The Handmaid’s Tale - You’re just like the rest of them.

The Handmaid's Tale: 6x08 Exodus.

Who were we under these clothes? Who could we be? Who had they prevented us from being?

Exodus is a thrilling episode. It is in essence a heist, precariously perched between success and failure, hinging on the women who have become a symbol of Gilead’s evil and wrongness. Gilead’s great success is its fertility programme, which rests on the rape and exploitation of the Handmaids. They are in every powerful household, robbed of their name and individuality, reduced to their function of carrying children for Commanders and their Wives. June has decided that these women in their uniform of red will be her army – a perfect army because of their access to power, granted because nobody expects them to organise and fight back. In Serena’s great wedding ceremony, they sit quietly in the back. At the reception, they side on the sidelines. In the lives of the Commanders, they exist quietly, aware of the brutality they would face if they resisted, embedded in the grand mansions. All it takes is some knives, handed off one by one in the pews of the church, and the sedatives that Rita has baked into Serena’s grandiose wedding cake. It’s such an elegant beginning to the revolution, making use of Gilead’s arrogance and its constant misjudging and underestimation of the women it has subjugated.
Apart from June’s voiceover, pondering the life before Gilead, when capitalism was the engine that drove the fashion industry, the two-sided sword of personal choice in what to wear but also frivolity in spending hours at work to earn the money to buy new clothes, the majority of the plot unfolds quietly, because the Handmaids are meant to be seen, not heard. June and Moira craft their own robes, hiding the knives they will hand out, and Aunt Phoebe guides them to their place at the back of the church. The ceremony is what you would expect in a totalitarian state in which the Commanders are heads of church and state at the same time: instead of a priest, Nick leads it, marrying Serena Joy to Commander Waterford. It’s a reminder of his stellar rise through the Gileadean hierarchy: once a driver living over the Waterford’s garage, he is now vested with the full power to marry his former employer to one of the most powerful men in Gilead, who is also his father-in-law.
Afterwards, there is a moment of panic when Serena takes time out of her own wedding to address the Handmaids. June and Moira slip to the back, attempting to hide their faces in their white wings, but there is still just enough space visible to capture June’s eyerolls at her little speech about how Gilead is changing and how Serena could have been kinder to her own Handmaid, and how they “both said unforgivable things to one another, and now I can count her as a good friend”. It’s spin, and branding, but it is also, unfortunately for Serena, genuine: she truly thinks that this is the truth of her and June’s relationship, and she still believes that her plans for a kinder and gentler Gilead will come to fruition now that she has shored them up with her marriage to a man who can deliver them. There is such a clear engine for the plot in this episode: will the uprising succeed or not – but there is a quieter current that runs through it that leads inevitably to the moment when Serena realises that all of her meticulous plans have come to nothing because she has once again trusted the wrong person, and it’s a disillusionment that happens very, very quickly. 

At the reception, the rest of the knives are handed out to the remaining Handmaids. The cake – dosed with enough sedatives to put everyone to sleep in one to two hours – is cut and handed out, and, in the case of the Handmaids, hidden under their chairs. At the last moment, it looks like the plot will fail because Aunt Lydia, returned from Washington D.C. too soon, returns just in time to catch a glimpse of June and become suspicious enough to put all the pieces together. She finds the left behind cakes. She forces her way into the sleeping chambers of the Handmaids in the Red Centre and finds one of her girls fully clothed under the blankets, trembling at her discovery.

But first, before all the things that June and Moira have set in motion begin to unfold, Serena is carried over the threshold of her new house in Boston by her new husband. They’ve had their meticulously planned ceremony; they’ve shared a romantic dance. Her life back in power is just beginning, and she has plans to atone that require now personal sacrifices. But when she looks around, she sees a Handmaid kneeling there, ready to begin her service (I wonder if she, too, has been given a knife, or if she didn’t make it to the wedding). Ofgabriel is there to provide the many children that her new husband has been dreaming of, just in case Serena’s own fertility fails. As much as Serena’s rocky road to change has been frustrating and half-realised, I think that this is a moment of some true redemption: she does not back down. She is furious (at herself, perhaps most of all: “I was so stupid to do this again”), and betrayed. She insists to Gabriel that Handmaids are people, not vessels, and attempts to leave (“You think God wants this abomination of a marriage?”), but is stopped by a Guardian. Gabriel reveals who he truly is, underneath this thin veneer of civility: a man who has indulged her but will now have his due, who will never take Serena seriously enough to sacrifice anything that is important to him. It looks like he might imprison her in another marriage, the way that Fred did at the end when he revealed his true face, but then she throws the truth at his face: as a Commander, he cannot be a good man and good husband. She leaves through the door with Noah, but where will she go, and what will the world even look like in a few hours when the knives come out and the bombs go off?

The Handmaids walk down the snowy Boston streets, in an episode that does beautiful work with their uniform movement, capturing them in overhead shots. Individual Handmaids pull off from the column one by one to go home to their Commanders, knives at the ready. June goes to Commander Bell’s house where he is dozing off next to the phone, sedated by the cake and by whiskey. He puts up no fight – this isn’t a man who has ever had to fight. With beautiful symmetry, June stabs him through the eye and then frees Janine, who has lost an eye. When they turn up together at the Red Centre, Aunt Lydia is holding everyone hostage, commanding the one remaining Guardian against this massive betrayal she has uncovered. She has ranted scripture at them, and Moira, who Lydia does not remember, has stood up to her, but what changes the equation is the appearance of Janine. It’s interesting that Lydia has such a limited ability to think in structural terms about what Gilead is doing, that she only started to truly question things when she saw the effects on one specific girl she cared about more than the others.

June: You did this. You trained us to be like this. After you beat us and after you mutilated us, and after you tortured us, after you took our children away. You did this. But I think you’ve seen things you can’t unsee. And I think that you’ve learnt things that you can’t unlearn. And I know that in your heart of hearts you know that rape is rape. And you know it wasn’t our fault and we don’t deserve this. And we’re not fallen women, we’re rising up because in each and every one of us is this immaculate soul that was given to us by God, that is just crying out for dignity and freedom.
[…] Is there a God that would empower a woman like you to stand up for us? To arc toward the light, and to finally declare: enough? Because we, all of us, together, we’ve had enough.

It’s a great speech, once again falling back on June’s personal version of religion that exists separately from what Gilead has twisted religion into, put into precise terms that Lydia is bound to resonate with. Janine is who changes Lydia’s mind, and she lets them all go, and the Guardian – more a boy than a man – lets it happen. They are free. The revolution has begun, but how far will it come in the two episodes that remain, and who will survive to see the end?

Random notes:

The unspoken fact about this episode, which I thought was very good and compelling, is that the tension between the plot succeeding or failing existed almost solely because June was the weak spot. If she hadn’t been there, there would have been barely any risk of discovery – even though the things that gives it away in the end is Lydia’s suspicion (by itself mainly raised because she thought she spotted June) and finding of the cakes under the chairs. June had to be there for story reasons – she is the face of the rebellion – but she is also one of the most recognisable faces in Gilead, who has in the past intersected with several of the guests. There was no reason why she had to be the one there, or why she shouldn’t have simply gone off to kill Bell after the sedative was delivered without ever attending the wedding.

There’s almost a fairy tale quality to this episode, especially with the cake putting the entire kingdom to sleep, but I did giggle a little bit at the very Fight Club vibes in the opening monologue.

Nick, in his sermon at the church, says “mine own child first and forever”, opening the forever question of which child he is talking about. June seems ready to blow the plan at several points, and for a moment I thought she might just use her knife on him instead of freeing Janine. I think Rita’s very well-timed “eye on the prize” speech to get rid of Serena is aimed directly at June and her furious, fuming eyes.

Serena’s hopeful little conversation with Commander Lawrence is almost tragic: she tells him how committed she is to their shared plan, not knowing that he has moved on, that he knows she cannot deliver on them, that he himself delivered this wedding as the perfect opportunity to rid himself of his political rivals. Do we think that he ate the cake at least? He definitely encourages his beloved new wife to have heaps of it, perhaps looking forward to a moment of quiet before preparing for the fall-out.

The Handmaid’s Tale – We’re here for all of those women.

The Handmaid's Tale: 6x07 Shattered.

If there is one noticeable difference in tone since previous seasons of this show, it’s that we’re naming things as they are: in this episode alone, Luke calls Nick a “Nazi” and questions how June could fall in love with one, and Commander Lawrence, now a more reliable contact to the inside of Gilead because it’s in his self-interest to support Mayday, has the word “fascist” thrown at him, immutable in spite of his cooperation. A lot has changed since this show started in 2017, with the rise of the extreme right being the most horrifying monster to rear its ugly head. Since the first season, religious extremists have forged a happy and fruitful alliance with these groups, and it has altered the language of the show accordingly.

June’s faith in Nick has destroyed Mayday’s plans to kill the Commanders at Jezebel’s, and it has cost the lives of the women forced to work there, who are all shot, with the exception of Janine, who is taken away. It’s Nick who is responsible for these deaths, but June is culpable as well, because she trusted him with information that she should have never given him. These women were meant to be rescued, and now, they have died – as so many others have who followed June. Nick argues what we already know about him, that the only thing he has always reliably done has been saving June, that he has never shown any dedication beyond protecting himself and her – but she loved him, and she thought he was someone he wasn’t, because what does it say about her now that she could have loved such a man?

June: You gave up those women to save yourself.
Nick: We all want to save ourselves. We’re fucking human, that’s what we do.
June: You’re just like them.
Nick: And you love me. So what does that make you?

I think the twist that Lawrence goes to Mayday straight away to ensure that other plans are in motion to kill the warhawks who have already planned his death is interesting: here is a man who has never, by anyone, been considered as more than self-interested. He is reliable because he is predictable, because nobody expects him to do more than look out for himself. That makes him a better ally in this case, because what could be a greater motivator than saving his own life by ensuring that his enemies die? And what better occasion to hit as many influential people in Gilead as possible than Serena’s wedding, which has now been moved to Boston because in her meeting with other, proper Gileadean wives, it has become obvious that her plans for reform are falling on deaf ears. All these wives – these women in green, facing a woman who no longer wears that colour and is not one of their own anymore – have no interest in reforming a system that benefits them. They so easily fall into a rhythm of “my husband says” without holding a thought of their own, revealing to Serena that her plans – and what she considers Commander Wharton’s plans for now, as well – are doomed to fail without a show of power. With the wedding being back in Gilead, it also means that Handmaids will be present, forced to witness a ceremony so connected to their own subjugation, never meeting the bride’s eyes. It’s already a concession that Serena has to make, but it’s also the weak point, because Mayday can use them to infiltrate the ceremony. Lawrence also knows exactly how to hook June on his plan, as she’s packing up to leave a place that is no longer welcoming to her: would she want Serena to win in the end, to have her move up in the world while June’s legacy will be defeat?

On the sidelines of these plans developing, Luke and June once again reaffirm that they will continue to support each other, that their love still exists in spite of everything that happened, not just because of Hannah. Luke is furious, but he can’t stop loving June (June asks him to not pity her, and gives him an out, but he doesn’t take it). I wish that Luke had gotten a bit more to do this season, that he was more than just a mirror for June to reflect her own weaknesses back at her, but at least his bombs are still in play: with Serena requiring more Guardian support at her wedding, all those precious buildings will be unguarded. If anything, this plan feels more solid than the original one did, except it comes at the cost of all those lives lost at Jezebel’s. 

Janine, meanwhile, is once again taking the brunt of all the horrors, perhaps, as Commander Lawrence suggests, wishing she had died at Jezebel’s instead. Commander Bell has saved his favourite and taken her on as a Handmaid, and as much as Aunt Lydia is overjoyed to her that she is still alive, she realises what that means for her instantly. She is not “presentable” enough to attend Serena’s wedding, because Commander Bell and his wife seem to take joy in abusing and beating her (the cold shiver of “we’ve been working on her adjustment all morning”), which thankfully happens off screen. June has her own plans to save her, but I hate that the show keeps falling back into its favourite habit of torturing Janine, who has survived so much. If she had left with June and Moira, she’d be safe and sound with Mayday now, but she made the selfless decision of staying behind, and is paying for her courage now.

Moira and June sneak into the Handmaids training centre while Lawrence gets Aunt Lydia out of the way, offering her the opportunity to speak to the birthing centre plans in D.C. Aunt Phoebe is in place – a resistance mole, placed perfectly for this mission – to prepare the Handmaids for their mission. Before the shit hits the fan, June offers a prayer that ends with “Give us the strength to murder those goddamn motherfuckers.”

Random notes:

What an absolute treat to have D’Arcy Carden join the revolution, even if it’s almost the end. There should have been many more seasons of A League of Their Own, but I’m always happy to see her. I wonder if her character will carry through to The Testaments.

Nick, being revealed as who he truly is to the only person whose opinion he cares about, now takes it all to the obvious conclusion: he no longer has to pretend to care, he can do the easiest thing in the world after proclaiming that it’s all just about saving his own skin, and step back from his promise to Rita to help her find her family. Which brings Rita back into the Mayday fold, ready to deliver for them.

I really like June and Moira’s little conversation, where Moira is all too ready to forgive June for trusting Nick: she says that if a Commander had saved her life, she might have fallen in love with him too if he was “Angelina Jolie hot” (June, in what is a funny moment in a very dreary episode, says that Nick is definitely not that).

“Her narcissism brought down one nation, now it’s going to bring down another.”

Moira: Say something leaderish. Leadery.

Favourite Books I've Read This Year (in progress)

Non-Fiction: 

Manisha Sinha: The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920.
Wright Thompson: The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi.
John Ganz: When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s.
Richard Flanagan: Question 7.

Fiction: 

Colson Whitehead: The Nickel Boys. 

Trang Thanh Tran: They Bloom at Night.

Katherine Arden: The Warm Hands of Ghosts. 

Liz Moore: The God of the Woods. 

Liz Moore: The Unseen World. 

I read The Nickel Boys just before watching this year's cinematic adaptation by RaMell Ross, which will be somewhere on the top of my favourite films this year: this is a beautiful, painful book about two boys caught up in the horrors of a fictionalised version of the Florida's Dozier School for Boys, the same setting as 2023's The Reformatory by Tananarive Due. The transit from the gentleness, pride and support that Elwood Curtis experiences growing up under the tender care of his grandmother into the system of abuse and violence at the "school" he ends up in through no fault of his own is jarring - his inability to realise that the rules he has internalised all his life about fairness and equity do not apply here, his focus on truth and justice, doom him, as much as his friend Turner tries to guide him. 

Trang Thanh Tran's follow-up to She is a Haunting, this year's They Bloom at Night, is set in a fishing community on the Gulf of Mexico, where a mysterious algae has literally transformed life after a Hurricane. There is a sense that the world has already ended there in some way, that the cataclysm is in the past and the remaining inhabitants are slowly coming to terms with it: Noon, daughter of a shrimper, tries to solve mysterious disappearances in the town with the help of the corrupt harbourmaster's daughter Covey, but also begins realising that she herself has been transforming into something not entirely human anymore ("a story about a monster learning to love herself") - and the story is very much about the question of what is monstrous, in a world where truly monstrous acts are being committed by people because they fear what they do not understand. 

I came to Liz Moore's fiction after starting to watch the adaptation of Long Bright River, starring Amanda Seyfried. The two novels I picked up are The God of the Woods and The Unseen World, and the range between them is truly amazing. The first one is the story of two disappearances in a manor and summer camp - one in the past, the other in 1975. The lost children are siblings, son and daughter to the rich family that employs most of the people in this part of the Adirondacks, and in revealing the details of the investigation and the people connected to it, Moore tells a story about class (specifically the relationship between the blue collar workers and the rich who depend on their labour, in spite of their claims of "self-reliance", literally the name they've chosen for their estate) and misogyny, focusing on women struggling to be heard and to have agency over their lives. 

The Unseen World is a marvel that reminded me of the best of Richard Powers' fiction: the story of a single father raising a daughter, Ada, by himself. Ada grows up surrounded by her father's colleague at a computer research institute in the 1980s - her father is heading a team that is building an early version of artificial intelligence called ELIXIR. It's an unconventional education that centres curiosity that prepares her poorly for transferring to a regular school later on, where she struggles to understand the societal rules of teenage cliques. When her father begins exhibiting symptoms of Alzheimer's, Ada realises that he has kept secrets from her, and she begins a journey to try and find out who he really is. I'm excited that both of these books have been picked up to be turned into television shows. 

n+1: We Have Always Lived in the Convention, January 10, 2025.

coda.: The death of truth was by design, January 14, 2025. 

Vulture: There Is No Safe Word. How the best-selling fantasy author Neil Gaiman hid the darkest parts of himself for decades, January 13, 2025.

Atmos: The World’s Northernmost Coal Mine Closing Is Good News… Right?, January 14, 2025.

.coda: Trump, Museveni and the anti-LGBT agenda, January 31, 2025.

Wired: The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk's Government Takeover, February 2, 2025. 

New York Review: Darfur: A War Within a War, February 2, 2025.

The Guardian: Wall Street Journal editorial calls Trump tariffs ‘dumbest trade war in history’, February 3, 2025.

.coda: Shattering the Overton Window, February 7, 2025.

n+1: Full-Throated Explicit Dehumanization, February 10, 2025. 

Undark: Grave Mistakes: The History and Future of Chile’s ‘Disappeared’, February 19, 2025.

.coda: How the West lost the war it thought it had won, February 24, 2025. 

Reactor: Severance Is the Future Tech Bros Want, February 26, 2025.

Atmos: On the Anniversary of Wounded Knee, Leonard Peltier’s Release Sparks Reflection and Hope, February 27, 2025.

The New Yorker: The Subversive Love Songs of Lucy Dacus, March 17, 2025.

Vulture: My Cool Friend Michelle, March 18, 2025. 

Atmos: Australia’s Heat Is Rising. So Is Its Climate Inequality., April 17, 2025. 

The Guardian: Daria Kasatkina: ‘If I wanted to live a free, open life I couldn’t do it in Russia’, April 25, 2025. 

The Verge: Wandering Souls, April 2025.

Rolling Stone: People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies, May 4, 2025. 

Dissent: Schengen Surveillance, May 2025. 

The Guardian: Gaza will be entirely destroyed, Israeli minister says, May 7, 2025.

New York Review: Gaza: Starvation and Exile, May 18, 2025.

The Handmaid’s Tale - Are you on board?

The Handmaid's Tale: 6x06 Surprise.

 

All the tension of this episode – it’s the shortest of the season so far, and yet the most propulsive in terms of story– comes from the question of whether June and Mayday’s plot will be betrayed. The whole point of a secret plan is that it remains so, that as few people as possible learn about it, and yet June, due to a series of truly unfortunate decisions very much in line with what Moira blamed her for in the previous episode, now has to rely on a group of people who are, for various reasons, inherently untrustworthy. As much as June has been in the resistance for a long time now, she is not a seasoned revolutionary, and by the end of the episode it becomes obvious that the plan will fail because she trusted the wrong person.

Worse than that, the person who does end up betraying her is the one, among the three who could have, she trusted the most. Commander Lawrence, so hesitant to get involved in anything related to June, both for professional and personal reasons (the episode reminds us that June let his wife die), turns out to be trustworthy because he can personally profit from what Mayday have planned. The very Commanders who he has just spied plotting his death through the walls of Jezebel’s will die in the attack, leaving him the sole man standing to finish his project, which he does very directly connect to his wife in this episode. His guilt is not so much derived from the pain and suffering caused to June and all the other women like her, but for creating a prison for his wife, who was utterly miserable in Gilead. It’s a reminder that all these characters have personal motivations for their actions that are less about ideological resistance to a reprehensible regime and more about the specific people they have lost or are trying to save. Lawrence gets out Moira safe, but June stays behind to meet up with Nick, who is tasked with retrieving the letters and plans from Jezebel’s that were locked in the safe. It has always been clear that Nick’s uneasy cooperation with Mark Tuello is about June and their daughter Holly, not about any intention to destroy Gilead. His love for June – who, he can guess, is engaged in activity that makes future meetings more and more unlikely, is the reason for the foolish and reckless decision to ask her to stay the night. June’s decision to stay, in the context of all that is on the line and all she owes to Moira and Janine, is completely bewildering. Nick thinks that his father-in-law has left New Bethlehem for D.C. with Rose, but of course, with all that has been happening, with his guilt about killing the Guardian in the hospital, he should have realised not to rely on it. Commander Wharton is diligent and keyed into everything that happens in Gilead, and he has made it explicitly clear in the past that he is watching everything that Nick does. Of course he received a phone call when the Guardian died, and of course he’s decided to turn back to confront Nick – there are just too many suspicious coincidences piling up.

While June waits in the car outside the house, Nick is on the brink of discovery. Wharton is not a man who is easily lied to, and he loses his temper for the first time here, revealing how truly dangerous he is underneath the veneer of control and civility. He has always been the most dangerous of the Commanders because of his control, for the very reason that keeps him so far away from the other Commanders at Jezebel’s: he is a true believer, and he is powerful enough that he can afford not to buy into this scheme of mutually assured destruction that they engage in whenever they go out in mobs to terrorise the women at Jezebel’s. Nick has to give him something, and he’s not going to sell out June, whom he loves, whom he made silly, childish plans with when they were meeting in his apartment above the Waterfords’ garage. It’s June’s naivety that she’s never made a difference between trusting Nick with her life and trusting him with information about Mayday’s activities, in spite of the fact that he’s repeatedly proved that he can only be trusted with the former.

June, left out in the rain, flees to the only other potentially safe place in New Bethlehem. It’s a last resort, especially in light of how far these two characters have come just in the few months since they were on that train together. Serena is now engaged to the most powerful of Gilead’s Commanders and very much once again an architect of Gilead, even if it is towards a changed and potentially less obviously heinous one. June has reunited with her mother, whom she thought dead, and become a vital part of a plot to terrorise Gilead. There is a lot on the line for both of them, a lot that they are each risking by meeting. If you had to bet on anyone to betray June in this episode, it would be Serena with her incomplete comprehension about her culpability, her inability to admit just how responsible she was for the suffering of June and other women. And yet – as much as possible, and much more than expected – she provides a safe haven for June, even after they fight, even after June once again admits that she will never forgive Serena for what she has done, let her off the hook for her sins, that she has already done all she will ever do for her when she helped bring Noah into the world and saved her. June lies to Serena about why she is on the wrong side of the border, making up a story about asking Nick to come with her to Alaska to raise Holly with him, an idea that rubs Serena wrong in all the religious ways (“what does your husband think about that”). I think in the context of what Nick proposes later in the episode, a romantic plan of both of them running away to Paris that the show leaves hanging in air for viewers to interpret (would she say yes?), it’s interesting that she has never even thought about that option, not necessarily because of Luke, but because it would mean leaving Hannah behind – and how interesting that Serena, who I would have thought knows June better than most people at this point, doesn’t pick up on that.
The most interesting part of their conversation is when Serena reveals that she is now engaged to Commander Wharton (and, awkwardly, about to become Nick’s mother-in-law). June seems to react to it with a mixture of sarcasm and genuine concern for Serena, asking her if she initially realised that “Fred was Fred” (we’ve seen in a flashback that she didn’t – she was just as starry-eyed and excited as she is now) .She warns her that she is once again subjugating herself to a man and serving Gilead, but in light of the betrayal at the centre of the episode, there is a certain irony in the warning – June is not heeding her own advice, and she has completely disregarded what her own mother said about Nick.
Serena gives her clothes and a bed, and she invites Rita over the next day for them all to have a beautiful, serene, light-filled breakfast, during which June tries to recruit Rita into Mayday even though she has just reconnected with her sister and is on the brink of actually living a safe life (the subtext is that the plan that June is executing for Mayday would very much put an end to this – but what do they all owe to each other?). Nick comes over and proposes his plan of escape, very much motivated by the narrow escape he just had from his father-in-law, who pops by to see his fiancée – and tell her all about the thwarted plan against Jezebel’s, which he has shut down, because the only way Nick could get off the hook was to tell him everything about it. By trusting Nick too much, June has sold Janine’s freedom – the same Janine, who was so ready for the plan, who turns down Lydia’s attempt at making up for her own mistakes, and is now left with absolutely nothing. Janine decided to stay behind to save the other girls, and now her way out has been closed off. 

Random notes:

Again a shout-out to Madeline Brewer in this episode: she gives Lydia absolutely nothing, she screams at her for taking away her daughter and having no way to give her back, she wants to burn Gilead to the ground. How will this all end for her?

June reading Serena’s writing – she’s definitely working on her comeback book – and realising that Serena truly does not comprehend what she has done – I do wonder where Serena will end up at the end of the show, if she will make it out alive. She’s irredeemable, but in a very interesting way.

I’ve thought about that flashback to Nick and June a lot, especially how Nick talks about that he would have never met June if it weren’t for Gilead – he would have been a nobody, and now he isn’t, even though he’s not yet managed his stellar rise. Remember, he was an Eye – an agent of terror in the regime, that transformed him from a man with no college education and prospects into someone who holds power, even if it’s not as much as his father-in-law. I don’t think that June is really hearing all of that, she’s just thinking about how romantic it would be to go to Paris or to a date at a presumably long-closed Italian restaurant. She calls him “good, kind, brave” – and it’s taken her this long to realise how wrong her assessment of him was.

One of the low-key favourite moments in the episode is Commander Lawrence teaching Charlotte/Angela chess: she is much too young, but I think the more important fact is that this is a man who, after hearing of June’s plot, thinks that she will grow up in a very different Gilead where it is no longer considered unwomanly to play chess, as Naomi thinks. He’s making up for the world he created that made his wife suffer, but now maybe he’s working to build one that will be kinder to his adopted daughter (and there’s always a fun aspect to how Naomi always seems to be lurking suspiciously, how he can never be sure that he isn’t being watched by the wife he never really wanted).

Reading List: April.

Non-Fiction: 

 

Roderick MacFarquhar, Michael Schoenhals: Mao's Last Revolution. 

Reid Mitenbuler: Wanderlust: An Eccentric Explorer, an Epic Journey, a Lost Age.  

Chris Hayes: The Siren's Call. 

Stephen R. Bown: The Company: The Rise and Fall of the Hudson's Bay Empire.

W. Scott Poole: Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror.

 

Fiction: 

 

Hannah Deitch: Killer Potential.

Amy Shearn: Animal Instinct. 

Allison Gunn: Nowhere. 

S.A. Cosby: Razorblade Tears. 

Katherine Arden: The Warm Hands of Ghosts. 

 

Films: 

 

Y2K (2024, Kyle Mooney). 

Certain Women (2016, Kelly Reichardt).

In the Lost Lands (2025, Paul W.S. Anderson).

September 5 (2024, Tim Fehlbaum). 

My Dead Friend Zoe (2024, Kyle Hausmann-Stokes).

 

Shows: 

 

Dying for Sex, Season One.

The Handmaid’s Tale - Are you getting us out?

The Handmaid's Tale: 6x05 Janine.

At the centre of Janine are two conversations. One compares suffering, inflicted – what it means to have been deliberately ignorant about the reality of it, which really just works as a cover-up of actual, direct responsibility for it. The other compares suffering, endured – and arrives at the realisation that victims of the regime playing one-up about it just play into the hands of the oppressors, because it takes the focus away from who is causing the pain and makes solidarity more difficult.
The first conversation happens between Aunt Lydia and Serena Joy, who are both engaged in a project of atoning for their guilt, although I’d argue that neither of them has admitted the true extent of it, and is conveniently looking at the other as less evolved. Lydia wants to save Janine after realising that she has been blind to the lies that were told to her about where her Handmaids would eventually end up, but it doesn’t feel like she is questioning the project itself, only that it wasn’t truthful about delivering the Handmaids out of their misery after they have endured their suffering. She still casts herself as a protector to her “girls” and as a victim. Serena is trying to build a different Gilead out of the example she is setting in New Bethlehem, but she, too, still believes in the project of Gilead itself, which she believes to be reformable. Serena doesn’t question the ideology behind Gilead, only the excesses it has committed against women, and she hides her responsibility for the specific suffering she has caused – to June, especially – behind her wish for a child at the time, a wish that we know is now exalted way beyond the borders of Gilead. The fertility clinic she has built in Canada, the freedom that women enjoy in New Bethlehem, are all meant to showcase was Serena originally wanted, as if any deviation from it was the fault of anyone but herself. The two meet in the middle: Aunt Lydia suggests that her Handmaids could work as attendants in new fertility clinics instead of being sent to the Colonies, or the wall, or to Jezebel’s. She doesn’t want to end the Handmaid programme, or allow “her girls” any true measure of freedom. Serena can’t admit that her dreams of a reformed Gilead are dead in the water (how truly dead they are is revealed when Joseph Lawrence overhears his fellow Commanders plotting his downfall and the end to his project of open borders through a spyhole at Jezebel’s), and that whatever freedom for women she has achieved in New Bethlehem is both short-lived and only accorded to a few privileged people such as herself. There is no true regret here, or atonement, only self-interested attempts to soothe their conscience.

The second conversation is much thornier, because it goes beyond the world the show has built and reflects, on the meta-level, on The Handmaid’s Tale itself. June and Moira, still furious at each other, are going into Jezebel’s to warn Janine about Mayday’s coming attack. They’re successful, and Janine seems prepared for what they have planned, giving them the best access point plus a door code. At the last moment, June asks Janine to come with them right now, putting the entire plan to save all of the women at risk. It’s Janine’s responsibility for the other women that keeps her there – nobody else is better equipped to ensure that as many of them get out before the attack than her. Moira is stunned that June would have put the life of her friend before those of all the other women here, and would change the plan at the last minute. They have it out: Moira accusing June of always putting herself first, using her own suffering to centre herself, without much thought about what everyone else has gone through. She asks if she has a right to her trauma as well, as someone who escaped the abuse and rape of Jezebel’s, or if only June’s pain as a Handmaid counts. They do find their way back to their love for each other, realising that this argument of measuring each other’s pain against each other means losing sight of who is inflicting the pain – but it’s also one of the core issues that this show has been struggling with, and by allowing June and Moira to make peace again, it feels like The Handmaid’s Tale is writing itself a hall pass in the process. This whole show has been based on the idea that the horrible aspect of Gilead is that these things that have historically happened to people of colour and queer people are now happening to straight, white women. June’s pain has always been more central than everyone else’s, because she’s the main character: Elisabeth Moss is the face of the show (a centrality that was initially maybe mediated when Emily was still around – and I wonder if there’s a version of the story where Alexis Bledel didn’t leave and it would have turned out differently) and June is the face of what Gilead has created, and now the face of the resistance against it. Moira has always been on the sidelines of that struggle, a supporting role in June’s deliverance and now her resistance. I wish that the show had given her more time to articulate the wish to break free from that, and followed her into that independence.

Once June and Moira come back to each other, the whole plan goes sideways. A guardian traps them in a room and attempts to rape Moira, a horrifying moment already but unbearable in light of the fact that Moira has returned to the place where she was raped and abused repeatedly. They kill the man, but his absence is quickly noted, and they are delayed by having to get rid of the body. At the gates, Luke is turned away by another guardian and almost arrested in his attempt to get June out. They end up having to rely on Commander Lawrence – a man who has just overheard the other Commanders plotting his death – to get them out in the boot of his car.

Serena, haunted by Aunt Lydia’s words about “a healthy womb must never go to waste”, walks right into a proposal by Commander Wharton that has been a long time coming: he’s built her a library as proof of his promise that he wants Gilead to change too, that he will never treat her as her former husband did. It’s very romantic, and also an impossible situation for Serena to escape: she has to believe him, because she can’t say no. We know that the bombs will soon go off, and I doubt that he will stick to his words when Gilead comes under actual threat.

Random notes:

Serena uses her wellness branding language so effortlessly – she fits neatly into a fold of the current overlap between fascism, wellness and self-improvement literature.

Lawrence is correct in saying that the other Commanders despise and disrespect Commander Bell, but he doesn’t have to taken into account that they mistrust him more, because he is already inherently suspect for not sharing in their aggressive misogyny. Lawrence wants to reform Gilead, but these men are happy with Gilead as it is.

Janine’s “You’re not a good guy. Just compared to them you are.” hits hard. It also makes me wish that Madeline Brewer, between this and her final season performance in You, had been more available this season.

Nick is in hot water as well, because one of the two guardians he shot to save Moira and Luke has survived and is waking up from his coma. He meets the mother of the man, only to make the inevitable task of getting rid of him harder. The walls are closing in.

Commander Lawrence’s “Oh hell no” was great comedic acting.

The Handmaid’s Tale - This is my turn.

The Handmaid's Tale: 6x04 Promotion.

I feel like it breaks us every day. 

I don’t really have much in terms of theories about where all of these characters will end up at the conclusion of the series. The Handmaid’s Tale has often been bleak and cruel to its characters, and maybe it would feel like a cop out to give any of them a happy ending, to provide a beacon of hope when Gilead is going to continue existing, and the precarious places of relative safety are shrinking. June, Moira and Luke could have returned to Alaska after the rescue to build a family with the two Hollies (Holly being Nichole’s true name), but it would have required that June and Luke give up the hope of finding Hannah, an impossible preposition. They have returned and retreated from Gilead like a yo-yo, each time leaving more of themselves behind, with their odds of survival diminishing. Promotion builds up to the final moment, where Luke and June decide they will continue fighting the regime together because they know they can ultimately never escape the draw of reuniting with their daughter – and Moira will return too, eager to build a life separate from her two friends, returning to the place she barely escaped all those years ago to help Jezebels escape before the attack.

Everyone’s return is of course inevitable, narrative-wise. Had they flown off to Alaska, the story would be over – the fight would continue, but without them. Holly is now conveniently out of the way, safe in Alaska, and there is nothing stopping them from dedicating everything to what feels like a last-ditch effort, directed by a disillusioned Mark Tuello who does not care about the human cost. Luke has been using his knowledge as a civil engineer to plan where Mayday can best place their bombs for maximum damage on the Commanders, and he feels so responsible for the plan that he wants to execute it in person. Moira and June are horrified at the prospect that Mayday is intending to attack Jezebels without any care for the women who work there against their will, and so they must go in and safe as many of them as possible before the gun squad arrives. It all feels inevitable, but also inevitably doomed, because as June insists again and again, even in the best-case scenario where everything goes to plan, which she doubts it will, they might not end up finding Hannah at the end. Luke is still driven by his shame and guilt about not having contributed enough to a fight that has caused so much damage to his wife, and he is even more eager to prove himself after June has had to rescue him, once again. Moira is driven by frustration over June’s protectiveness, by the feeling that she has lived someone else’s life and is now once again almost robbed of the chance to do something by herself, for herself. I don’t think that all of them will return alive. 

On the other side of the equation, the potential targets of the Mayday attack are lining up. In honour of his successful project, Commander Lawrence becomes a High Commander, in a weird, half-religious half Freemasons inspired ritual. Naomi, his reluctant wife, has warned him that all these Commanders care about are proofs of virility that are both gross rituals of hypermasculinity and a way to incriminate everyone well in sight of each other. Wharton is the outlier, a man who is so steadfast in his belief and so safe in his power that he doesn’t have to go to Jezebels to prove anything to anyone, but Lawrence doesn’t escape, because his position is still precarious. This episode spends a lot of time on this complex man, who is reluctantly connecting to his step-daughter while still very much struggling with this marriage he never wanted. At Jezebels, he finds a woman he knows well – Janine, who is there because Naomi couldn’t tolerate her presence in her household, and because Lawrence kept her from the colonies and the wall. He performatively takes her to a room in front of the other cheering Commanders, but of course he just wants to talk, and he gives her one of her daughter’s drawings. He has personally created most of the programmes that are terrorising women in Gilead, and these are the smallest ways in which he is now trying to make up for it. There is a whole host of characters indirectly implicated in what has happened to Janine – part of June’s decision to scope out the place to save the women isn’t just about saving Moira, but her “little sister” Janine.

Serena is courted by Commander Wharton, who has had his eyes on her even before the death of her first husband (who Serena, satisfyingly, refers to as an “anvil”). Wharton is like the absolute expression of how Gilead probably, in ideology, wanted to recreate masculinity (while Jezebels is an example of how that ideology failed in reality), and beneath the veneer of chivalry and charm, it looks a lot more terrifying than Fred ever did. He talks about how he used to be too shy to talk to her, he asks her to dance with him on the dimly lit streets of New Bethlehem. It’s a fucked-up romcom, and when Aunt Lydia steps into view, probably already thinking through how she can use this for her own purposes.

Random notes:

Timothy Simons, forever Jonah from Veep, appears as Commander Bell, an exaggerated gross example of what weak men turn into when they are given a smidgen of power. If anyone’s for sure going to be at Jezebels when the attack happens, it’s him.

Serena helps Rita reunite with her sister in New Bethlehem and is eager for her to move there, maybe out of guilt, maybe to have one other person there she knows and trusts. But it takes Nick, who genuinely cares about her (and vice-versa, apparently) assuring her he can track down the rest of her family even though it will take them, for her to make the decision. I don’t think that New Bethlehem will be quite the safe place it is now after Mayday have finished their campaign.

It feels like Lawrence reading The Little Princess to Angela was just The Handmaid’s Tale revelling in what a great narrator voice Bradley Whitford has – and rightly so.