The Handmaid's Tale: 6x09 Execution.
As armed Handmaids wreak havoc upon the households of their Commanders, the group of Red Centre Handmaids including Moira, Janine and June are making their way out of Gilead, hoping that the resistance has successfully taken over the guard post on the border. All three of them intend to stay behind to continue the fight, in spite of the fact that June at least will have a hard time from here on out to remain unrecognised. They fall at the first hurdle: the Guardians have not been overpowered, and instead arrest everyone, singling out June who identifies herself to spare the life of the other women who the Guardians are all too ready to kill one by one. It is astonishing in and of itself that pictures of June haven’t been circulated widely enough that they can’t pick her out of a line-up. Mayday’s bombs are going off and somehow, Gilead’s command knows exactly who the motor behind all of this is. All of the dreams about a kinder, gentler Gilead that Serena and Lawrence may have harboured are dead now.
Serena, wandering the streets bathed in the blood of her fellow Wives and their husbands, finds shelter in Commander Lawrence’s house for now, but Naomi, awoken from her sedative-induced slumber, voices what is likely already being discussed by all the surviving Commanders. The dream of New Bethlehem is dead, the regime will strike back mercilessly, beginning with the ceremonious killing of the apprehended women. Naomi tells Serena to return to her husband, whom she has helpfully called over. Commander Wharton appears apologetic and ready to make amends to get her back, offers to try for their own children without admitting that if they failed, he would fall right back on his original plan. Serena is trapped now: Gabriel wants her to go deeper into Gilead, further away from the safe haven of New Bethlehem, a place that already no longer holds the promise of a better or different life. He also tells Serena that June was behind everything and used the wedding ceremony to execute her plans: a very personal betrayal of trust and the idea that they were ever friends, but it’s interesting to watch Serena grapple with this information: she has seen behind the façade of the Commanders now and seems to understand June more than she ever has, and is horrified at the idea of a public execution. If all of her plans to create a better world for Noah to grow up in and for herself to be free have failed, than her next best bet is for June’s rebellion to succeed.
Wharton goes to speak to June, who is being kept separate from the other women in a cage. He opens the cage, places two chairs opposite each other. I’m not sure what he seeks from her: a sense of triumph at having the face of the rebellion in front of him and planning her execution, being able to use his interpretation of scripture to force her to admit fault, or a validation of his very personal anger that June used his wedding, his wife, for her purposes. In any case, June comes prepared for his religious arguments and counteracts them with her own interpretation of god. She refutes his arguments (“That’s the thing about state-sanctioned rape. Patience is not an option.”), telling him that nothing about Gilead has ever been about piety, that it has always been about power. Wharton, as one of the few surviving Commanders, is the most self-righteous one, a man who has distinguished himself from the other Commanders and maybe because of that reason has even less capacity to admit to the true nature of the regime he has built. How could he argue against her, having witnessed the excesses of people like Commander Bell at Jezebel’s? June compels him to “be the man” that Serena believes him to be, but there’s no world in which Wharton is capable of admitting his wrongs to a woman he despises so much.
The public execution of June and the Handmaids is less of a massive spectacle than we are used to from Gilead, but this is a nation under pressure now: 37 Commanders have died (nobody mentions the fate of their Wives). The econo-people asked to witness the deaths are horrified at the notion that Handmaids are being led to the gallows, since the entire ideology of Gilead is built on the idea that their fertility makes them holy. It’s a miscalculation, as is adding Aunt Lydia to the mix, who is horrified to see her beloved girls and especially Janine about to be executed by a regime she so recently supported. “They have been prisoners of wicked, godless men.”, she shouts into the masses, and then Wharton, so eager to once again win the argument and subdue her, gives June a pulpit to speak from.
June: Who have too long been oppressed by evil. Rise Up. Fight for your freedom. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.
As June is lifted up by the rope, Mayday, including Luke, begin the attack with knives and guns. Rita saves June’s life. US fighter jets begin a bombing campaign in Boston. Wharton manages to escape.
If you consider the twist in the episode, that the titular Execution should have applied to the women that were captured and June herself but that they managed to, against all odds, be rescued at the last moment by Mayday, ready to strike at the public execution, then it becomes all about the three men who are headed for the doomed airplane.
Nick, who has revealed his true face, or maybe just decided to pursue the path of least resistance, is a father now, and his wife eggs him on to embrace a more brutal Gilead because June’s plan has put her and their child in danger. He is the future of Gilead – a man who would have amounted to nothing much in the world before Gilead has lifted himself into new heights in this world which rewards opportunism so highly. He had as many opportunities as Serena to choose a different path, and yet he ends up on the same plane as his father-in-law.
Commander Lawrence, who started off as a pragmatist deeply troubled by his own sins and yet eager to avoid real consequences for his actions (such as a war crimes trial), seems horrified at the prospect of seeing June executed, since he was such a vital part of the plan that he pursued to save his own skin. He even asks Serena to pray with him, and seems to already know that he will never see Naomi and Charlotte again when he sends them away together. He is desperate enough to ask this woman he married against his will to break the laws of Gilead and read to Charlotte, to teach her. “We’re her parents” (Janine would disagree), he says, but he already must know that he is unlikely to come back to this family, because everything he pursued before the Mayday attacks now puts him at odds with the surviving Commanders. Both he and Serena have nowhere else to go after the attack on the public execution: Serena is taken into protective custody by Mark Tuello (a man who holds her life in his hands – she, too, is under threat of being put on trial for her crimes), and Lawrence is now forced to help Tuello with his plan to ensure the success of the rebellion by placing a bomb on a plane (“I’m an economist, not James Bond”). June (again, why the most recognisable person would do this, I don’t know) drives him to the airport, but the Commanders arrive too early. Joseph, a man who wears the mantle of courage to awkwardly, is now faced with the choice of abandoning the plan or getting on the plane along with the bomb that will explode once it reaches altitude. There is a beauty to the fact that the least likely character to make the brave choice of self-sacrifice is the one who ultimately dooms the future of Gilead by taking out its remaining leadership – and Bradley Whitford gives an astonishing performance here, looking back at June emotionally before getting on. June watches Nick arrive, and there’s not really anything she can do: if she warned him or tried to save him, she would doom herself along with the fate of the entire resistance. Maybe, before he carelessly allowed for the killing of all those women at Jezebel’s, she would have still done it, but now June just watches as the plane takes off and explodes spectacularly in the sky. Like Joseph says to Nick, who knows to ask him about June’s fate: Can’t keep a good woman down.
Having just finished the astonishing second season of Andor, it’s very difficult not to watch these final episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale – a show that started all the way back in 2017 – and draw parallels, and think in particular about the contrasts. We don’t know yet who will make it to the end of this show or into The Testaments, but this episode cuts down the number of people to survive the beginning of the visible, large-scale rebellion significantly. The point of Andor – that a successful rebellion takes all kinds of different approaches and ideologies, and that frequently, its most relevant agents do not survive to see the world changed by their acts – resonates through The Handmaid’s Tale as well, but I find myself yearning for a broader spectrum of individual stories, for more of an insight into other perspectives, that I suppose we might still get from the spin-off but that are only gently teased for now. The Handmaid’s Tale does give us an insight into both sides of the equation through the eyes of Serena and June and who they are connected to, but this episode in particular gives us a glimpse of some stories on the sidelines that I think could have coloured in the picture even more. Mark Tuello, who has repeatedly proven he is willing to sacrifice anyone to the cause (but would he sacrifice himself as well, I wonder) and the story of how Ava/Aunt Phoebe went into deep cover in Gilead would make for a great show on its own. The so-called econo-people, who must make up the majority of Gilead have not appeared in this show since June sought shelter with a family and ultimately doomed them. Surely there is revolutionary potential in their difficult lives, so far removed from the luxuries of the Commander households, such a wide section of society that in no ways profits from the radical ideology of Gilead and yet fears the excesses of its terror. Without a glimpse of the bureaucracy (and it is such a cautionary tale to think that something driven by an obsession with rules and regulations above all can prop up any kind of regime without regards to the morality of it) behind Gilead beyond the Commanders at the top, we also don’t really have a sense of what will keep the regime together now that most of them are dead. One more to go!
Random notes:
This is beside the point of the episode but the reveal that D’Arcy Carden’s character was CIA the whole time made me realise that I really want a 1940s TV show in which she plays an OSS agent, with the severe sense that she would have fit seamlessly and perfectly into my beloved Bomb Girls. I would watch seasons of that.
I wonder what will happen Serena at the end of all of this. June convinces her to share the vital information about where the Commanders are, and she must know that this means Wharton’s death: which signifies the end of any connection to Gilead and dreams of reforming it into something different. It’s a clear choice between a woman who has saved her life (in spite of hating her) and a man who has proven to be a disappointment (in spite of claiming to love her).
Nick was never going to make it, but there’s something powerful in leaving it in June’s hands to decide his fate and to finally fully embrace the idea that the rebellion requires her to cut off her personal feelings. It would have hit harder emotionally if he hadn’t revealed himself as the opportunist willing to kill anyone to save himself and June, but then, I don’t think June would have made the same choice in that case, and there’s a list of character whom she wouldn’t have allowed to get on that plane even if it had meant that the plan failed (this is what sets June apart from most of the characters in Andor, I would say). June has not spent her entire life training for this, she was thrown into this role, and as frustrating as her feelings about Nick have been, especially in this season, I do like the conflict between her personal feelings and the requirements of her as a figurehead of the rebellion.
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