The Handmaid’s Tale
Landslide by Fleetwood Mac with help from the handmaids
Last night we finally reached the end of the final series of The Handmaid’s Tale. For those of you who haven’t kept up, there have been 6 series. The program has never been less than good and has often been excellent if extremely disturbing. The final series followed this pattern, starting off slowly but reaching excellence in the last 3 episodes. The use of the wonderful Landslide by Fleetwood Mac helped this.
While washing up this morning, however, something occurred to me.
Near the end of the final episode our hero, June Osborne, says goodbye to ‘Captain’ Mark, only for him to turn round and correct her as he is now ‘Commander’. In Gilead this is a loaded title. The Commanders (all male, naturally) ruled Gilead with an iron fist and it was they who raped and abused the handmaids. We are left wondering whether Mark is going to break the system and start anew or is going to become part of a replica of Gilead’s immediate past. Will the system of government set up by the original Commanders be too entrenched to be changed by a new group.
This led me on to another thought. Is it reasonable to expect any government to come to power and enact any radical changes, when the system, in the UK’s case, the civil service are so entrenched? While the civil service have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo is it possible for any political party to fundamentally change the way society works?
And a less palatable thought. Was Liz Truss right in at least one thing? Do we need to remove The Blob?
In an unrelated thought:
If a group who spray paint a plane are terrorists, what does that make an organisation who kill going on for 60,000 people, some of whom I’m sure were terrorists themselves, but the vast majority of whom were innocent bystanders?
