Late to the party, but I recently caught up with The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu, a show with which I have a love/hate relationship. To be honest, the first season felt somewhat interesting and original. By season two I was starting to entertain this niggle, an idea that perhaps this bit of media that looked from the outside, from the sides, from before and after, like an unmissable feminist triumph was doing something weird. Like, for instance, who was the target demographic audience for a show about how religious (Christian) fundamentalism takes political power and immediately uses it to create a state that is predicated on corporal punishment and sanctioned sexual violence? It seems to me that the religious fundamentalists of the US would be, at best, disinterested, and at worst they might find a way to warp the narrative into an allegory of the too-permissive liberal democratic order – logic that might equate, say, state sanctioned violence with the right-wing paranoia around sexual liberation. I know, it seems like an enormous stretch, but I spend enough time on twitter to have an understanding of the mental gymnastics involved in reading the Empire in Star Wars as an allegory of the American left or whatever…

Anyhow, this is all to say that I was having my misgivings already. If the only people who were watching the show were those who understood the value of a liberal secularism to begin with then what was the point of this highly didactic, preachy-ass show? Was it the violence itself, a sort of trauma porn? Was is merely a sense of smug self-righteousness that middle-class Americans could experience, knowing that Gilead would never some to fruition on their watch, and for good reason, after all, just look at… And then something happened on the show that crystalized these nebulous ideas for me (spoilers begin now, in case that matters at this point in time): June names her daughter, the offspring of a relationship that had been liberatory in its clandestine origins, discovered by Serena, and turned into another coercive sexual duty, “Nicole.” This was the name that Serena had chosen for June’s child before the child’s birth, before June’s dramatic escape, before sending the newborn to Canada. In an action of defiance, June chooses her own name for the unborn daughter, and to say that I was shocked at this turn of events during the season two finale, this moment of reversal, capitulation – betrayal – would be an understatement. After all, the relationship between Serena and June was that between jailor and inmate, between assailant and victim. We (I) had just sat through eight episodes of misery meant to convey the banality of evil, returned to American soil. This was nazi shit. Slavery. The use and abuse of humans as things. And so here we are, having been convinced that Serena is irredeemably evil, and June pays her tribute by naming her daughter the name she would have had if Serena and Fred had succeeded in stealing her from her rightful mother. I still don’t understand this move, really, in terms of character or plot. Perhaps it is meant as an acknowledgment on the part of June, either of Serena’s desire for a child of her own (why should we care at this point given that she is comfortable with horrendous means to obtain this child, or any child), or perhaps – and even more horrifyingly – as a nod of solidarity between two women who have fallen into the trap of Gilead. Except it’s clear that Serena is an architect of her own prison. It may have proven more restrictive to her own ambitions than she imagined possible, but the fact remains that this is not only her doing, it is a system that she has continued (and will continue, for at least a few more seasons) to defend.

The real answer to this question, which is every bit as unsatisfying as the above answers and which betrays the vacuous politics at the center of the show, is elsewhere, and it has everything to do with the intended audience of the series. June is demonstrating her moral superiority by naming her child in accordance with Serena’s wishes. And let me digress here: she is certainly morally superior and deserves this reading. In fact, if anything, later seasons of the show will spend far too much time depicting an inner turmoil that begins to tear apart June’s emotional stability and the very fabric of her family. But the truth is, she is unequivocally a freedom fighter, an ally to the others in her position, and a force for good. That’s why this token seems wildly out of place, and it transforms June from a gritty survivor into an apologist, a parody of an American center-left that meets the rise of right-wing populism with the smug knowledge that they are safely tucked away in their own blue-hued enclave.

It gets better in this latest season, though, and by better I mean infinitely more problematic, vexing, bizarre. June is in exile, with several other Gilead expats and escapees, in Toronto. Over time, the American ethnic enclave (huh?) in Toronto has started to rub our neighbors to the north the wrong way, resulting in xenophobic protest. This imagery reaches its pinnacle in a scene where June has come out to pray for an American pilot who lost his life flying a mission to save her older daughter, Hannah. She kneels before an American flag before diving to save a child from a disgruntled Canadian who fires a gun into the crowd, through the slowly billowing American flag. It’s a veritable clash of fascisms – the populist (bad) versus the American militaristic (good), and it’s carried off without a whiff of irony, without a single nod to the thought that, perhaps this sort of macho nationalistic ideology was implicated in the rise of Gilead and its successes in conquering so much of North America to begin with.

Margaret Atwood and Elizabeth Moss have contributed immensely to feminist discourse in the previous decades. I do not fault them for the premise of this show, its stylization, and much of its political content is valid, if essentially benign – after all, women all over the world find themselves trapped in their own Gilead, just not typically in the US and not typically professional-class white women. But when liberalism and civility disintegrate into fascist apologia then I really have to wonder what I’m watching and why, what they’re making and why.