In Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the U.S. has been replaced by the Republic of Gilead, a cruel, misogynist, brutally oppressive theocracy. Even that terrifying premise hasn’t stopped the show from shocking audiences week after week. Here are some of the most shocking events in the series so far.
The story of how Gilead came to be is told in flashbacks, and in one we see June (Elizabeth Moss) and Moira (Samira Wiley) trying to get coffee after a run. But June’s credit card won’t work, and they find out that every woman’s bank account has been frozen.
In another flashback, June is fired from her job — in fact, all of the women in her office are fired, simply for being women, a mandate enforced by heavily armed soldiers.
Near the end of Episode 1, the handmaids are summoned to witness a rapist being punished. The sentence is death and, in a process designed to make the enslaved women complicit in their own oppression, handmaids are required to do the deed – an act known in Gilead as “particicution.”
At the Red Center, women conscripted to be handmaids are brutally indoctrinated. We quickly learn how brutally when Janine (Madeline Brewer) gets her eye taken out for back-talking her captors.
An unexplained drop in fertility and healthy births destabilized the U.S. even before the revolt that created Gilead. Demonstrating this, in one flashback a woman tries to steal June’s newborn daughter, Hannah (Jordana Blake), while they were still in the hospital.
Episode 3 ends with one of the season’s most horrifying moments — after Ofglen (Alexis Bledel) has been outed as a “gender traitor” (a lesbian), she’s punished with female genital mutilation.
The “ceremonies” — Gilead’s forced, regulated rape of handmaids every month – is truly horrifying, and extremely difficult to watch onscreen.
In Episode 6 we’re led to believe that the Mexican Ambassador — a woman — is skeptical of Gilead and sympathetic to the handmaids’ plight. But in a cruel twist, we learn she’s only there to secure a trade deal to bring handmaids to Mexico.
It’s a shock when The Commander (Joseph Fiennes) takes June to the illegal club Jezebel’s. Staffed by sex slaves, the sex, drugs and booze keep Gilead’s most powerful men happy despite the repressive, brutal theocracy they forced on everyone else.
In flashbacks we learn Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski), The Commander’s wife, was once an author and activist who helped create the nightmare that is Gilead – which ironically robbed her of all her rights.
Luke (O-T Fagbenle) isn’t dead, and we were just as shocked to find this out as June was. Episode 7, “The Other Side,” showed Luke’s side of the story, and whether or not he and June will reconnect is one of our biggest questions for the finale.
June was stunned to learn in Episode 8 that Moira is alive, and a sex slave at Jezebel’s, as Janine previously told her Moira was dead. Moira has since escaped Jezebel’s and seems ready to join the resistance.
