Season 1, Episode 10: ‘Night’

What does it mean for a woman to try to gain power in a society that thrives on her subjugation? Is the price of reclaiming one’s identity in such a dystopia worth the violent punishment that follows? How does women’s resistance take shape?

The answer varies for each character in the Season 1 finale of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” While Moira finds freedom by successfully making it to Ontario, Offred witnesses brutality at every turn. This is a harrowing hour of television. Putnam’s punishment for his transgressions with Janine is to have his arm surgically removed in a scene that’s remarkably gory. But the handmaids don’t have anesthesia or positions of power to return to, and there is something rather unsettling about the way the camera lingers on Offred’s wounds and the use of slow motion as blood spatters from the mouth of Ofglen No. 2.

Decisions over who wields violence and how it’s depicted reveal a gap between the show’s feminist aims and its lack of emotional development, which is sacrificed for the sake of its brutal portrayals of punishment. Violence could be used in this series as meaningful commentary on the ways in which women’s bodies are manipulated by men in power. Instead it feels grotesque and unnecessary. “They should have never given us uniforms if they didn’t want us to be an army,” says Offred early in the episode. I’m still waiting on that army.