A commendable Chase Infiniti can't save Handmaid's Tale spin-off The Testaments

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I don’t know why Atwood felt the need to write a sequel.
I have read the Tale but not the sequel. I have no desire to. Even though it ended on a cliffhanger, I felt the core story had been told well.
It’s not worth reading IMO. It reads like YA fiction she’s lost her edge and the fear and claustrophobia of the first is totally gone. In my head it doesn’t exist

I remember hearing that they brought her on the first show to consult but didn’t give her any kind of actual authority and she butted heads with them a lot over the story. I’ve always suspected she suddenly threw a sequel out knowing Hulu would pick it up to try to force the shows narrative in the directions she wanted by forcing it to meet a sequel’s plot.

I didn’t read the book, sounded awful, but I saw many that did speculating she used a ghost writer. But then again I hated the Oryx and Crake sequels so my feelings about her as a sequel writer are already poor.

I agree with you she was trying to steer the show, but didn’t. The book is really disappointing and the writing style is weak, so a ghost writer wouldn’t surprise me

There’s a lot of world-building across the season’s slow-moving ten episodes, which feels like a waste given how familiar even casual TV watchers are with the original series.

I still plan on giving it a watch, but that’s a bummer.

I thought Handmaid’s Tale told a great story, even if it went on a little long. I had hoped this series would be telling a new or different story that we hadn’t seen before.

The end of our previous story looked like it was setting up a future that needed and was in the process of being fixed. With Aunt Lydia returning I thought we might get a long redemption story (redemption is probably the wrong word, but a character truly trying to make up for their mistakes.)