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.
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