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PaybackJack posted:I don't really know how many legs the show has if June escapes to Canada or gets reassigned. I'm already feeling like it's going to be a giant cop-out to have June survive and continue on given the way in which they're sort of wrapping up her various arcs while building up Emily. I agree, I'm hoping we get 4 seasons total, though I think they could easily wrap things up in the next season. Anything longer than that and they're either going to lose their way by having too many new characters or we'll get to the point that the main cast has just gone through so much it all loses it's punch. There's only so many times I'm willing to watch June get tortured, try to escape, fail and be tortured some more. At some point the good guys have to start winning.
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Jun 22, 2018 21:37
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Cat Army 
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Tiggum posted:If June is still with the Waterfords by the end of this season I'm not going to watch the next one, because it's already dragging and they need to shake up the status quo, not find every possible excuse to return to it. This is my feeling exactly. I waited to start with this season until it was halfway through and even then almost didn't keep watching. The premise is getting stale, and I might be willing to watch another show with great acting if the plot meanders but this show is too draining to watch while waiting for things to pick up. The plot needs to move forward in unpredictable and captivating ways, and with three more episodes left in the season I hope they really start to shake things up.
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Jun 23, 2018 00:28
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This is one of the few shows I'd love a prequel season or two out of.
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Jun 23, 2018 00:31
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Matt Zerella posted:This is one of the few shows I'd love a prequel season or two out of. Ooo yeah Fred and Serena prequel season like Spartacus did with the lotus owners when the star got cancer.
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Jun 23, 2018 00:46
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JazzFlight posted:Part of me wants June to contact and be saved by the Mayday resistance people and become an underground freedom fighter, but that might veer too close to an action-packed "Man in the High Castle" style that doesn't match up with the first two seasons of this show. Like, it would definitely become a less powerful show, but I'd love every minute if she's blowing up/sniping commanders and freeing handmaids. I'd imagine they'd get plenty of mileage out of killing Waterford, and having Serena holding Hannah hostage in exchange for the baby. Maybe the season could focus on the other stolen children as well. Presumably at some point they would cover Emily and Nick in Gilead (attempting to free the remaining children, handmaidens, and marthas during the run up to war with Canada?) There seems to be plenty more to do in Gilead without June becoming Carrie Matheson and tracking rogue Gilead commanders to Venezuela post-revolution.
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Jun 23, 2018 02:13
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Yeah, the statement that they had material to go ten seasons is ... distressing, almost. That's way too much Gilead for me. There's only so much emotional beatdown I can take in. Ann Dowd is freaking amazing, by the way. The "Were you ever a godmother?" scene did a phenomenal job of cracking through her terrible, awful Gilead-era persona to show the humanity that once was there. "It wasn't my fault" was bone-chilling, though. I'm not sure if I want to know what happened or not.
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Jun 23, 2018 18:09
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Ann Dowd is killing it. She took Aunt Lydia from early 20th century schoolteacher monster to the most sympathetic Other in the show. Like how we sit here giggling a bit over Serena not liking the bed she made for herself, it's more tragic to see Lydia more deeply question her values and what society demands of her girls. Dowd's face does better acting than most of Hollywood.
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Jun 23, 2018 20:35
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Ann Dowd is a bloody treasure.
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Jun 23, 2018 20:42
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Agree, I'd love to see an episode devoted to just following Aunt Lydia around which she does her regular duties. Make it a whole series and include flashbacks of her life before and being indoctrinated into the Sons. That would be great.
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Jun 23, 2018 21:58
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esperterra posted:Ann Dowd is a bloody treasure. I hadn't seen her until The Leftovers but now I'm so glad whenever I see her pop up. She's an incredible actor and I think we deserve an Aunt Lydia background episode.
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Jun 23, 2018 22:34
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I don't know, I think that kind of fan service really cheapens this show. We're already complaining about the ten seasons thing. It's like the above poster said, there's the curiosity at what she meant by the death not being her fault. That sentiment loses a lot of weight if it gets explained.
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Jun 23, 2018 22:48
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I agree that the unknown aspects of Aunt Lydias character, combined with Dowds talent is what makes it work so well. I don't know if a detailed backstory would improve on it at all. Anyone who'd like to see more of Dowd should watch the Leftovers. She does a great job there as well, along with most of the other cast and it's a wonderful and sad show.
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Jun 23, 2018 23:33
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Did anyone else see Anne Dowd in Hereditary and think "ohhh Aunt Lydia is such a nice lady in this. So refereshing..." ? 
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Jun 23, 2018 23:49
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Started out hating the season because June very quickly just ended up back where she was last season, started thinking things might pick up, then got let down in the end when the big emotional finale was a rape scene. The show should have ended at season 1 or this season should have had at least some real setback for the villains- instead they just triple down on the evil and the attempts to make the audience feel any empathy for Serena were just a huge embarrassing failure. The acting remains stellar with the exception of Nick but the show has already gone off the rails for me. My wife bailed as soon as June was recaptured and I should have too.
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Jun 24, 2018 03:09
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Unzip and Attack posted:Started out hating the season because June very quickly just ended up back where she was last season, started thinking things might pick up, then got let down in the end when the big emotional finale was a rape scene.
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Jun 24, 2018 03:23
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PaybackJack posted:That was much more effective that this week's comically evil torture porn moment, in having the Waterford's hate gently caress their handmaid to teach her a lesson. I don't think it would be a stretch to call it rape but Gileadean society probably would believe the old wives tale that you can use sex to induce labor. Though I think the implication here is that Serena and the Commander knew it was "wrong" in this instance, that there's actually a difference between this 'Ceremony' and any of the other ones is pretty flimsy. Thinking about whether forced sex with a pregnant handmaiden would be looked down upon in Gilead feels like chasing shadows. Gilead and its use of handmaidens is primarily to enforce that women are property that exist only for to serve the will and pleasures of men. If they were truly worried about producing children there are hundreds of ways to do that they are purposefully avoiding in favor of comfort women because that is all secondary to their ideals of the superiority of men and their absolute dominance over women. Knight fucked around with this message at 08:46 on Jun 24, 2018 |
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Jun 24, 2018 08:43
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That one guy had his arm cut off for having sex with Jeanine outside of the ceremony. I’m sure something similar might happen with a Martha.
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Jun 24, 2018 18:06
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Knight posted:I'm pretty sure in Gilead the only "rape" that exists is when someone has sex with a woman they aren't married to or don't own. Fred could violently rape his wife, his maid, or his handmaiden. (Saying that feels redundant because any intercourse with handmaidens is obviously rape.) That might be considered unpleasant or unsavory but it will be accepted, just as random acts of violence towards handmaidens is accepted, and the maid acknowledges that if the guard decided to sexually assault her it would also be accepted. Until 1993 it was perfectly legal to rape your wife since she consented when she married you. Gilead wouldn't give two flying fucks about the Waterfords raping their property.
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Jun 24, 2018 21:11
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No, they would, but not for the rape aspect of it. Every indicator we have about Gilead is that sex is a highly controlled thing, even with Jezebels. It's silly to go 'nah they'd be totally down with raping the maids' because a, they probably wouldn't consider it rape, but also because b, whether it's rape or not is not the part that gets your hand cut the gently caress off.
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Jun 25, 2018 04:53
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Is Hulu sort of stuttering for anyone else? It'll like skip a second randomly every now and then, and bounces between low and hi res, which is super annoying for visually intense shows like this or Westworld. I'm using the PS4 app, fwiw, and every other streaming service is fine.
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Jun 25, 2018 04:54
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the crazy hypocrisy of fred raping june but nick loving his child-wife through a sheet with a hole in it
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Jun 25, 2018 06:07
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Doorknob Slobber posted:the crazy hypocrisy of fred raping june but nick loving his child-wife through a sheet with a hole in it I don't buy that hole in the sheet thing. If such a thing existed in Gilead, surely the wives would insist that it was used on the handmaids during the ceremony.
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Jun 25, 2018 15:37
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BattyKiara posted:I don't buy that hole in the sheet thing. If such a thing existed in Gilead, surely the wives would insist that it was used on the handmaids during the ceremony. They see the handmaids more as livestock. Eden is still a wife, albeit a lower ranking one, she gets considerations the handmaids don't.
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Jun 25, 2018 15:40
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Yeah they can be 100% sure that the handmaids aren't enjoying the experience; additional measures probably aren't necessary.
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Jun 25, 2018 15:45
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Doorknob Slobber posted:the crazy hypocrisy of fred raping june but nick loving his child-wife through a sheet with a hole in it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRNlxBuB9jM
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Jun 25, 2018 17:17
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BattyKiara posted:I don't buy that hole in the sheet thing. If such a thing existed in Gilead, surely the wives would insist that it was used on the handmaids during the ceremony. IIRC, that's an invention of the show, basically stolen from certain sects of Orthodox Jews, and in that sense I think it's a fuckup, but it's not entirely contradictory for how the ceremony is supposed to work. In the book, Atwood gets a bit more into the psychology of it, and IIRC the positioning is a little bit more like the handmaid is laying on top of the wife, and is really supposed to be much more of a direct surrogate. Like, the dude is supposed to be having a boner for his wife, and his Handmaid is supposed to be completely psychologically subsumed into her. The whole pretense is that the handmaid isn't even supposed to be "there" per se. It's been a while since I last read the book, but the whole point of it is that the wife and handmaid are really supposed to be "one flesh", possibly as a commentary on how hosed up the theology of Communion and the various philosophies of marriage, "headship", and all that crap are. Or, I guess I should say, the psychology behind the theology. I do think it's stupid that they put the sheet in, because it's actually from a very different theological and cultural stream and makes zero sense in hosed up neo-Calvinism when we look at the greater whole. I'm not trying to say it's psychologically healthy in Judaism, just that there's a very different culture around modesty, sacredness, and separation of the sexes than in Gilead, and it's of a piece with that but makes zero sense in Gilead, especially since they don't even have the excuse of it being cultural detritus and there being a large ethnic/tribal component to the religion that makes tradition incredibly paramount. Having that sheet in a culture where Eden can be alone with adult, unrelated men and just have her hair out in public is ridiculous, not even as an indicator of blatant hypocrisy and empty piety but because it just flat out makes no drat sense, and feels vaguely disrespectful of the real world cultures that have traditions like that, and I say that as someone who really hates that part of Orthodox culture. Like, the one criticism I have of Atwood's writing in general, and the show takes it to extremes, is that it's almost like the anti-thesis of Dworkin's "Right-Wing Women". There's zero nuance and zero attempt at real empathy for the women on the other side when it's not direct identification. It's all 100% just what a Nice Outraged Liberal "Spiritual But Not Religious" Culturally Christian White Lady finds shocking or puzzling or alien about those weird, backward right-wing religious people. Atwood at least is good at empathizing with how oppressive it feels, but in the show it's almost weirdly plastic. That attitude kind of infects the whole show, which I think is why so many of the "humanize Serena" moments fall flat and are creepy and yet you have vacuous idiots in Vanity Fair calling her "the most intriguing character of the show" and saying the scene of June's rape was "the most brutal of the series: they don't really know how to empathize and have an understanding of the motivations of the villains, while still actually understanding the horror of it all. The writers fail drastically at understanding this stuff in a systematic way, and can't really recreate anything like the internal worldview of these people, and the show is a lot poorer for it. They can only empathize with Serena by having sympathy with her, which feels gross to anyone remotely normal, and it also makes her totally ridiculous and over the top as a villain. She's only slightly less so than Fred, not so much because of the difference in performances (Fiennes is great too!), but because I think the writers have basically no window of cognitive empathy on Fred at all, whereas what they have on Serena is a funhouse mirror reflecting some parts of their own psychology. There was an interview with the writer for the last episode that made me spit bullets, and I feel like the sheet bullshit is a perfect illustration of the mindset behind it. HELLO LADIES fucked around with this message at 23:01 on Jun 25, 2018 |
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Jun 25, 2018 18:01
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Of course if the show gave Nick an ounce of sense they would've just had him explain to the kid that she's half his age and he's uncomfortable with that rather than inventing some dissonant "traditional" method of having sex with a child bride, but no, open communication might accidentally give them some sort of functioning companionate relationship and we can't have that.
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Jun 25, 2018 22:09
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Nick being cruel to the girl for no reason whatsoever is so loving dumb. He's already committing numerous treasonous acts that would result in him being executed- better treat this innocent girl like poo poo and make her super suspicious of him!
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Jun 25, 2018 23:34
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Nick is garbage and I want him to go too.
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Jun 25, 2018 23:44
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The guy who plays Nick is a bad actor too. Unless his character is on quaaludes or something? Did I miss that?
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Jun 26, 2018 05:21
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I would like a spin off of Agent Hedonism destroying Gilead by romancing barren housefraus please.
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Jun 26, 2018 16:12
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Just finished watching the first episode and a lot of the setup feels hard to believe. So there was this enourmous cutural change in the span of five or so years? Seems like it would be more likely something that would take 50 years.
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Jun 26, 2018 21:09
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Never question what can be accomplished with nukes and 4chan users.
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Jun 26, 2018 21:25
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MOVIE MAJICK posted:Just finished watching the first episode and a lot of the setup feels hard to believe. So there was this enourmous cutural change in the span of five or so years? Seems like it would be more likely something that would take 50 years. Just go with it and let yourself buy in. Headcanon that it's the year 2155 or whatever if it helps. Personally I think something not unlike Gilead could come about in another decade or two with radical upheavals to help it along-- but I think a nascent American theocratic state would be more "Southern Baptist" in character.
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Jun 26, 2018 21:43
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MOVIE MAJICK posted:Just finished watching the first episode and a lot of the setup feels hard to believe. So there was this enourmous cutural change in the span of five or so years? Seems like it would be more likely something that would take 50 years. There is a lot of historical precedent for this. German public society was almost unrecognizable after only 6 years of Nazi rule. Soviet public life experienced even more dramatic changes in a very short period. So did China under Mao. Post-revolution Iran is a good example for a religious totalitarian society going through this.
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Jun 26, 2018 22:03
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Propaganda Machine posted:Never question what can be accomplished with nukes and 4chan users. 
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Jun 26, 2018 22:31
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MOVIE MAJICK posted:Just finished watching the first episode and a lot of the setup feels hard to believe. So there was this enourmous cutural change in the span of five or so years? Seems like it would be more likely something that would take 50 years. This was modeled after what happened in Iran I suggest you read up on some history.
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Jun 26, 2018 23:51
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socialsecurity posted:This was modeled after what happened in Iran I suggest you read up on some history. In Iran there hadn't been over a century of traditions and values that diametrically oppose this sort of social structure. I mean, a brand new set of religious and social rituals don't just appear in the span of a couple years from nowhere - brand new customary greetings, legal proceedings, ranks.
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Jun 27, 2018 00:04
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MOVIE MAJICK posted:In Iran there hadn't been over a century of traditions and values that diametrically oppose this sort of social structure. I mean, a brand new set of religious and social rituals don't just appear in the span of a couple years from nowhere - brand new customary greetings, legal proceedings, ranks. There's a whole lot of discussion we could have about this but I suggest you read into communist involvement in the Middle East and caucus's pre ww2. You know all those old pics they show of people in the Middle East looking all modern and stuff? A big reason for that was secular communist influence on the regional govts.
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Jun 27, 2018 00:08
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And Iran was a particularly potent example of a modern society. Check out Persepolis for a lighter but very informative overview.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:04
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