In a huge, five-page, 3,200-word spread in Sunday’s Washington Post, Style section writer Jada Yuan heaped more liberal bile on the grossly anti-Christian, anti-family, pro-baby death, and far-left crowd behind the show The Handmaid’s Tale ahead of its final season. As is usually the case with puff pieces on the show, Yuan left out that star Elizabeth Moss is a devout Scientology which, if there ever was a dangerous cult, that’s it.
“‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is ready for its revolution; The dystopian TV drama is winding up for its big finish. Its cast members have lots to say about its relevance,” Yuan beamed in the online headline.
Despite women still having been allowed to protest en masse and abortions continuing to take place across the country, Yuan fed the narrative women have almost become lifeless, listless vessels for the patriarchy in the Trump presidencies.
Referring to the show’s premise of women being held captive and forced to be raped and impregnated by authoritarian male leaders in the dystopian world of Gilead, Yuan said while “[n]ostalgia is a natural reaction when coming to the end of something, a longing for the way things once were,” Moss “realized that sometimes it’s okay not to look back.”
“As the show reaches its climactic conclusion, there’s a drop of hope — maybe even some inspiration — amid the darkness. The dystopian Hulu series became a phenomenon when it premiered in April 2017, just months after President Donald Trump took office...[I]t felt remarkably of the moment — depicting a terrifying future America under an authoritarian regime in which women have been stripped of their reproductive freedom and are forced into sexual slavery to bear children for the wealthy and powerful,” she huffed.
Nevermind that, in this world, women are raped and “get a finger cut off if they are caught reading, and “gender traitors” (anyone not straight) are publicly hanged.” The left has spent eight years insisting America is eerily similar to this.
Yuan celebrated the show’s impact as though it had changed the world and not instead given the left the latest chance to channel their pasts as theatre kids. Notice Yuan framed the second Trump administration embracing “pronatalism” and pointing out there’s only two genders as bad things (click “expand”):
“Ugh they just need to release the rest of the handmaid’s tale episodes now so we can see what’s going to happen in real life next week,” the comedian Robin Thede wrote on Twitter in 2017, joining a chorus who couldn’t believe how closely the series mirrored their reality. The cast made a video declaring their unwavering support for Planned Parenthood, and “Saturday Night Live” aired a spoof in which politically unengaged bros are confounded by why their female friends are wearing red robes and white winged bonnets.
Around the country, women wore the handmaid costume to state legislatures to protest attacks on women’s rights, including one in which they gathered in the Texas state legislature and chanted “shame” for eight minutes straight. Mashable called the costume “the most powerful meme of the resistance.” (The show won eight Emmys that first season, including outstanding lead actress in a drama series for Moss and the first award for a streaming show for outstanding drama series.)
Everyone interviewed for this story said they felt a wild, perverse sense of déjà vu filming this final season — which starts streaming weekly on Hulu on Tuesday.
Here they were again, shooting in the winter in Canada during another election in which Trump would defeat a woman for the presidency, this time the first female vice president of the United States. And just as in Gilead, some American women were losing their reproductive freedoms. Roe v. Wade had been overturned as the show shot Season 5, and some 19 states have since enacted either total or partial abortion bans.
While the show was wrapping its finale, Trump signed an executive order declaring that there are only “two sexes,” pardoned antiabortion protesters, cut off foreign aid for reproductive health and enforced a “global gag rule” that bars federal funds to any foreign organization such as International Planned Parenthood Federation that provides abortion services, counseling or referrals. Pronatalism is on the rise, with Vice President JD Vance declaring, “I want more babies in the United States.” Civil rights activists fear that other Project 2025 agenda items — a federal abortion ban, restricting access to birth control and surveilling women to track births and abortions — may still be on the table.
“We thought we were done with Trump, and we were hoping that the show could be more of a fictional narrative, which it was always meant to be,” co-showrunner Yahlin Chang says. “And then suddenly we landed in a second Trump presidency, where things are even worse. As a TV writer, you make stuff up. You imagine an alternate reality where bad s--- happens, and it’s really astonishing to see it all come to fruition in real life.”
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What’s remarkable about the final season, though, is that it suggests a future that would, at least, give liberals hope.
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Some have suggested that America right now feels like the beginning of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” But Gilead is already at the explosive end of the story. Everyone has lived under oppression for so long that they’ve had time to build a resistance, make plans, fight back.
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“It’s a world where ordinary women show extraordinary strength,” says Warren Littlefield, whose company produced every season of the show. “The handmaid’s robe that was a prison becomes their armor.”
The Scientology omission was particularly gross when highlighting one episode Moss directed for this final season:
The first episode Moss directed this season takes place mainly on a train headed west toward Alaska, where June and others are fleeing because Toronto has been overrun by pro-Gilead mobs. Moss’s friend Tom Cruise advised her to do it on a set that shook like a real train, and so Williams put the whole thing on giant casters.
Oh, they just happen to be friends, not that Cruise is a high-ranking official in Scientology.
The irony continued when Yuan admitted that, if this final season “had aired during the final year of the Biden administration, as was planned, it might not have carried as much of a punch” and that Moss has come to view “the show differently, as not just a story of survival but also a story of motherhood, and a love letter to anyone who cares for a child.”
Ironic considering the show’s premise is making new life a commodity and cast being openly supportive of Planned Parenthood, the chief organization behind exterminating babies in the womb.
She had more bizarre, almost purposeful wallowing in past seasons claiming the show’s taping mirrored life in the first Trump administration, including the infamous handmaids shot on the National Mall (click “expand”):
That scene was shot during the rise of the #MeToo movement. In another parallel, Chang, the showrunner, consulted U.N. consultants and psychologists to write an emotional episode in which June is granted 10 minutes to reunite with her kidnapped daughter. A week after it aired, Trump announced his policy of separating families at the border.
“I think the reason why we seem predictive is that we have to get into the minds of these characters who are running an authoritarian regime,” Chang says. “And so, imaginatively, we’re just like, okay, if you’re a really flawed human being who is incredibly selfish and only thinks about what’s good for you, and doesn’t give a crap about anyone else, and follows all your worst impulses, what would you do?”
The day after Trump’s second win, even actors who weren’t on the schedule that day came to set. For many of them, the only Americans they knew in Toronto worked on “Handmaid’s.”
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Moss says she most felt the show’s impact when they turned the National Mall into Gilead’s capital in February 2019.
The day of their shoot — which had been inspired by images of rallies in Nazi Germany — Trump declared a national emergency in a bid to build his wall on the Mexican border. A sea of red-cloaked extras stood in formation between the Washington Monument, in the show a giant white cross, and the Lincoln Memorial, with the statue’s head and torso ripped off. Passersby had to look twice before realizing it was not a giant protest.
“It just felt very meta,” Moss says. “We were, physically, right in the middle of D.C. … You couldn’t be more in the middle of it unless you were sitting in the Oval Office.”
The high didn’t last. By the time they shot the end of Season 5, Roe had been overturned.
