The Handmaid’s Tale (new season) ★★★½

For four seasons of The Handmaid’s Tale, the question viewers have asked is: how much punishment can June (Elisabeth Moss) take? But as season five begins, the question is flipped on its head: when, our heroine asks, will she get the punishment she deserves?

Season four ended, you may recall, with June and a posse of former handmaids dishing out the punishment her one-time master and long-time tormentor Fred Waterford (Joseph Fiennes) so richly deserved. They beat him to a pulp in the woods between Gilead and Canada, described with the show’s customarily indelicate symbolism as No Man’s Land. But as much as we willed them on, there was no escaping the fact it was a crime – and, as June sank her teeth into Waterford’s face, a pretty heinous (or hyena-ish) one at that.

But because Fred’s murder happened in the space in between, Canada decrees June has no case to answer. And as with Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the thought of a universe in which evil goes unpunished is enough to tear her apart.

Only the first two episodes have been made available for preview, so exactly where this season – rumoured to be the last – is going is anyone’s guess. But I’ll take a stab: all roads will lead back to Gilead, because June can’t help herself, because her daughter Hannah remains there, and because the show’s aesthetic and narrative demand it, even if logic argues against it.

It’s one of the great ironies of this series that while Canada is meant to represent the happy terminus of the underground railroad that ferries handmaids and Marthas to freedom, it comes across like a drab version of hell. That’s largely to do with the PTSD that afflicts June, Emily (Alexis Bledel), Moira (Samira Wiley) and Rita (Amanda Brugel). But it’s also because the show is utterly seduced by the imagery, and the violence, of the fascism in Gilead that it is ostensibly denouncing.

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This tension has been present since the very beginning: a big part of the show’s appeal has always been the visuals – especially the massed ranks of red-cloaked Handmaids, teal-robed Wives (oh, the unintended irony of that colour choice) and black-suited Commanders and Eyes. Gilead may be bad, but gee, it looks good.

Geometric shapes, volume and symmetry are the touchstones of the Handmaid aesthetic, just as they were in Leni Riefenstahl’s fawning depiction of Hitler’s rallies (and as they are in the real-world troopings of Russia, China, North Korea et al). Even Fred’s death followed the same aesthetic logic, the chaos of a night-time pursuit in the woods giving way to the order of a dozen or more torches laid out in a perfect circle, beams pointing towards the corpse at its centre.