channelling

Warning: contains spoilers for The Handmaid’s Tale season 4 episode 8: Testimony. With June out of Gilead, the premise of The Handmaid’s Tale has shifted. A drama about resistance and endurance has become a drama about recovery and survivorhood, and those new themes are being treated with characteristic complexity. Over the years, this show could be accused of lacking forward momentum, but never of oversimplifying the messiness of its characters’ emotions. That continues in ‘Testimony’, which complicates the cliché in fiction that surviving trauma either gives a character saintly quietude, or turns them into an instant villain. June and Janine (alive, we learn, but…