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.
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