The Handmaid's Tale: Together (5x06)

Well damn! I wasn't expecting that!

Cons:

I don't know how to speak about this eloquently, it's definitely not a subject where I'm the expert, but I'm just not sure how I feel about seeing Luke beaten and nearly strangled to death. It's... well, this show has a problem with the way it depicts race. I'm not crying foul that they dared to depict something so gruesome, it just... it kind of feels like an infamous death on Orange is the New Black where the show is using a specific real death as the inspiration for a trauma inflicted on a character, and I'm not sure how to feel about that. This show just has such an erratic track record with actually dealing with structural racism, which is a big, big problem I've talked about before. You can't have a show about the struggles of women in a patriarchal totalitarian system without considering race as a very serious factor. And the fact that we saw Luke struggling for breath while he was being suffocated... I don't know. That was viscerally upsetting to me on a level beyond a lot of what this show does to me. And it didn't seem to specifically propel the story forward in any way, either.

I continue to be a little frustrated by the repetitive journey of Aunt Lydia. She feels all guilty about the abuses these young girls have suffered with her full knowledge and permission? I mean, I guess I'm glad she's trying to stand up for them now, but that doesn't make her any less complicit in the rest of it. It's all rape, Lydia. All of the Handmaid stuff is rape, and she knows that. I hope the show actually grapples with that, and we don't just have a retread of the same thing again and again.

Pros:

I've been complaining about Luke and June a lot this season, that their relationship is just not convincing to me along the lines of an actual endgame romance. But I gotta say, them leaning in to the different ways Luke and June are each handling their situation worked really well. June is calm, resigned, but Luke is, in my opinion understandably and also rightfully, pointing out how crazy the situation is, how over the top evil Gilead is to have done all these things to June. It's one thing to hear about it, but until he's really living it, he could never really know. Maybe this glimpse really will lead to him being able to connect to his wife about what she's suffered. We'll have to see.

Commander Putnam! Damn, I did not see that coming at all. When Aunt Lydia goes to Commander Lawrence about the fact that a Commander raped a Handmaid before she officially became his property, I expected it to be another lesson on how the women in this society are powerless. Esther is pregnant with Putnam's baby, and who cares if it didn't happen during an officially sanctioned ceremony? Well, Lydia cares, apparently, and Commander Lawrence and Nick are able to arrange that he pays for his crime. When Nick actually shot him in the head, I gasped out loud. It was a callback to the beginning of the show, to the book, where rapists were treated with the full force of the vengeful law of Gilead. The morality imposed upon the citizens might come to strike even the most powerful and seemingly safe.

And while I stand by the fact that Aunt Lydia's journey is hard for me to feel invested in because of how repetitive it's becoming, I do want to praise the acting. Lydia doesn't want to believe that Esther has been raped. She wants to believe in Esther's wickedness. You can see her swallowing down her anger and validating the pain Esther has felt. She doesn't lash out, even when Esther screams at her and accuses her, rightfully, of complicity in all of it. And then Lydia actually follows through and makes Esther's rapist pay for it. That's pretty intense, I hope we can keep that momentum going.

We have the Nick scene with his wife, where we learn that she's pregnant, and he promises that he went ahead with the killing of Putnam for the sake of creating a better future for Gilead. I love the way Nick is portrayed this season, where he's toeing the line but you can tell he finds Gilead so repulsive in so many ways. His look of open disgust when Putnam and Lawrence are celebrating Esther's pregnancy is just so priceless. Nick is a big question mark, in the best way. Is he really leaning into Gilead, fighting to protect the little bit of security he's carved out for himself? Or do we think he might take Tuello up on his offer and turn traitor, or will he take his wife and unborn child and run, or will he and Lawrence team up to keep taking down the worst of what Gilead has created? We just don't know!

And then we've got Serena and June. Oh boy. For better or for worse, and I think you could argue both at different points in the show's history, The Handmaid's Tale is really about these two women. Both are given deep psychological depth by the narrative, both have suffered and triumphed, they are inexorably connected through their experiences, they have been allies in rare moments of desperation, and enemies far more often. Serena is June's rapist. June is the murderer of Serena's husband. It's all down to the two of them at the end of the day.

The setup for this moment of truth from Serena has been coming all season. Serena has been forced to see the consequences of the world she helped create, in a very real way. It's not as dramatic as losing a finger for reading the bible. It's more insidious, more familiar, to so many of the women watching the show. Serena's movements being monitored and forestalled. Being treated like she's incapable of making up her own mind about things. Being examined by a gynecologist and then asked out on a date by that same gynecologist. Being told her feelings are not as important as her baby having a father, being invalidated in her emotional experience by everyone she comes across, including another woman.

And then she has a chance for revenge against June. She is able to convince her captors, so to speak, to let her come along. She's standing there, she has the gun... and in the moment of truth she turns it on Ezra, her bodyguard. What I love about this is that Serena hates June so, so much, and really would like nothing more than to see her suffer. But in that moment of truth, her desire for freedom wins out over her desire for revenge. It's a slim margin, and we're not sure that Serena won't just run right back to Gilead and fall in line if things get too tough.

This episode really woke me up in a lot of ways: this has been a solid season, but the fact that Serena is on the run, holding June at gunpoint, just amped things up to a whole new level of intense. I'm excited to see what's coming!

8.5/10