Handmaids Tale Season 1 Episode 1

this is a quote from the key point of view lead to how the tv show starts;

“My name is Offred. I had another name, but it’s forbidden now. So many things are forbidden now.”

It has stripped women of all their rights. We now refer them to as handmaids and wear red. It forces them to bear children for the Commanders and their wives. Her new name is a symbol of her lack of freedom in this alternative world. Offred literally means “Of Fred,” the name of the Commander she’s currently assigned to. She’s not a person, she’s a possession.

June, her husband, and their young daughter are fleeing by car, trying to get to the Canadian border. Their car runs off the road, Luke tells them to run and stays behind but June doesn’t get far before they hear gunshots behind them.

She looks despaired and hurriedly grabs her daughter Hannah, and takes off running. She finds a small cliff hill in the forest they were running in, grabs Hannah, and hides.

Hannah cries out, “mommy?” but June shushes her, “shh baby girl be quiet”. in a scared and loving tone at the same time.

The guardsmen were right above them, but they couldn’t see them. As soon as they went a distance, June grabs Hannah and runs, but sadly they saw them. They caught them when June fell.

June tried to fight them off with all her might, but sadly they hit June in the back of the head, knocking her out.

she slowly went out of consciousness as she saw her daughter being taken away.

offred is June.

now I absolutely love this actress Elizabeth moss, she is amazing at how you can clearly tell how she is feeling or thinking because of the look on her face.

in present-day Gilead, she is Offred the Handmaid, sitting in her small room in Commander Waterford’s home.

She has a chair, a table, a lamp, and a window with white curtains. The glass is shatterproof, she explains in a voice-over, not to prevent the Handmaids from running away, but to prevent against those “other escapes — the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge, or a twisted sheet and a chandelier.”

Then there is the commander’s wife-Serena joy. she is cold-hearted, unkind, and just plain mean to offred.

there is also Rita, one of the “Marthas,” a. k. a. domestic workers who cook and clean.

each pair of clothes a person wears defines who they are in the chain of commands, handmaids, and workers.

Marthas wear green,

wives wear blue,

Handmaids, like Offred, wear red dresses with matching cloaks and white bonnets that hide the sides of their faces when they’re out of their homes.

they’re all lucky, compared to the ones who are called “unwomen.”

those women are sent to the colonies to clean up toxic waste until they die.

there’s also Nick, the Commander’s driver, who lives above the detached garage on the property.

women may no longer read or write.

Offred is sent out to do the day’s shopping, so Rita gives her vouchers with pictures instead.

she goes outside to meet her shopping partner named “ofglen”.

Handmaids are always to travel in twos, Offred explains to us, not for their own protection but so the women can monitor one another.

At first she thinks Ofglen is, to use her words, a “pious little s—,”.

They limit their conversations to small things like the weather and updates on an apparently ongoing war against the rebels.

occasionally after the grocery store stop, they take a route home that takes them past a wall where people are hung for what they now deem treasonous acts.

Their heads are covered by bags that depict their crimes — there’s a priest, a doctor, and a gay man. (“I think I heard that joke once. This wasn’t the punchline,” Offred muses to herself, cuttingly.)

a flashback shows us inside the Rachel and Leah Center, a former high school where women are forced into their Handmaid roles.

the “Aunts” — a brown-clad older woman, so-called teachers.

they like to spin stories about how our previous society messed everything up where they show them slides of pollution, radiation, charts with plummeting birth rates.

the women of that time were “dirty,” and “sluts,” but as Handmaids, they are “special,” carrying out a Biblical purpose.

When a newly captured June/Offred enters mid-lesson, she sees someone she knows: Moira.

a free-spirited pal she knew before Gilead.

Moira shakes her head slowly, and the intent is clear: Don’t act like we know each other.

Another student, Janine, talks back, Lydia (an aunt), tell her to sit up straight with hands on the table to which, Janine amusingly tells her to “go f-ck yourself” to which aunt Lydia shocks her with a cattle prod and has her taken away. Before offering a line straight from Atwood’s novel, which I’d say is the scariest quote of the entire episode:

I know this must feel strange. But ordinary is just what you’re used to. This may not seem ordinary to you, but after a time it will. This will become ordinary.”

it’s nighttime now, June and Moira are awake whispering to each other when Janine is dragged back into the room crying and mumbling.

We see what happens to those who disobey: one of her eyes is gone. “We’re breeding stock, you don’t need eyes for that,” Moira mutters.

Even worse, another day’s “lesson” finds her telling the rest of her fellow Handmaids about being gang-raped.

“Who led them on?” Aunt Lydia asks the group.

“Who’s fault was it?”

The women surrounding point their fingers at Janine: “Her fault.” When a stunned June doesn’t join in, she’s slapped by another Aunt — Margaret Atwood herself, in a cameo role.

When Lydia poses the next question (“Why did it happen?”), June joins in the group shaming under the Aunts’ unforgiving stare: “Teach her a lesson.”

n the present, Offred takes part in another necessity of her new life:

The Ceremony, when the Commander tries to impregnate a Handmaid as she lies in his wife’s lap. It’s joyless for all of them and difficult to watch:

The look in Offred’s eyes says it all, as does the contempt on Serena Joy’s face. After she’s dismissed and back in her room, Offred bolts out of bed and into the backyard, desperate for air, but that moment of release is halted when she realizes something potentially dangerous: Nick can see her.

The next morning, she doesn’t have much time to worry about why Nick has told no one she was outside before she hears a series of bells signaling a Salvaging.

It is another chilling ritual in this new world order. All the Handmaids gather in an open field, and a man is brought out in front of them.

a man who, according to Aunt Lydia, raped a pregnant Handmaid and caused her to lose the baby.

They’re told to stand around him, and once a whistle blows, they can do whatever they choose to him until the whistle blows again.

I’m assuming it’s a way for the women to unleash the rage they must feel in their captivity. When the signal comes, Offred lands the first blow and then the rest of the women join in, screaming, grabbing, pulling, kicking.

only Janine, holding her now pregnant belly, watches from a few feet away.

Offred and Ofglen take their walk home together and finally see each other clearly.

They talk about Moira, who Janine claimed was captured and sent to the colonies, and of a former ice cream shop where there was a salted caramel ice cream, Ofglen remembers as being “better than sex,” how they both thought the other was a true believer.

They do that really well, make us distrust each other,” Offred remarks. they talk about Offred’s husband and daughter, along with Ofglen’s wife and son, who were lucky enough to escape into Canada.

They stop in front of the Commander’s home and remark how it was nice to finally “meet” each other. But the warmth is short-lived: As Offred goes to close the gate, Ofglen leans in and whispers that there’s an Eye in her house.

“Be careful,” she warns, before walking on, leaving Offred to walk into a home where anyone and everyone could watch her.

She still tries to persist. “Someone is watching here. Someone is always watching. Nothing can change, it all has to look the same. Because I intend to survive. For her,” she says, before saying the names of family, Hannah. My husband was Luke. My name is June.”