in the writing is becoming an increasingly prevalent, and troubling, issue - it's definitely getting worse over time. If you're a writer who is telling a story set in a fantasy or speculative world, you're asking your audience to suspend an extra level of disbelief than is needed for a story set in this modern world. You have to be VERY organized with world-building for stories like this, because little things that don't make sense or need explanation stand out more, breaking the wall, and dragging the viewer out of the story. It can't be done by the seat of your pants as they currently seem to be doing. You don't want people missing important interactions, scenes, details, etc because they're stuck on 'But I thought...' and 'How did they...?' . And there really is no excuse for this kind of crap from the writers, because as we've been told, they'd been hoping and planning to go beyond the novel even before the second season was a sure thing. They are literally getting paid to sort this stuff out, and a lot of it should have long since been delineated and made clear in their own minds so that they can convey it to us viewers. If we reach a point where we can't rely upon most of the canon from the first season, I'm out. And the saddest thing to me is that in the moment, she was completely - and understandably - oblivious to what was going on with him. He was bleeding inwardly, and it was pretty well invisible to her. 'Holly Hobby Duggar' - YES!!! To me, though, what put it over the top for the kid was Serena's headgear and long gloves. Disney princesses got their headgear and gloves - so beautiful, regal blonde lady + cape + HEADGEAR + GLOVES = princess. She was putting it in the only context she had, I guess...?

I have a feeling Hot Smoker Guy will return. Am I the only one who thinks there was some chemistry there? Re: Nick, during his conversation with June, I got a feeling throughout of goodbye - the thoughtful gazing out the window as he spoke, and the lingering kiss on the cheek. June was so caught up in the news he'd given her that everything about his body language and his tone seems to have whizzed right by her...but I really got a sense that having met Luke, and watched June's reaction to what he had to tell her, Nick is resigning himself to the idea that June would probably pick Luke over him, and he's giving up on the idea of that family he'd hoped for with her, despite his love. And that could mean anything when it comes to what he'd be willing to do, now that his hope is leaving him. I know he's a character that draws mixed responses from people, but I'd be sad to see him go too. Plus if he were to die, it would absolve June of having to actually choose between him and Luke (or neither) and I was hoping they wouldn't cop out on that by killing someone. I am not a fan of the Serena Joy redemption arc, as I've expressed before, but I did think that her scenes in Canada were excellent - the struggle and humiliation of her interaction with professional woman Genevieve, and the elevator interaction with the woman and her daughter. Yvonne Strahovski nailed everything even more effectively than usual. Also loved yet more intersection with our current reality and the #MeToo movement: 'We believe the women.' YES.