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.

The Handmaid’s Tale - There’s no god here.

The Handmaid's Tale: 6x03 Devotion.

This is the first episode of the final season that felt like it existed in the No Man’s Land between tying up some storylines while still waiting for new ones to take off. Your mileage with Devotion may vary based on how you feel about Nick – but as someone who’s with June’s mum on this one, this wasn’t a great ride for me. June and Nick even talk at the end about how they always end up saying goodbye like it’ll be the last time, so this time they’ll say “see you soon” – except maybe this is now actual a final time, because Nick goes above and beyond here to risk everything once again for the mother of his child, and with all of his father-in-law’s attention on him, it’s hard to see how he will continue to evade detection.
June goes to Mark Tuello to figure out how to retrieve Moira and Luke, who are stuck in an abandoned waterpark in No Man’s Land. Since Nick has stopped providing information on Guardian routes, they’re trapped there, but June knows that Nick will once again do whatever she asks to help, even if he has so much else to protect now. He makes the truly mindboggling choice to go off himself – reluctantly taking June along with him – while the biggest diplomatic event is happening in New Bethlehem, which has invited foreign dignitaries eager to repatriate its populace of Gileadean refugees there. While they search for Luke and Moira, Commander Wharton continuously asks where Nick is, and as much as he seems drawn to Serena (in a creepy way – remember, Serena is meant to get remarried, and there doesn’t seem to be a Mrs Wharton in sight), I’m sure he can keep more than one thing on his mind at any given time. The rescue is relatively unspectacular: Moira watches Luke melting down, doing an Aria Stark routine with the names of the Commanders that ordered the airstrike, killing any hope of rescue for Hannah. Just as they’re about to leave, they do run into a Guardian patrol, but cornered, Nick doesn’t seem to hesitate a moment before he pulls his gun and kills them. It feels kind of low-stakes, like the kind of storytelling device that was necessary for June to leave the relative safety of Alaska, and culminates in another scene in which Nick feels sorry for himself for loving June more than she loves him. His heroism may have gone down a bit more smoothly if he didn’t bother to remind her that he just risked it all to save her husband, whom she chose over her. Both Luke and Nick are frustrating in their own way, but at least Luke’s desperation to prove himself (curtailed by the fact that June once again had to save him, with the humiliating element of Nick’s presence) is more understandable: his daughter is still lost. Moira has suffered so much more than either of these men and yet continues to be a rock and voice of reason.

Back in New Bethlehem, the spotlight is on Serena’s ability to sell the place to people who at least pretend to care about the ultimate fate of refugees who will return there (a nice thought, in the year 2025). As someone who is still skillfully playing the victim card (her missing finger out of view but never out of mind) while also weaving a narrative about seeking forgiveness for her transgression against other women, she talks passionately about the freedoms women will be granted here. What sells it in the end (and I hate to use this word again, but frustratingly) is babies. As much as the two foreign dignitaries ask questions of concern and doubt the sincerity of Gilead’s intention, once Serena rolls out Baby Noah and Commander Wharton presents his pregnant daughter, they become reduced to loving coos, which might just be one of the most insulting things that this show has ever done (an inspired choice for the two main ones who get to speak to be women). They are meant to be respected negotiators, but melt into a puddle at the prospect of holding a baby. Gilead is doing baby diplomacy – which they’ve always known was their biggest selling point – and it still feels like a choice by this show to have them fall for it as badly as they do. It can maybe be excused by the cynical idea that these diplomats were sent their symbolically, that all these countries are all too eager to get rid of refugees and restore diplomatic relations anyway and need only a sliver of an excuse to do so, but still, I do expect more from The Handmaid’s Tale. I hope I could still see through the thin veneer of fascist propaganda if it came with a side of cute puppies and I'm not a career diplomat.

The fun bits of the episode are Serena’s wildly different experiences with Commander Lawrence vs Commander Wharton. She knows that Lawrence is not a true believer, that he can’t even believably pray with her (he says “if there is a god”, a great line for a man representing a theological totalitarian state). I don’t think that any previous iteration of Serena Joy would have had the capacity to realise with just as much pragmatism that his ideological shakiness is exactly what makes him a great ally, whereas Wharton, who speaks her language of devotion perfectly, is much more dangerous to her. Wharton also gives us an insight into what is really going on here: while Lawrence and Serena dream of Gilead transformed by New Bethlehem, with more model villages joining the frays and things eventually changing in Gilead proper, Wharton sees this very much as a limited diplomatic exercise, a symbolic gesture that only serves to restore trade. Wharton has no intention to change Gilead, and he seems, from what we’ve seen, to be much more secure in his power than Lawrence, the odd man out, could ever be. Lawrence wants is driven by his feelings about his dead wife and his guilty conscience, Serena wants to fix the country she broke, but Wharton is perfectly happy for everything to stay exactly the same.

There aren’t many incentives for men like Wharton to change Gilead proper. He doesn’t seem to feel guilt over what he has helped built, and he is living a life of privilege. Back in Gilead proper, Aunt Lydia continues her journey of disillusionment – she would have thought herself to be a paragon of Gileadean virtue, and she believes that her work has helped the women she has, in her interpretation, cared for. It’s the kind of work that has made all these now diplomatically vital babies possible. But now, at Jezebels, she realises that she has been lied to: Not only is Janine there, but three other Handmaids who have fulfilled their duty, who she thought would be living a life of comfort now, are there as well. Janine explains to her that they are the lucky ones – other Handmaids were sent to the colonies, far away from prying eyes. Jezebels, where Gilead allows those who can afford it the privilege to vent their religiously repressed desires, is state-sanctioned, a pressure valve. Aunt Lydia makes it her mission to save Janine from there (Janine warns her that every time she tries to help, she makes things worse – and if anyone has been through the worst, it’s her), and she goes to New Bethlehem to ask Naomi and Commander Lawrence to take her in, which Naomi furiously refuses. What other authorities does Aunt Lydia have to appeal to?  

Random notes:

I think this episode was even more frustrating for all it teased in its scenes set at Jezebels: I find myself much more engaged in Janine’s story and Aunt Lydia’s (probably misguided) attempts to save her, but how much of that will be part of The Testaments rather than this final season remains to be seen.

Serena’s “You’re crying right now. On the inside.” made me laugh. Yvonne Strahovski doesn’t get a lot of comedic acting on the show but she’s so good at it.

I think these first few episodes of the season have shown that Mark Tuello truly does not care about the people he sends – he is fighting what he knows is a doomed battle. I think Nick’s life is likely coming to an end soon, but I don’t think that Mark will outlive him by a lot.

Yellowjackets - Table of Contents

Season One: 

Pilot

F Sharp

The Dollhouse

Bear Down

Blood Hive

Saints

No Compass

Flight of the Bumblebee

Doomcoming
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

Season Two: 

Friends, Romans, Countrymen

Edible Complex

Digestif

Old Wounds

Two Truths and a Lie

Qui

Burial

It Chooses

Storytelling

 

Season Three: 

 

It Girl

Dislocation

Them's the Brakes

12 Angry Girls and 1 Drunk Travis

Did Tai Do That?

Thanksgiving (Canada)

Croak

A Normal, Boring Life

How the Story Ends

Full Circle

Yellowjackets - Do you remember what we promised?

Yellowjackets: 3x10 Full Circle.

You deserve everything that’s coming to you!

What an appropriate title Full Circle is for the third season finale! The double-mystery of Pit Girl and Antler Queen has been hanging over Yellowjackets since the beginning, and they are both resolved now. I would argue that they are both inevitable resolutions, and I don’t feel let down by the fact that both identities could have been easily predicted from the shape that this season has taken – there’s something pleasing about the puzzle pieces falling into place without any last-minute twists. It is an earned outcome, one that plays well with the general horror of seeing another winter begin under the new leadership of Shauna, who has hated Mari for a very long time. The show doesn’t need this particular mystery as fuel anymore, because instead of a who-done-it in the past, we are now entering a new phase with as much of a voiced mission statement as we have ever had: in the end, to truly be safe, there can only be one survivor. At the end of the episode, Shauna is setting out to reclaim what she lost when she returned to civilisation, and Misty and Tai team up to protect themselves from her. Melissa remains out there, unseen, but she’s without support (although it’s interesting that the show deliberately hasn’t committed one way or another whether there are more survivors – I’m still keeping my fingers crossed for Akilah), so things aren’t looking too good for her. We’ve arrived at the sharp end of the stick. 

The smaller mystery of the season, the question of Lottie’s murderer, is also resolved within the first few minutes of the episode. It begins with a scene that is reminiscent of both Van’s hallucinations in the hospital and Shauna’s grocery store horror tale, twisted into something less legible through the eyes of Lottie. It’s as close to a Lynchian dream as we’ve seen, with adult Lottie waking up on the pathologist’s table confronting her younger self (a self that looks like it is either from before the crash or after the rescue, with bangs covering up her scar). It is unclear where this is situated in time, if it is a dream that Lottie has just before the confrontation that will cost her life, an event that she is scared to have missed – but we know that she makes all the preparations, that she likely knows what will happen, that the outcome is already determined.
I think that Lottie knew she was going to die when she set up the candles and waited for Callie to arrive. Callie must have been carrying around this horror this whole time without being able to tell, and it’s significant that she admits it to Misty first, not someone who cares about her or loves her. The DNA under Lottie’s finger was hers – mitochondrial DNA, matching Shauna’s. The picture that shocked Misty on Lottie’s phone was of Callie, wearing the necklace. Callie seeks out Lottie because she is so desperate for answers, and Lottie has stolen the tape that could provide them, knowing that Callie would come for it. In the end, the most heartbreaking thing about the escalation in their confrontation is the first and only question that Callie does ask – it’s not about the cannibalism, or the hunt. It’s not the sensationalism of figuring out who her mother was out there, and what she had to do to survive. She asks “Does she just not love me?”. All these attempts at the truth have been about uncovering why her mother seems to not love her, and Lottie is the worst person to ask that question of, because she does not care about placating Callie or coddling her feelings. Instead, in Lottie’s head, there is a version of reality where Callie is the product of everything that happened out there, all the horrors (Lottie calls it “all those thrilling and terrible things”, an eerie echo of how Shauna will describe it later). She is the product of It, because It is the coldness in Shauna’s eyes, “like looking straight into the earth”. In Lottie’s eyes, the wilderness took Shauna’s baby out there and Callie is the replacement, the culmination. It’s devastating because at this point, there is no question anymore that Lottie is suffering from an untreated mental health condition, that she has created a whole religion out of her interpretation of what happened. All of this turns around Callie being special, but apart from her tragic curiosity about Shauna, Callie has never been anything but a regular teenage girl who wanted her mum to love her. Callie snaps when Lottie tells her that Shauna will never love her because she’s jealous of her, because Callie is like her but more – and remember, Shauna snapped when Melissa hinted that Callie didn’t love her. Callie pushes Lottie, and that’s it. She could have died a million times out in the wilderness, most recently when she almost fell into the pit herself, but in the end, it’s a fall down some stairs that does it.
When Callie tells Jeff, he reacts with compassion and understanding. He is grateful that she told him, because Shauna was never so forthright about what happened out there. He tells her that she is nothing like her mum, confirming that something has changed here, that he is no longer the blindly supportive husband he used to be. Off-screen, they pack up the house and move far away to safety. “I’m sorry that I didn’t protect you from her. I should have done that.”

Tai blames Van’s death on Shauna, without whom Melissa would have never entered the picture again. Shauna blames Jeff and Callie leaving on Misty, who takes too much pleasure in gloating about it, still not fully realising what it means to poke that bear. Something clicked for me in this final episode that I should have fully realised much earlier – the particular way in which the present is in sync with the past is about remembering. The story of the wilderness moves forward along with the characters in the present remembering what they did. The link between the two has never been as clear as in this episode, as we’re working towards the reveal of Shauna as the Antler Queen – it couldn’t have come earlier, because if Tai, Misty (and Nat, RIP) had remembered it more vividly, they would have never reconnected the way that they have. It’s ironic that Shauna tells everyone to “eat and never forget this”: when they promised each other to never say anything about what happened, they must have already forgotten half of it. They are now realising along with the viewers what Shauna did in the past and what that means for her in the present – and they have already lost Nat and Lottie. Nothing changes for Shauna when she does finally find that letter that Melissa wrote her, in which she talks about forgiveness: without the context of Callie and Jeff, no longer a housewife or mother, she is set free, and her interpretation of the past scenes is radically different from everyone else. She begins journaling again: about how they lost their memories because they lost their capacity for self-reflection, but also with the deeply delusional interpretation that “we were having so much fun”. The only person who had fun during the hunt for pit girl was Shauna, nobody else was having a remotely good time. She is asserting her own reading of reality over everyone else. To her, it was the best moment of her life – when she was a warrior, a queen, not a wife or mother. And she wants to take it all back. 

Shauna’s claim that this was “fun” should colour and add meaning to everything we see unfold in the past. Misty secretly inquiring about the progress of the transponder and Van thinking that maybe it is beginning to work. Akilah coming to an incomprehensible truce with Lottie that is one of the hardest things to swallow in this episode: she kills all of her beloved animals, her worst nightmare coming true, so that the hunt begin again (the only way I can interpret it is that in Akilah’s mind, it presented a chance to kill Lottie - she almost does hit her with a rock - but that’s very thin evidence). Lottie is desperate for the hunt to resume because she thinks that the wilderness is unhappy with them, but ironically, it’s Mari who says they have to sacrifice something that is meaningful, something that hurts. “It’s not a sacrifice unless we cherish it”. This is deliberately far removed from the necessity of food: it’s a spiritual necessity for Lottie, but for Shauna, it’s a pure power play, the ability to control the group. Instead of walking to safety, they are hunting each other again. None of this would be happening if she hadn’t stopped them from leaving. Tai and Van discuss what they will do now that another card draw decides who lives and who dies, and they decide – very much to Van’s chagrin, playing through a version of the trolley problem – to give it to the outsider, Hannah. The tense draw begins, but Shauna notices that something is off from the start, and eventually inserts herself in a different place, guessing at what Van and Tai are trying to do. It’s not entirely clear but I think Shauna knows exactly what it means to move in right before Mari, I think she guesses that Hannah is the intended target and that throwing the count off by one means that Mari will be the sacrifice. She’s been meaning to kill Mari for a very long time now, and the way in which Shauna’s reaction to Mari’s annoyingness is the willingness to kill her shows how far gone she is (compare this to Van’s very genuine grief when she sees her in the pit: it’s Mari, their team mate, who they’ve been with for more than a year now). Mari is defiant and furious, saying that they deserve everything that’s coming to them. She takes off all her clothes to try and create a diversion but then runs towards exactly the same pit she’s already fallen into once, all of which are very Mari things to do. Her last words are “oh my god, fuck off”. Pour one out for Mari, the greatest hater, true to herself until her last moment.

In the background of the hunt, all the divisions in the group play out, and it’s fitting because Mari was also the decoy in the play-hunt that started the season! Hannah is all too willing to don Natalie’s costume because she wants to be part of it, and she thinks that the more she is part of it, the longer she will survive (little does she know that she was almost the chosen prey). It might be a decision she regrets once Shauna, thinking she’s Natalie, tasks her with butchering Mari for the feast. Gen spends the hunt trying to save Mari, her friend, by diverting others. Melissa tries to take her revenge for the first time but can’t go through with it – it opens up all kinds of alternative universes, if she had stabbed Shauna, with the moment reverberating forwards through time to Melissa stabbing Van (Shauna just says “I knew you’d turn out to be boring”). And Natalie sneaks off, unseen by all, carrying the radio up into the moments, desperately pleading for help, until she hears a response. “I can hear you”.

Random notes:

The very beginning of the episode before Lottie’s vision is of Natalie’s cabin being searched under Shauna’s orders, and Nat confronting Misty after realising that she was the one who destroyed the original transponder, both the reason for everything and the possible salvation. Misty asks her if she’s going to tell anyone – and knowing Natalie, she probably never did.

It’s an episode with a lot of disturbing scenes, but I think the most shocking – because we’re prepared for pit girl and what happens to her – is Tai burying Van’s body in the woods, but not before she cuts out her heart and takes a bite out of it, mirroring what Travis did to Javi’s (and very likely attempting to achieve what appears to have happened to Travis after, which is feeling Javi’s presence at all times with him). It’s set to Marianne Faithful’s The Mystery of Love, a harrowing scene. There is a marked contrast between what Shauna is trying to accomplish by killing and eating Mari (and what she tried with Melissa as well): domination, a show of power, and what Tai does here, which is a kind of homage, a consummation, an ultimate act of love for someone that she cannot be without (I don’t know what it says that Shauna tried to do the same with Jackie’s ear, because there were always those additional layers to her love for Jackie that made their relationship so fucked up). Tai promises to “remember all of it, all of you, and all of me”.

Sarah Desjardins does some great work in this episode. I wonder what Jeff’s and Callie’s role will be in the fourth season.

And talking about the fourth season, which hasn’t been announced yet: I think it’s fair to say that four seasons would be the perfect amount, rather than the originally planned five. I am also wondering at the end of the season about what the plans may have been going forward and to what extent Juliette Lewis leaving early impacted on it. It feels like this would have been a very different season if adult Nat was still around, especially considering the role that young Nat plays in the wilderness.

I think one of the best signs that this is a very different winter is that they never moved the head, instead using it for target practice: now that they’re no longer walking out, any attempt to hide what they did has ended.

“I know that neither of them would know how to contact the phone company” made me lol. 

What is Walter's deal?

Travis, now surviving only through constant drunkenness (there must be heaps of berry wine to keep him in this state so consistently) throws a little bombshell: he’s been wandering into everyone’s dreams, and his favourite is Jackie’s and Shauna’s: slumber-party make-outs, jealousy, betrayals! It’s funny how low-key everyone has their interpretation of what exactly was going on with Jackie and Shauna.

“When it’s done, bring me her hair”. WTAF, Shauna. Also the hat with the eye-holes, arguably the least inspired costume choice.

Misty’s little smile after Shauna furiously screams was life-giving. It’s a whole episode of Shauna being incredibly cruel and completely in control, including the moment when Melissa can’t go through with killing her: but this whole time, Misty and Natalie played her. In fact, this is the only moment of “fun” everyone except Shauna is having.

The Handmaid’s Tale – It is not over.

The Handmaid's Tale: 6x02 Exile.

 

The only way is to show up and fight.

I think the animating question of this final season of The Handmaid’s Tale, with limits imposed on how far the resistance against Gilead can be allowed to proceed since there is already a Gilead-set sequel in the works, is about the personal decision on how to live a meaningful life with the existence of a terror regime looming over everything, even the relative places of safety that both June and Serena find themselves in now. They are coming at the question from opposite ends:
Serena is one of the architects of the original Gilead in all its horrors, contributing the ideology and profiting from its exploitation of other women. The episode shows her in the days just before, visiting her declining father, a preacher of some kind, excitedly telling him about her relationship with Fred and how they are changing the world (significantly, as his beautiful garden which he can no longer care for lies fallow and wilting around them). She has always believed in the tenets of Gilead, and she still does, with some caveats regarding the power accorded to women (and I think it’s pretty clear that these doubts about Gilead stem much more from her own experience than from being moved in any particular way by the suffering of others, including June). In this episode, she has found an unlikely haven that she should thrive in: a religious commune in Canada that cares for women and children, devoid of the brutality and violence of Gilead. She is safe there, and if she could let go of her desire for power, she could continue to exist, in this small life, harvesting ripe tomatoes and seeing Noah grow up exactly the way she has claimed she wants him to. But it’s not enough! I don’t even think that in the end it’s Commander Lawrence’s thinly veiled threat about the Eyes knowing where she is, the stick he brings out when he fears that the carrot of giving her power and influence in New Bethlehem isn’t enough. It’s sufficient that his diagnosis of her boredom is correct: Serena will never be satisfied with a small life, and she has taken all the wrong lessons from what happened to her on the train. She will not quietly atone for her sins in a community of women who accept her in spite of knowing who she really is. She wants to become an architect of Gilead once again, this time of a transformation that promises to continue Gilead on into the future.

There are historical examples of totalitarian regimes building model villages – and model concentration camps – to create the illusion that things are not as horrible and terrible as they are. It gives other countries an excuse to stop the boycotts, to also profit from what Gilead has achieved, without seeming too morally compromised. Once these connections are made, once Canada and others begin importing Gileadean goods, perhaps even use similar methods to bring babies back, it will be next to impossible to meaningfully oppose the true Gilead that will continue to exist. The thaw already has consequences for the refugees in Canada, who are being terrorised and evicted from their new homes. New Bethlehem’s existence does not mean that the other horrors of the regime have ended – nobody has yet talked about what is happening in Gilead proper, in the Handmaids training centre for example, and what effect it will have on the Colonies or the judicial regime of terror. It’s a fig leaf for Commander Lawrence, who is horrified by what he has created but too cowardly to face the consequences. It’s Commander Wharton who points out to Lawrence that he needs Serena as the face of New Bethlehem – and he knows that his position is precarious enough within the regime that he has to do whatever he is told. He tasks Nick, who is now under the watchful eye of his father-in-law, to use his contacts in the Eyes to track down Serena. Lawrence arrives in Canaan with his new wife in tow – we’ve seen him and Naomi bickering, with Lawrence deeply uncomfortable in this new life that Gilead has assigned him, hesitant to give up his control over his house and awkward around Naomi’s (Janine’s) child. He knows how to play Serena, how she ticks, and the scene at the table where neither he nor his wife can deliver a believable prayer before the meal showcases why he is in the position he is in: he’s barely passing as a true believer in Gilead, without the religious fundamentalism or the true faith of the other Commanders (Wharton, on the other hand, wears the role so comfortably – in his conversation with his son-in-law about how he grew up with a mother that “worked outside the house”, with a father who didn’t care for him, and a hidden warning to Nick that he reads well enough to toss the phone SIM that Tuello has given him). Serena is the one who ends up saying grace in a way that sounds like she is already prepping for her newly assigned role, perfect, seamless, ending in a goodbye to the women who have accepted her and Noah into the community. She was never going to be satisfied with this quiet life they were offering, and her time has once again come to regain her power. 

June is on the other side here. She is a victim of Gilead. Horrible things have been done to her. Alaska is a place of safety, of an impossible reunion with a mother she has thought lost. She could stay here, settle down, or go on to Hawai’s or Guam, the other remaining parts of the United States. Luke, freed for now by Tuello and Moira, is waiting for his hearing in Canada, but if all goes well, he could join her. If it weren’t for Hannah pulling her back, this is once again a promise of a relatively safe life. But we’ve seen Luke’s fury boiling for a while now, his shame for not fighting harder, for having suffered less than June and done so little to fight back. He is just as eager as Moira to join Mayday, and off-screen, they begin their fight and get lost in No Man’s Land. In the conversation between Nick and Tuello, it becomes clear how willing Mark is to send these untrained people to be chewed up as cannon fodder: he will do it for as long as he has people to burn, regardless of whether they have a shot at real change or not. He is so open to Nick about it that he doesn’t even realise he is burning that contact, because Nick isn’t willing to put himself and his new family in danger if there is no clear upside at the end of it. Without Nick as a contact, Mayday doesn’t have access to the kind of information it needs to operate. Suddenly, the phone calls (a limited resource always effectively adds drama) June makes from Alaska stop going through, until she finds out that her best friend and her husband are lost, and she is the only one able to help, because Nick would listen to her. Holly, her mother, asks her not to risk herself again. She has only just found her daughter, after years of desperately trying to find her and hoping she was still alive. Holly is also the first person who calls Nick what he truly is – a Nazi. As much as Nick is also not a true believer, his actions have enabled the regime, he is a part of the Eyes, essentially secret police that is terrorising Gileadeans. It doesn’t matter if his heart is in it. Holly thinks June shouldn’t trust him, but she’s never been clear-eyed about Nichole’s father. The only thing Holly’s pleading achieves is that June leaves Nichole behind when she goes back to join the fight. Holly thinks that the rational thing to do in light of the overpowering presence of Gilead is to protect the people that you love, to hold them close. June still wants to burn it all down, and it might be the only way to get Hannah back.

Random notes:

There’s some great acting happening between Elisabeth Moss and Cherry Jones to showcase how complex the relationship between June and her mother is. In the past, Holly has always been the radical, blaming June for her relatively mainstream life, but now that June wants to do something dangerous that could put her in danger yet again, Holly asks her to stay.

Bradley Whitford and Ever Carradine do some great comedic work in their uneasy interaction as unwilling spouses. I’m also looking forward to more showdowns between Whitford and Josh Charles, who are evenly matched.

Rita is thinking about going to New Bethlehem because she is looking for her sister and about to be evicted in Toronto. It’s easy to see Gilead as a villain – it’s a totalitarian state – but the idea of Canada acquiescing and becoming an unsafe place for refugees is maybe the more terrifying proposition in 2025.  

The Handmaid’s Tale – Now we’re safe.

The Handmaid's Tale: 6x01 Train.

It’s been two and a half years since June and Serena boarded that train leaving Toronto! It’s hard to return to the world of The Handmaid’s Tale and not reflect on what it means for a show to have such a long break. It’s also impossible to think about this show and not connect it to all the things that happened in the intervening years – Roe v Wade was overturned a few months before the fifth season started, we were halfway through Joe Biden’s first and only term, we had lived through two years of a pandemic. And now, right in the middle of what I think is fair to describe as the most momentous change in global economic politics since the end of the Cold War, with the United States putting tariffs on imports based on questionable AI maths, with US residents renditioned to prisons in other countries, with reproductive rights diminished and trans people under constant, vicious attack – The Handmaid’s Tale returns for its final season, for a final round of what occasionally feels like “I told you so”.
As a reminder of where we left off in terms of context: Canada, a previous safe haven for refugees fleeing the Gilead regime, has been tempted into forging a closer alliance with Gilead. Gilead has created a horrifying regime in response to a decline in global fertility, and Canada – with nativists protesting the presence of refugees, with regime sympathisers wanting to adapt the same strategies – has folded. Gilead has also devised a strategy to fix its image – it has built a display village of sorts in New Bethlehem, a place in Gilead with relaxed politics, for refugees to return to if they choose to do so. It was Commander Lawrence’s pet project, a step towards reforming what he perceived to be shortcomings in Gilead, in which some of Serena Joy’s ideas about giving women more rights would be realised. On the personal level: June and Luke are in a tight spot after Luke kills a man who runs over June’s arm with his car, and just before June gets on the train to take her out of Toronto, she realises that Luke was always going to accept being arrested by the police. Serena flees with her baby from a Gilead-associated family that has treated her like their own Handmaid. She wants to raise her son Noah in the kind of freedom that is not possible in the place that her own ideology has helped build. June is still eager to free Hannah, who was stolen from her and is being raised in Gilead.

Train picks up exactly where we left off all those years ago. Serena and June have found each other on the train that they believe is headed for Vancouver, a train filled with refugees. They have been thrown together again – their complicated relationship has been the focus point for a long time now, dancing around the thorny issues of how June feels about the woman who is responsible for the worst of what has happened to her (and I am glad that another woman on the train, once Serena’s identity is revealed, calls it what it was – rape). They are in the same boat, but not on equal footing: June can’t trust Serena, and Serena is not only fleeing Gilead, but also the reaches of the war criminal court that is still seeking her. On the train, Serena seems genuinely eager to prove that she can be trusted, and as much as June is hesitant, she does care about what happens to Noah (who she helped birth).

Serena: Seems they are unhappy with both of us.
June: We’re not the same, but…
Serena: The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
June: On a case-by-case basis.

It seems like they will be stuck with each other for a while. June no longer has Luke and Moira, and Serena has been without allies for a very long time. She is also seemingly incapable of stopping herself from using her Gileadean phrases, all the time, around an audience less than receptive about them: it’s hard to unlearn, and as she will demonstrate later, she is still a true believer in Gilead, even if she wants to see it reformed.

Serena: It seems that all of us here at some point were part of some kind of violence.

She seems to want to atone, but she hasn’t even reached the point yet where she can admit the full extent of her complicity as an architect of Gilead (“You built the fucking place, it belongs to you”). She has recast herself as a victim among victims, as someone who has suffered from the regime as these other women have, but that’s a fiction – not only was she a wife, not only did she participate in a regime of violence against June, but she was the face of complicit womanhood in Gilead. Her books inspired it. No good deed can erase her debt.  

June is the only one who realises how precarious Serena’s position is, who, instead of keeping her head down, begins reorganising the train carriage to help other mothers and their children. She brings a doctor to help June, who is dealing with an infection in her arm, but this act of charity proves to be her downfall: she has always sought to assert power when given the chance, but this doctor recognises her from his time as a fertility doctor in Gilead (if we’re throwing around war crimes accusations here, then you’d think he wouldn’t admit his previous job quite as freely). The doctor tells June that he has alerted the police, and June realises that Serena’s time is running out, and that she won’t be able to protect her. Elisabeth Moss does a great job here to show how torn June is: she should want Serena arrested and held responsible, but they are also now a fucked-up kind of family, reliant on each other. Before the police arrive, the doctor reveals Serena’s identity to the entire train compartment filled with people who have, only moments earlier, shared their horrible stories about what happened to them in Gilead, which means that getting arrested and trialled is the least worst possible outcome for Serena here: the other one is the real possibility of experiencing what her former husband did in his last moment, being torn apart by a furious mob of women out for revenge. Serena still doesn’t realise how dangerous a spot she’s in, and instead of keeping quiet, begins spouting Gileadean propaganda right in front of all these wronged women, who are getting more and more furious, while June desperately tries to shush her and go quietly with the policeman. Realising what will happen to Serena if he simply leaves here there, he doesn’t arrest her, his own form of revenge for what has been done to his family.

In spite of everything that has happened to June, she still tries her best to save Serena. She stops the train and tells Serena to jump, with the women smashing the window in between compartments, ready to kill her. In the end, she has to push her out somewhere in the wilderness of Canada, and resumes the journey alone.

Instead of Vancouver, she finds herself in Alaska, one of the two remaining stars on the American flag. As she’s being processed, a woman reads her name on a list and shouts her name – it’s her mother, after all these years, impossibly here in Alaska, embracing her.

Random notes:

June’s “Why do you make it sound romantic” was a lol moment (there is fanfiction, guys, it’s the law of AO3). Yvonne Strahovski has done such hard work to make Serena sympathetic against all odds (she shouldn’t be, and maybe she still isn’t, but it’s a hard boundary for even June to enforce). I don’t think that suffering has the capacity to redeem a character from past wrongs, and no amount of it will ever undo what she did, as showcased in the stories these women tell on the train. It will be interesting to see what happens to her out there, away from June.

This felt like a bit of a soft launch for the new season, which doesn’t even take us into Gilead proper to catch up with what’s happening with Aunt Lydia: Nick, arrested after attacking Commander Lawrence, is taken to New Bethlehem to live safely with his pregnant wife. We find out that the reason why his actions didn’t have more severe consequences is that his wife’s father is a highly influential man of his own: Commander Wharton, played by Josh Charles, who is also moving to New Bethlehem to keep an eye on his son-in-law. I don’t think there was ever a way for any of this to end well for Nick.

Moira, left behind in Toronto, is desperately trying to get Mark Tuello’s help for Luke, but is told that with Canada’s thawing international relations with Gilead, the American government in exile is wrapping up. The only remaining source of resistance will be Mayday, and Moira is eager to join, and impresses Mark when she tells him that she escaped Jezebel’s after killing a Commander. 

Yellowjackets – Death is around every corner.

Yellowjackets: 3x09 How the Story Ends.

 Surviving this was never the reward.

Regardless of what else you take out of this season of Yellowjackets – a frustration with the imbalance between the past and present storylines, a criticism of the fact that it no longer feels pointed like an arrow towards something (and it’s interesting to think about how much of the previous seasons felt like that because we were steering right towards cannibalism, and once we were there, the stakes felt lower), maybe even a sense of sadness that the young and adult versions of Lottie never quite lined up the way they should have – I actually like that we’ve arrived here now, at the point where most good shows about surviving some version of the end of the world (which, arguably, being stranded in the wilderness for that period of time is) end up at. Survival is insufficient, as per Voyager and Battlestar Galactica and Station Eleven and all the rest of it. The Yellowjackets have made it through winter, and they likely wouldn’t have, had they not resorted to cannibalism, but every person who has died since then has not died because it was existentially necessary. The spiritual interpretation of the team’s experience served them through a time where any kind of comfort was vital for community, but with the prospect of rescue, where all they’d have to do to all get out is walk for a few days, it is no longer necessary for survival (and useless for explaining reality, now that the mysteries are solved), it’s just taken on a life of its own and is hard to kill. At a point where everyone could just follow Kodi out of these woods, it’s no longer a question of if they can survive – these are choices.

A lot happens in this episode, but this is Van’s story, from beginning to end, and it ties in with the moral question of if the ends justify the means, of holding on to humanity especially when the stakes are so high. As Natalie cries and resigns herself to the fact that in spite of all she has done in her attempts to be a good, rational leader, they are facing another winter with no means of escape, the girls and Travis and we along with them already know that this will be much worse season for survival, in spite of their reserves of meats and their assumed preparedness. Earlier in the episode, Travis prepares the famous pit – as close to a Chekhov’s gun as the show has – with the intention of luring Lottie into it, to end the madness. It’s a desperate act, payment of sorts for having played along with her and having served up Akilah in his stead. It also doesn’t work – it seems that Lottie walks on it without falling in, the branches creaking under her soles, as the wind picks up and she tells Travis that Javi is still with them. Lottie would say that It doesn’t want her dead yet. Nat’s last ditch effort to undermine Shauna’s leadership by freeing Kodi and Hannah and sneaking away with the “Others” – this reorganisation of the group takes no time at all, the fall-out over their disagreement – fails spectacularly, with Hannah stabbing Kodi in the eye and asking Shauna to let her become part of the group (if this is just the desperation of a woman who knows she would die otherwise or genuine fascination with their impossible survival is hard to say). They are going into this winter under Shauna’s leadership, whose will is so entrenched in the group that she can decide for them even when she is outnumbered and doesn’t hold a gun. Tai is already reasoning with Van about it, who is so scared for what will happen: they’ve practiced with the cards, meaning that they both know that the hunt will begin again, but at least they’ll be able to make sure that neither of them will be the chosen prey. 

In the beginning of the episode, Van is in her hospital bed and her younger self appears to her, reminding her of the plot of the Goonies. It’s a classical hero’s journey, and now she must undergo one herself. X marks the spot. She seems resolved, determined, and there’s treasure waiting at the end of it. She’s evaded death so many times before, against the odds, that it’s hard not to spend the whole episode waiting for it to happen again. Tai, Misty and Van end up finding Melissa – who has escaped Shauna, after spitting that piece of her own arm back in her face – by the side of the road. There’s a traffic sign with an X on it. It’s how everything started with Lottie, magical thinking paired with the desperation of being on the brink of death. They drive Melissa back to her house, all of them having vague plans of having to clean up after Shauna again, who spends the entire episode covered in Melissa’s blood. After so many days of Dark Tai arguing that she is the only one who can save Van, and that the only way to rescue her is through a sacrifice, it’s Van waiting for the right set of circumstances to bring her own sacrifice, to save herself. We’ve seen young Van, horrified at the prospect of what they would have to do to survive another winter, so desperate that she has hidden the broken radio in the woods and is secretly trying to figure out how to fix it. We’ve not yet seen what does happen in the remaining months out there – but it’s enough that not all of them made it back, that we know about pit girl, to have a sense of how dire it’ll end up being. This adult version of Van has survived all of that while knowing that they had a moment where they could have just walked out, and Tai was one of the people deciding to stay behind. She has, presumably, in part survived because she was the one dealing the cards, protecting Tai from becoming the target of the hunt. Maybe she and Tai even chose between them who would end up with the losing card. 

Melissa ends up closing the flue on the fireplace, knocking out Tai and Shauna in the process. After saving both Tai and Shauna – with Tai having a hallucination of a cave, where she picks up a phone and speaks to herself, and ends up battling with other Tai, emerging as herself for the first time in probably a long time – Van returns to the house, intending to bring the sacrifice. She is going to kill Melissa, and maybe, if Tai is right, surviving. Maybe this is what the wilderness wants after all, and maybe she will be spared. But she can’t bring herself to do it. This is the same Van who, after Shauna nearly shoots Melissa in frustration (“You’re nothing”), in front of everyone, venting her anger that people are talking and plotting behind her back, goes to Melissa to comfort her.

Van: Why can’t I be that? Why?
Melissa: You don’t want to be.
Van: No I don’t.

Melissa can be that person, because she has spent all these years scared of Shauna and the group of people that sided with her. Shauna turned on her so fast, and so few of the others made it back alive. Van, the storyteller of the group, gets the agency here to tell a story about herself: who she wants to be, in the end. She pays for it with her life – Melissa stabs her, and Van finds herself in the plane, with her last moments playing out on the big screen in front of her, with young Van refusing to spoil the ending of everyone’s story for her – but in the end, she is still herself, and the treasure that she was promised is saving the love of her life – because Tai is herself again. Surviving this was never the reward.

Random notes:

Seeing Lauren Ambrose and Liv Hewson finally act alongside each other, with each other, is a gift. I’m sad about Van’s death, which has been in the cards this whole season, but it’s a revelation to see them share scenes. On the meta level, the journey from Liv Hewson’s performance ensuring Van’s survival and the subsequent perfect casting of Ambrose is such a fortuitous present from the television gods.  

Other shout-outs: Kevin Alves portraying Travis’ desperate decision to do something about Lottie, Sophie Thatcher (who has had an outstanding season) and Nat’s horror at seeing a vision of what will happen to her charges now that Shauna is in control, Jenna Burgess playing a betrayed Melissa so that your heart breaks for her, in spite of what adult Melissa does later in the episode.

I’m not a hundred percent sure if the thing that Misty secretly removed from a box buried in the woods is a part of the original plane transponder that she’s been hiding this whole time or a component from the radio that Van has hidden, but in any case, Misty is convinced that this is another way out after Kodi’s death, it might just take them two or three months to get there.

Dark horse Hannah! I was wondering what exactly kept Shauna from just killing Kodi when she could – maybe she knew that it would be a transgression too far even for her supporters – but Hannah definitely solved that conundrum for her.

I feel for young Melissa in this episode, who seemed so attached to Shauna before but is faltering now. Hannah tells her about her daughter and she sympathises with her, emotions that Shauna mocks her for, and then Shauna just goes full-on cruel beyond belief (“why can’t you just be a nice person”, Melissa says, who made the unbelievable choice to kiss Shauna when she had a knife to her throat), with every intention to scare and humiliate her. It explains why adult Melissa did what she did, but not at all why she decided to send the tape. It’s also interesting that from the moment that Tai and Misty start talking about Adam in front of adult Melissa, it’s pretty clear that they will have to choose to kill her eventually – the same way that they knew they’d have to get rid of Kodi and Hannah, if they wanted for their crimes to not follow them forever.

I think I’m also wondering a bit about why Tai and Misty would be so eager to bail Shauna out after everything we’ve seen now: the second season leaned heavily into Tai and Shauna’s connection when Shauna was pregnant, and it worked, but that’s so long gone now that it’s hard to remember why any of them would care what happens to her, beyond mutually assured destruction.

Misty gets picked up by Walter in a helicopter, and they talk about the DNA evidence since Misty now knows that Shauna extremely unlikely story about going to the city to get a replacement cat checks out: she steals Lottie’s unlocked phone from him, after finding some kind of evidence that shocks her. There’s theories out there that Walter may be Lottie’s killer because he thought that a mystery would bring Misty back, and I think it’s not looking too unlikely at this stage.

Jeff and Callie are having time to themselves to process, smoking weed together, with Callie asking him if he was serious about the things he said about Shauna (she seems to agree with what he said, but it causes him a whole existential crisis to think about it too much). On the plus side, sans Shauna he’s gotten the Joels contract and I’m sure this will all work out just fine in the end.