The Handmaid’s Tale – Season 4, Episodes 1-3

It’s incomprehensible that up until this season, the entirety of HULU’s The Handmaid’s Tale aired during the Trump presidency.  The pilot episode (Offred), debuted on the 26th of April in 2017, as America reeled from an unanticipated Clinton defeat.  In the wake of the Women’s March, an adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s chillingly-prescient, dystopian novel tapped directly into this country’s zeitgeist.

Four years later, after a criminally-mishandled pandemic, runaway corruption, and numerous, inhumane policy changes pushed us headlong into a Gilead-esque stranglehold on already-marginalized communities, the nation suffers from mass trauma.  We’re hungering for a narrative to help us heal instead of wallow, to provide a reference point for moving forward.

This season’s first episode (Pigs) gives us meat to sink our teeth into.  June’s driving force is her rage, which she uses to focus her resolve under the weight of leadership.  The resistance movement itself, known as “Mayday”, is now a name synonymous with June’s own.  She never sought the responsibility of leadership, a trait that makes her suitable for it.  Her sense of morality is immovable, which can be both admirable and frustrating; June wields it to protect women who are more vulnerable to Gilead’s never-ending cruelty.  Although her anger drives her like an engine, it also never allows a moment of respite.  She can’t process her trauma—in her mind, a concession to “weakness”—moving forward to avoid her past.  The singular focus that makes her a natural leader will also eat her alive.  Her pain is cumulative and sits like a dormant volcano inside of her.

Mrs. Keyes (Mckenna Grace), a Commander’s wife, turned her remote farm—somewhere in the wilderness between Massachusetts and Pennsylvania—into a safe house for the resistance.  When June, delirious with sepsis from a gunshot wound, is brought to her, Mrs. Keyes exclaims, “He sent me dreams of you.  We kill people together.”

The complexity of Mrs. Keyes’ character lies in the nexus between the childhood that she should’ve experienced, and the adulthood that she’s forced into.  On the surface, she’s moody and prone to misdirected bursts of rage: she forces Janine to eat a beloved pig and demands that June include her in Mayday’s fight.  It rankles her when, out of habit, handmaids stop talking as soon as she enters a room.  Just as any handmaid, she was brutalized.  Mr. Keyes passed her around to Guardians, Eyes, and even other Commanders to be raped.

“Wives have bad things, too,” she implores June, a statement heartbreakingly childlike in its simplicity.

June recognizes that Mrs. Keyes requires nurturing, but her maternal instincts are warped by the world they inhabit.  When a Guardian who raped Mrs. Keyes stumbles onto the property, drunk, June has him strung up in the barn and swiftly orders his execution.

“Make me proud,” she states, handing Mrs. Keyes a knife.

Violence gives Mrs. Keyes an outlet for her rage: with this catharsis, she reverts to being a child again, finally allowing herself some vulnerability.  The episode ends in a crescendo of her crawling into June’s bed like she’s escaping a nightmare; “I love you,” she whispers, and June reciprocates.  They act as surrogates for roles missing from their respective lives.

The forward-motion of the season premiere quickly loses steam.  We’re given some satisfaction, like the revelation that Mrs. Keyes poisoned her husband into docility with nightshade, or that June’s new Mayday contact is a courageous jezebel at a Pennsylvania manor house who shares invaluable intel regarding Commanders being sent to the Chicago front.  These two plot points dovetail together in a moment of vengeance almost as gratifying as Commander Winslow’s bloody comeuppance, but from that high point, proceedings crash back down to reality.  Nick arrives at the Keyes’ farm right as the handmaids escape. Mrs. Keyes is taken into custody, and June is re-captured.

From there, the series regresses once again into misery porn.  Book-ended by June’s waterboarding and various examples of psychological torture (including the sacrifice of two innocent women and more gaslighting from Aunt Lydia), we’re reminded of Nick’s existence—a kind of torture unto itself.  Is this basic white guy meant to be an inscrutable enigma?  The story frames him as June’s man on the inside, but what has he ever done other than the bare minimum?  Try as I may, I can’t understand her continued devotion to a man who’s afforded the assumption of a complex inner life, despite demonstrating little more than the ability to manipulate by way of eerie stillness.  Is it because he’s Nicole’s biological father?  Or is there projection of an emotional intimacy that simply doesn’t exist?

June’s torment eventually ends when she breaks and gives Gilead the location of the handmaids’ latest safe house; the method they use specifically targets her Achilles’ Heel.  Nick confesses that he’s the one who devised her bespoke torture, and somehow—inconceivably—June isn’t furious at him.  It’s a writing choice that’s breathtakingly antithetical to her established character.

Episodes two and three are beset with other irritating contrivances.  Why devise a shocking twist that renders inert a driving force in Serena Joy’s motivation—inexorably tied to her complicity in Gilead’s creation?  She tries to out-maneuver Fred, her pathological need for control instructing her every move.  Serena resents that he won’t allow her the smallest piece of the pie, meanwhile he’s convinced she shouldn’t have a seat the table.  A Canadian legal representative questions Serena about abuse that she suffered at the hands of her husband, but she refuses to acknowledge it as anything other than appropriate punishment.

“I knew him before Gilead,” Serena offers, an opaque statement mired in the same black depths as her paradoxical justification for her own oppression.

Yvonne Strahovski’s delicately-rendered depiction of a malignant narcissist—the kind of character so detestably compelling that they’re impossible to look away from—remains among the show’s high points.  The scenes she shares with Joseph Fiennes are skin-crawling.  Their dynamic settles exactly where it should, highlighting their equal abhorrence.  A densely-packed roster, from Elizabeth Moss to Ann Dowd, the cast elevates whatever the writers give them.  Samira Wiley deserves much more than what she’s been handed recently, but she does remarkable things with those moments.

We’re given a small glimpse into the after-effects of trauma as Moira works through her own healing process and survivor’s guilt.  She and Emily push through the arduous process of placing the 86 refugee children (saved by “Angel’s Flight”) into foster homes.  One child, Asher, has greater difficulty adjusting to his new environment, rejecting the use of his pre-Gilead name.  “It’s better if you don’t correct him—he needs to feel what he’s feeling”, Moira tells his frustrated aunt.  Asher’s emotions are reasonable and deserve validation.

It’s easy to recognize the parallels to inhumane practices still perpetuated at America’s southern border.  Ripping a child from the arms of a parent is a profound, life-long traumatic event never completely heals; we’ll never heal as a nation if we don’t strive to acknowledge and upend the injustices still inherent to our system.

Moira does her best to mitigate Asher’s pain, bringing Rita in as a surrogate for the absent Martha who raised him in Gilead.  He doesn’t feel so adrift with a kindred spirit by his side.  This simple act of empathy gives us a small taste of what needs to be done to maintain a sense of hope as we emerge from the horror of the last four years.  Alas, the agony of June’s seemingly perpetual abuse at the hands of an authoritarian regime is infuriating, reductive, and keeps the narrative of a sex slave turned freedom fighter on a metaphorical treadmill.  Let June let go of her anger so that we can finally let go of ours.