This week’s season finale of The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu was typically dark, both in subject matter and in lighting.
We see the seat of power: the commanders, who make decisions about justice , the economy, and international relations.
Rarely do we see the rest of the population, known as “Econopeople.” The Handmaid’s Tale Wiki points out that our hero, June, describes the Econopeople as the ones who “played their cards right” and thus lead relatively normal, if limited lives.
In The Handmaid’s Tale, The Hunger Games, and dystopias in between, we get little opportunity to learn what life would really be like for most of us, the imagined world’s silent majority.
But if dystopias are supposed to help us avoid the futures we would not want to live in, then it would be nice to see the futures that most of us would actually experience.
The pilot shows the first day it happens and then skips forward a few years, where we learn that, yes, it was not a one-time event.
On this week’s episode of Slate’s technology podcast, host Lizzie O’Leary talks to Nila Bala, of the NYU Policing Project, about the rise of genetic genealogy to solve crime and two new state laws intended to put constraints on law enforcement’s use of the technology.