10 times The Handmaid’s Tale got way too real

The Handmaid’s Tale — “Faithful” — Episode 105 — Serena Joy makes Offred a surprising proposition. Offred remembers the unconventional beginnings of her relationship with her husband. Offred (Elisabeth Moss), shown. (Photo by: George Kraychyk/Hulu)

In the current climate of political dumpster fires, sexism, and constant worry about what will have happened in the news overnight, The Handmaid’s Tale feels sharply real at times.

Even if The Handmaid’s Tale‘s writers, production staff, and Margeret Atwood herself could not have anticipated the current presidency, the scariest thing about The Handmaid’s Tale as it wraps up its fifth episode isn’t any of the events that actually transpire in the show; at least, not on their own. Rather, it’s the constant reminders and realizations as to just how close we might be to something like the Republic of Gilead, and the flashbacks showing the process of how things got that way in the first place. It hits painfully close to home, time and time again.

Sure, women walking around with blinders on doesn’t exactly scream 20xx immediately, but that particular vision isn’t meant to. What The Handmaid’s Tale in Hulu series form does so much better than the book (by virtue of the medium, with all respect to Atwood) is show, via setting, props, and simple interactions, how “normal” the society was until very, very recently. June, Emily, Luke, and even Waterford, Serena Joy, and all of them were once people walking the streets beside one another, unknowing. How did everything go so wrong, so fast?

I don’t have the answers, but here are ten particular moments when The Handmaid’s Tale just got way too real for me:

The Handmaid’s Tale — “Faithful” Episode 105 — Serena Joy makes Offred a surprising proposition. Offred remembers the unconventional beginnings of her relationship with her husband. Ofglen (Alexis Bledel), shown. (Photo by: George Kraychyk/Hulu)

Grocery store scenes

Seems harmless enough, right? But as I said above, the props and set dressing often frighten the audience even as unrelated conversations occur in the foreground. Pause, sometime, at one of those grocery store scenes. Not the close-ups of the same-ish canned foods with only one brand, but rather, look at the whole picture. The way the shelves are stocked and organized. The way people mill about through the aisles. It all screams of normalcy, even as the people in the aisles are wearing giant sack-like robes.

For some reason, when I read the book, I pictured something more like a counter where you would have to request certain items and be given them by a dark-looking person guarded by a rifleman. I didn’t expect a normal, reappropriated grocery store to suddenly be filled with a nightmare. It’s a simple image, but a powerful one.