The second season of The Handmaid’s Tale was, in almost every way, a marked improvement on the first. It was bolder in its storytelling, more incisive with its character arcs, and knitted together with stronger thematic underpinnings. Without Margaret Atwood’s book to fall back on, for the most part, the series pulled back just a bit (literally, in the case of the camera, which dropped more often into wide shots) to examine the ways totalitarian societies hollow from the inside out, taking and taking and taking, until they become the only way of life you know. It was as timely as season one, but in a very different way, less triumphal and certain of the power wielded by large groups of people raising their voices as one. It was also so, so, so much harder to watch, in a way that maybe sort of broke the show. This is the paradox of series like The Handmaid’s Tale. Sometimes, making your show better can simultaneously make it worse, can expose the flaws in the template that were always there that viewers were better able to overlook when there were more obvious and glaring flaws to point to.