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).
No comments:
Post a Comment