The emotional rigor of “Vows” feels like a return to form, or at least a hiatus from the catch-and-release tension of this season and the last. They have their memories - of neighbors who used to chat over fences, or coffee shops where they met up with colleagues, or the spot of sidewalk where their son first rode his bike - but the past and the present are entirely disjointed.
The women (and men) locked inside Gilead are still in their home country, sometimes their own towns and cities, but their everyday lives are wallpapered over with some alternative reality. Yet it was the most trying 50 minutes of The Handmaid’s Tale in a while because the show’s writers finally keyed back into the original resonance of Margaret Atwood’s novel: that the biggest burden of the Gilead regime is the way it entirely sweeps away the past. “Vows” isn’t an especially violent episode. When dark art follows you into lighter times, its former meaning sometimes turns into an affront. (Some of you poor souls didn’t make it past the first season’s ominous ending.) And right now, in the late spring of 2021, just as large parts of America are reopening and the roses are peeling open outside my window, it’s somehow harder than ever to tune in. Former viewers sometimes send me messages, explaining exactly when they had to call it quits - in season two after the forced surgery to remove Emily’s clitoris or when Loaves and Fishes was shot up in season three. The Handmaid’s Tale is, to put it far too lightly, often difficult to watch.
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