It’s been two years since the previous season of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale aired, one of many ongoing television series that experienced a longer-than-usual hiatus due to covid. Thankfully, season three ended on such a key turning point in the struggle to explode Gilead from inside—with the delivery of nearly one hundred children to Canada—that the new season could pick things up immediately, without missing a beat. To do this, of course, it needed one of the series’ trademark ironic music cues: Dionne Warwick’s “I Say a Little Prayer” as the band of rogue Handmaids carry June, going into shock from a gunshot, through the woods to temporary safety.
If you’re a millennial like me, your first exposure to this song might have been the saccharine opening to My Best Friend’s Wedding, starring an anonymous bride and her bridesmaids; June being ferried away has that same vibe, her struggles to stay lucid backed by Together, together, that’s how it must be / To live without you / Would only mean heartbreak for me. Except… she has chosen, again and again, to be apart from Luke and Moira and now baby Nichole in Canada. Is June doomed to a future of nothing but heartbreak? Will she ever choose her own freedom over Gilead’s end?
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