The Handmaid’s Tale: 3x10 Witness.
Gilead is escalating towards something. There are more executions, stricter rules, and the changes that June saw in Washington DC are starting to arrive in Boston. This attempt by the regime to prevent a revolution goes hand-in-hand with the revolutionary talk that we are more and more often privy too: Handmaids discussing amongst themselves what they can accomplish, Marthas sharing information. In the background of all of this is High Commander Winslow and Commander Waterford’s attempt to leverage Nichole in order to force Canada into an extradition agreement – one that would have severe consequences for the few who have made it across the border alive, and especially those who, in order to escape, inevitable committed crimes.
June fits right into the centre of all of this with her newly forget plan to rescue the Handmaids and children of Gilead. As much as we have previously witnessed the workings of the underground railroad, it appears as if Mayday hasn’t previously formulated this idea as a radical strategy – taking the most valuable product that Gilead has to offer, human children, away from the Gileadan economy. June has played these games long enough to be cynical about the use of human beings as leverage to achieve political goal, and her resolve to accomplish this feat is stronger because she comprehends the emotional side as well. Every day, she is surrounded by Handmaids whose first children have been stolen from them, whose names have been changed. Five years – so long that many of them have been with their new families longer than with their mothers.
While June tries to find resources she needs to accomplish her goal, Winslow and Waterford arrive from Washington DC to inspect the goods. Fred plays a weird game of jealousy with June, apparently thinking that she is still rightly his, or should want to return to him, that escalates into a horrible scene later on, and Winslow is outraged by how lenient Lydia is with the girls when he sees that the Boston Handmaids not yet wear the facial veil and that she has allowed Janine to wear an eyepatch over her mutilated eye. June already knows that things are worse in the nation’s capitol, that her mission is one that is racing against the clock of Gilead’s progress towards even more hateful policies against women. Several people over the episode tell her that she will get herself killed, but maybe that’s the whole point: to weaponize her own carelessness with her life against the regime that has taken her children away from her.
In all of this, it takes her too long to realise that her jibes against Fred have doomed Commander Lawrence (she tells Fred that Lawrence “respects her”, a statement that Fred oddly enough turns into some kind of raging attack against his sexual potency). Fred, thwarted in his attempt to convince June to come to DC with them, manoeuvres against Lawrence, implying to High Commander Winslow that he isn’t following the steps of the ritual. His house has already been stripped of all the freedoms he has thus far enjoyed due to his position in the hierarchy – there is no more art and books, no more unsanctioned music – but now Fred is coming for the only thing that is keeping the Lawrences sane, refusing to participate in the ceremony.
But first, June finds out that all the information that she needs to actualise her plan is right beneath her, in the Lawrences’ basement, where apparently all the information from the early days of the regime is collecting dust. Mrs Lawrence, who has degraded without June (because her Marthas are no longer able to get her the antidepressants she depends on, showcasing another way in which Gilead is destroying women’s lives), gleefully remarks that life is just that much more exciting with her in the house, and takes her to her husband’s files on all the Handmaids, and where their lost children were placed. This is a heartbreaking scene – seeing how Gilead has stolen children, changed their identity so that their pasts become untraceable. June is moved, but also realises the value of this currency for convincing Handmaids to help her with her plan. She now knows what happened to their children, and how to get them back.
June: We’ve missed everything. The steps, the smiles, the tragedies. Children still die, even in Gilead. Janine’s son Caleb, four years ago. Prayers can’t stop car accidents.
She also realises something about the Lawrences: That they are as trapped in Gilead as she is. She thinks that Commander Lawrence is powerful enough to organise for Handmaids to cross the border, to save children, and doesn’t understand why he hasn’t saved his wife and himself from what is coming for both of them, until Eleanor tells her that her husband cannot leave – he would be tried as a war criminal, and rightly so. And she is true to him and is sacrificing her own mental health to keep him safe.
In this case though, unfortunately, that places her right in the line of Fred’s fire. He thinks that he can get rid of his political and personal rival by insisting to be witness – to the Lawrences not performing the prescribed ceremony with June, which they have never done. They will participate in the pre-ceremony, all of them, including Winslow and Aunt Lydia, and then send in a doctor to determine if the rape has taken place. There is no way out for anyone, everyone is fixed to their positions, and the only thing June has left to do – to save the man she is placing her hopes in, to spite Fred Waterford, to save Eleanor, who is so vulnerable, so easily breakable – is to consent, to absolve Joseph from his crime.
June saves the Lawrences, and Joseph Lawrence realises that he cannot forever protect his wife from the reaches of Gilead, that the same people that have come for those with less political clout are now coming for him. He has created the machine that will chew both of them up. So he consents to June’s plan – and so does Mayday, which enthusiastically announces all the support it can master to free the children of Gilead. And more than that, June promises Joseph that he can trade this for political protection. He is as disgusted by the idea as he can be (“I’d be a hero”, he spits out), but if he wants to save Eleanor, there’s nothing else he can do. All the pawns are in place.
Except elsewhere, Serena, having witnessed the person that Fred is becoming under High Commander Winslow’s influence, suggests the same for them. Instead of using the phone that the agent gave her to save herself, she offers it to Fred, to find them a way out of Gilead.
Random notes:
Because maybe it is time to remember June’s gentleness as well, her goodness, a kind scene in which she lies to Janine about the fate of her son, who died in a car accident. She tells her he lives happily with a loving family by the beach in California.
It is mentioned in this episode that in the early days of Gilead, there were witnesses present at the ceremony because people would have resisted – hinting at what would have happened to sane people in this regime, in this insane creation that institutionalises rape.
Janine convincing other Handmaids to help June by saying “I can help! What? I’m brave.” is the moment. Oh Janine.
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