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I like this show but boy does it lean on the melodrama a lot. Add in all the graphic violence, replace the facism with zombies and you're practically in The Walking Dead territory. I'm going to keep watching because this season has been doing a good job building up the backstory, while also giving the characters a bit more depth but I wouldn't mind an episode that didn't hammer in some dramatic beat with music or act of graphic violence. I soured a bit on Moss after watching Top of the Lake S2 recently, so that's not helping things. Also if Offred is recaptured and we go backwards, I'm done. This is a good time to have her lying low among the common people, and give us some perspective on what's happening in the immediate world from a perspective other than the upper class. Anyone got any guesses where the 'colonies' are? I'm trying to think where the U.S. would nuke, then want to colonize that looks like where they are in the show.
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Apr 30, 2018 19:49
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Owlbear Camus posted:It wouldn't surprise me if it were a meaningless Sisyphean task and just a flimsy pretense to work undesirables to death. Seems like this is probably the case as we don't see them doing anything else that one might do to clean up the area; though I'm guessing what they're cleaning up is going to fall under some artistic license.
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Apr 30, 2018 22:29
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esperterra posted:Burst out laughing when I saw Clea Duvall. Of course she's the wife lmfao I think I feel about her how you felt about about Bledel. Almost twenty years later and I still just see her as the worst part of Carnivale. JUST MAKING CHILI posted:Alexis Bledel is definitely cleaning up radioactive waste, the containers they’re filling at the worksite were all marked radioactive. Probably somewhere in the Great Plains or west coast if I had to guess. Western U.S. was my guess too. We don't see them doing decontamination or anything other than shoveling but like I said before there's probably some creative license going on here.
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May 1, 2018 09:13
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I'll give the recapture two episodes before I say "gently caress you show". If she's back in the Waterford home and Season One status quo is returned by next episode, then I'll bump up my timeframe. PaybackJack fucked around with this message at 23:12 on May 2, 2018 |
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May 2, 2018 23:10
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I put off watching this episode for a while because I just wasn't sure I could care about Moss(and the viewer) getting tortured for an hour, and I wasn't. Every scene with Moss and Strahovski is just eyerolling. I don't know how many more episode I can take of these two having 45 second silently death staring each other. The hope I had with her running away was that she would realize that she couldn't actually leave because a) she has a kid still in the country she isn't willing to abandon and b) someone has to keep fighting the system from the inside, so we'd see her "get out" but then go back in. She'd lose the child but end up back in the Handmaid system because she's fertile but this time as someone with support, more actively trying to break down the system. Where we are now hasn't evolved her character in any meaningful way. If you watched the first episode then skipped to the end of the third you'd be fine. It's the worst of a show when it just runs in a circle for a few episodes and then continue on the main plot. I'm fine with episodes that do some world building too but this was framed as June reclaiming her identity...and then it's gone again. Big whoop. Also I agree with people here that the lower-middle class families not being broken up over fertility does lessen the distopic aspects of the show, though clearly they don't need a whole lot of pretense to break them up if they want to.
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May 13, 2018 23:18
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"Is it ok to shoot Serena?" is this show's version of "Is it ok to punch a Nazi?" In typical fashion they ramped it up to 11 and then made their position even more obvious by saying "Yes, and you should have shot Fred too." with the scenes where he kills the wife and later feels sexually assaults June. I'm starting to approach this show is almost like liberal torture porn; it's like Hostel or Saw but instead of watching prolonged, graphic, murder; we're watching extremist graphic conservative ideology. I actually liked this episode but really only for the promise that we might start seeing poo poo fall apart based on the ending.
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May 25, 2018 22:24
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CelestialScribe posted:Sorry, after 16 episodes of torture porn, I'm happy to have a traditional TV-style story. Funny you say it like that because I literally laughed at the woman being shot in the middle of their street as the "wake up call" for white America Serena to put her foot down and stop the overzealous It was like here's your moment of the week meant to remind us of an injustice we're facing in the real world that conservative America tries to tell you is justified. That it was justified in this show as being to root out terrorism wast the "also featuring" on the liberal torture porn Blu-ray case. I didn't mind the episodic nature of the episode so much, even though it did fall into the trap of trying to introduce things that are suddenly important like "we all need to know each other's name". I can almost forgive the suddenly lost love of Moira since the show is very clearly focused on June so you kind of want to make it all about her and then you get a second season so you need to start expanding on backstories and what not; but that is something they probably should have tried to write in earlier as being a bigger deal. Seriously, if this show even tries to turn Serena face. I'd stop watching immediately. I know if sort of happens in the book, but gently caress. I'd sooner see them try to turn Cersei Lannister and thank god they only teased that. Turning Nick would be fine; I'm actually betting that at some point he outs a bunch of people because someone finds out and convinces him that if he does so he and June can live happily ever after which then results in his getting executed. PaybackJack fucked around with this message at 19:26 on May 31, 2018 |
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May 31, 2018 19:24
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DasNeonLicht posted:I think the scene with the American fed (what exactly was his job?) was my favorite. See this kind of stuff was the real cowardice that I disliked in the premise of the show. By portraying Gilead as another place rather than as an actual U.S.A. it becomes easier to disassociate with it. Yeah, it's made up from the ashes of a coup that happened in the U.S. but this episode showed that they still want you to think of the U.S. as this place that wouldn't go for this poo poo. Let's ask ourselves right now, if all the crazy right-wing conservative incel nutjobs took over this country in a military coup, is there any loving chance they'd rename the country? gently caress no, they wouldn't. Liberals are not the ones who plaster the American flag over all things. I did like the episode overall, however the letters being the things that did real damage is just dumb though when you have living people constantly fleeing the country who are actually there to put a face on the tragedy. It's like, let's imagine that all these foreign refugees who come to our country were telling the same story about an oppressive regime ruining their country, would a pile of letters telling people how awful it is there suddenly make their story more believable? I think my favorite part of the episode was Waterford complaining about the protestors as the country "not being able to control their own people". Well played on the week of yet more "shut protestors up" bullshit. I can't wait to see how they write Moss' character out of not being offed(pun intended) after she gives birth. The best storyline would be that she's taken out back and shot but before that, gets a moment with Bledel's character to pass the torch and ask her to get out and take Moss' kid with her. Then next season being about Bledel's character trying to figure out how to do that. Nick is dead for sure though.
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Jun 14, 2018 18:33
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PostNouveau posted:Elisabeth Moss being a Scientologist is so very disappointing. Arguably been great for her career though because whoever is picking her roles and adjusting scripts for her is doing some 90s-2000 Julia Roberts level work.
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Jun 17, 2018 14:52
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tetrapyloctomy posted:The scene with I was sad they reeled it back in, I thought they were totally going to just have her resent June. I suppose given everything else in the episode they needed a hope spot. 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. 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 worry we're going to get even further into Game of Thrones territory with the antagonists becoming more of more comically evil to the point that nobody believes their character or cares about them.
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Jun 22, 2018 16:51
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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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I'll give this show a bit of credit for the Moria surrogacy flashback and not being completely hypocritical about female identity and motherhood. Which isn't to say this show doesn't have a ton of "look how great mothers and being a mother and having a baby is!" propaganda but it's typically a lot more "Oh there's one token friend who doesn't want a kid because of her career or free spirit...but it's totally because she hasn't met the right guy yet!" It's one of those things that Hollywood always tends to slant ridiculously right-wing on. Of course the character that rejects the idea of wanting to be a mother would be a lesbian but that's another matter. Either way, it's very believable to me that Serena would feel a tremendous inadequacy from being unable to have a child, but it's also a bit flimsy that her recourse to being unable to conceive is that she would go along with Fred's regressive plan or that she would agree to his plan in exchange for him getting her pregnant. If this show spent less time focusing on characters giving each other death stares, Moss making faces into the camera, and patting itself on the back for portraying another social issue in a dystopic way, we could actually have some background about the society that would make you feel the ramifications of the negative birthrate and might have given the Serena character some meaningful depth. Instead it's a line that we should feel is really motivating and powerful but in the context of what we've seen and the timeline of the show isn't really all that potent.
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Jun 28, 2018 19:39
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*whistle* Ok! Everyone out of the pool! It's 3:00! Time for the executions!
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Jul 5, 2018 21:48
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I gotta say I enjoyed that swerve. They built up that she was going to be the one that outs Nick and gets him killed with her religious naïveté but instead led to her own downfall(no pun intended). Was still surrounded by this show's typical melodrama and blunt imagery, but hey; I'll give them credit for a clever twist that I didn't see coming. Albeit a bit out of left field and very rushed.
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Jul 6, 2018 21:44
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The Lydia attack was kind of out of nowhere and dumb given that Emily was in a new home that was obviously not going to be so bad. The reveal of her commander makes sense but his whole arc should have been given more time throughout the season. The Martha network thing I can write off as "handmaid hosed poo poo up and commander is getting her out, let's also get this baby out!" Serena losing her finger was the dumbest thing. Like we literally already saw that your husband was going to beat you for reading and writing, what the hell did she expect this room of powerful, whose power she is challenging and defying are going to do. It didn't make me think of her as any more likable, just headstrong and oblivious. Letting the baby go was a good thing, but still within her wheelhouse of crazy so she doesn't get props for that. So June makes the choice that she debated making earlier in the season about leaving Hannah behind and this time goes through with it. It shouldn't end well for her but I'm pretty sure she has plot armor so I look forward to seeing her almost drown in a pool scene, almost get beaten to death by Waterford, and almost die from being raped by him too, until the show comes up with even more way for her to suffer a hideous fate worse than
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Jul 11, 2018 22:26
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Timeless Appeal posted:Legitimately, I think the hate for the finale is baffling. This wasn't the problem. Her staying is a perfectly fine decision for the character. The issue comes with them doing a bait and switch again. If Emily had just shown up, said she was leaving and June told her she had to stay for her daughter and shoved the baby into her arms, that would have been fine. Instead we got a dramatic escape sequence, with a redemption moment for Serena that nobody asked for, all to build up to a fake out with Emily dramatically screaming her name as the car drives away. It's the same weight that drags every other aspect of this show to the bottom of the swimming pool. It's too concerned with telling it's own self-indulgent victimization narrative and wallowing in melodrama than exploring the things that actually made the show critically acclaimed. The plot line that the women were going to organize into some sort of resistance movement(hinted at the end of season one with the uniform line?) is all happening offscreen or in cutaways, while 90% of episodes are Serena and June making passive aggressive comments and glaring at each other. This show has tons of promise in exploring society that's been created here and telling a compelling story but instead wastes most of it's time with Moss' face in the center of the screen as she runs the gamut of facial expressions. I didn't write this review but in reading their story on the Emmy's I decided to jump over and read this. Pretty much captures my opinion on the season. PaybackJack fucked around with this message at 17:01 on Jul 12, 2018 |
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Jul 12, 2018 16:52
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MeinPanzer posted:Also, who actually thought this could be a good loving idea? Listen up writers, you guys gotta make people like Serena otherwise nobody will buy her wine! edit: “layers of approachable white grapefruit and lemongrass,” Jesus Christ. MeinPanzer posted:There were a bunch of fires in the distance in one that broader shot. This, in combination with our Martha being in on the whole thing suggests to me that there was probably a lot of people getting smuggled out, or at least more than just June+Baby and Emily. PaybackJack fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Jul 12, 2018 |
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Jul 12, 2018 17:22
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Timeless Appeal posted:Hannah's father and godmother are already in Canada. June being in Canada doesn't do anything to help Hannah's chances. I would actually agree with this in the sense that she's not going to be able to raise an army just to go rescue her daughter. As we've seen from Moria and her husband's story, the Canadian government wasn't even formally protesting them until just recently and the best they were doing was offering aid/amensty. At least in Gilead and in the Waterford home she has access to the Commander who can in turn access her daughter. Given the limited information that the refugees and Canadian government have on the situation there, attempting to locate her after the fact would probably prove impossible; let alone attempting to actually get back into Gilead to rescue her. veni veni veni posted:I don't really agree with that. It opens up more potential resources to get her back including a larger group of people to work with and a possibly sympathetic government. What is she going to do by staying in Gilead? Try to grab her and run though the forest? Presumably she'd rely on the same network of Marthas that she just used to get Holly/Nichole out.
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Jul 12, 2018 21:51
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