Review: ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Season 2 Moves Into a Dark Future

At the end of “The Handmaid’s Tale” Season 1, June (Elisabeth Moss) steps into the back of a van. Having rebelled in a small way against Gilead, the future America where she’s kept as breeding stock, she’s either being carted off for punishment by the state or spirited to freedom by the resistance.

The scene is June’s last in the source novel by Margaret Atwood, which Bruce Miller adapted in the first season with some expansions and variations. From here on out, we don’t know where the van or “The Handmaid’s Tale” are going.

Very quickly in Season 2, we get the answer: somewhere significant but nowhere happy. June is muzzled and roughly ejected with a crowd of other handmaids into a floodlit Fenway Park, hurried by guards and attack dogs to a mass gallows in the weed-strewn outfield.

Over this monumental scene, Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work” plays. It’s striking and terrifying and mournful. It feels, as a near-death scene should, like the end of the world.

But it is only the continuation of this world. “The Handmaid’s Tale,” returning to Hulu with two new episodes Wednesday, sets its terms early. After a first season that started strong, then wobbled as it found its own material, it’s become a confident, emotionally rich series — but one that, by nature and obligation, is wrenching to watch.

I’m going to rule it not a spoiler to tell you that June does not die in the opening minutes of the season. Because “The Handmaid’s Tale” is a series, it tests out both possibilities of the novel’s ending — destruction or salvation — while putting off a resolution.

Instead much of the new season focuses on how Gilead, a fundamentalist Christian tyranny that arose after a worldwide fertility crisis, keeps its hold in large and small ways.

June, carrying a child for Cmdr. Fred Waterford (Joseph Fiennes) and his wife, Serena (Yvonne Strahovski), is called “Offred,” taking her name from the family patriarch. Her own daughter — separated from her but still alive, somewhere — is called only “your first pregnancy.” June is not allowed her present or her past, and she only matters to the future as a vessel for it.

Being pregnant affords her temporary leverage, which she wields in small ways with Serena, who herself is bound by Fred’s quiet paternalism and answerable to the same religious minders, like Aunt Lydia (an imperious Ann Dowd), who discipline the handmaids.

Inevitably, given the feminist anti-Trump protests and #MeToo movement, “The Handmaid’s Tale” will continue to be seen as an allegory of politics today. But you can also take it as less a specific prediction than as a diagram of how systems of oppression work.

Born out of fear, Gilead keeps handmaids in line, but also wives, intellectuals and less-powerful men, and it thrives by pitting each against another.

Given more space (the new season is 13 episodes) the series sketches that system further outward. June’s dissident friend Emily (Alexis Bledel) is exiled to the Colonies, a radioactive zone where “unwomen” (among them a new character, played by Marisa Tomei) labor until they die.

The Colonies could be another planet, hazy and blasted, the unwomen overseen by guards in masks and brimmed hats that make them look like robot inquisitors. While Gilead’s backstory remains sketchy, the art direction and costume design make the world feel immediately realized. (While the original director, Reed Morano, has left, her successors have retained her heaven’s-eye shots and portraitlike intimacy.)

The first half of the new season back-burners the Canadian exile of June’s husband, Luke (O.T. Fagbenle), still one of the weaker parts of the series. It has a better handle on its tone now; gone, mostly, are the ironically upbeat soundtrack choices, like Tom Petty’s “American Girl.”

Often, though, “The Handmaid’s Tale” feels so determined not to be misread, to treat its subject with gravity, that its storytelling is heavy-handed and its peripheral characters stiff.

Fortunately, the central performance is anything but. The essential image of “The Handmaid’s Tale” is the crimson dress — the red of menses and childbirth — but its favorite visual is Moss’ face, framed in tight close-up. It is mask, shield and vulnerable portal; it shows her defiance and conceals it at the same time. She’s wary and tired and seething — heroic on a very human scale.

Without someone as expressive as Moss, “The Handmaid’s Tale” might not pull off its balancing acts: to be morally urgent but not didactic, harrowing but with flickers of hope and grace. But that may be more challenging as it stretches out, maybe for years, a story of a protagonist sentenced to systematic rape.

In the novel, June’s entering the van was not the absolute end. In an epilogue, we learn that her memoirs were recovered by “Gileadean Studies” scholars far in the future. The time between the van doors closing and the fall of the tyranny, it suggests, might have been very long.

For TV purposes, maybe it shouldn’t be. “The Handmaid’s Tale” is dystopian sci-fi, but it plays like horror, from its constant sense of menace to its ominous score. Horror is a hard genre to sustain in serial TV. Stretch it out too long, as in the very different “The Walking Dead,” and you create an endless circuit of frying pans and fires that becomes desensitizing or unendurable.

Not knowing the producers’ plan, I can’t say if the right length for “The Handmaid’s Tale” is two seasons or five or more. But sometimes the best testament to a story’s effectiveness is that it makes you hope for it to end.

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‘The Handmaid’s Tale’

Wednesday on Hulu