The Handmaid’s Tale Recap: Promised Land

ABLUpdated 2 weeks Ago7 Mins read3

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me a squillion, well, that’s what I get for tuning in to another season of The Handmaid’s Tale. The premiere suggested new contexts for June and Serena, who have spent years stuck in a frustrating cycle of raised and punished hopes. Enemies to allies to enemies to allies to enemies. But by the end of episode two, both characters are boomeranging back to the same plotlines they never outrun. How many fingers will Serena need to lose before she accepts that patriarchy means no women at the table? My guess is ten. And how many times can June give the camera a hard stare and twisty smile only to end up nearly dead? The limit, I fear, does not exist.

“Exile” is a well-crafted hour of television, replete with affecting parallels and some satisfying callbacks. But it leaves us on disappointingly familiar terrain, reducing a series about misogynist theology and authoritarianism to a catfight. In one corner, we have June Osborne, an ex-handmaid destined to escape Gilead again and again until it kills her. As her central antagonist, we have Serena, who once wrote a trad-wife Bible that helped usher in a government that doesn’t let women read in the first place. Because you know what’s really evil about a totalitarian state in which all women are subjugated and/or enslaved? You guessed it. It’s the women!

If this episode shades in anything about our understanding of June and Serena, it’s the extent to which they’re actively choosing this life of war when in the past, they were more like conscripts. In Gilead, Serena seemed almost brainwashed, unable to give up on the dream of this new world order even as it continued to disempower her. In “Exile,” though, she has the brief chance to become someone less strident and moralizing than the woman who quickly whipped up enemies on the refugee train. Only Serena Joy would have the luck to jump off a moving locomotive and land in Canaan, a faith-based community of women and children who love to garden. She tells their leader, Abigail, to call her Rachel.

And Rachel will be accepted into this Eden without question, though we don’t get to see her assimilate due to a two-month time jump that screams final-season energy. I was curious to learn if Canaan could change Serena — if prioritizing motherhood and exposing herself to a nurturing sisterhood could soften her zealotry. Would living in the absence of men cure Serena of obsessively managing how men treat women?

Alas, no. When she reveals her true identity to Abigail, who recognized her all along, Abigail presses Serena to take responsibility for the role she played in creating monstrous Gilead. “Set it right,” Abigail tells her, like honey to the ear of a megalomaniac. No, Serena, you’ve done enough. Unfortunately, Serena receives this wrongheaded advice at the worst possible moment. The newlyweds Joseph and Naomi Lawrence turn up in Canaan to woo her back to New Bethlehem, where she’s told that she’ll be more than the pretty face of paltry reform. She can have “real influence,” Joseph assures her, within the context of a patriarchal state that reserves the right to revoke that influence at any time. For example, are they really going to let Noah Waterford, a trueborn son of Gilead, grow up without a man in the house?

Serena eagerly accepts the invitation to build Gilead Lite — tastes great, less filling! — because the zeal of a true believer is her biggest liability and her source of endless resilience. The only thing Serena ever wanted more than a baby was a pulpit for her own fundamentalism. But if colluding once again with Gilead is what it looks like for Serena to start setting things right, then maybe it’s better to leave things wrong.

Two months of peace and quiet turns out to be June’s R&R limit as well. On the train to Alaska, she told Serena that she could not do “it” — life, motherhood, survival — alone again. By some miracle, she doesn’t have to. After leaving her eldest daughter, her husband, and her best friend behind, June miraculously runs straight into her mother’s arms at the refugee camp. In Alaska, she’s not just safe, she’s a child again. She wakes up in her mother’s bed. “She’s so smart,” Holly says of Nichole, just like grandmothers reliably do. June tells her mother that the last she saw Hannah, Hannah no longer recognized her. Can anyone but your own mother help you heal from the pain of that?

As welcome as the reunion is, the explanations that “Exile” offers about Holly’s return to the narrative are somewhat unconvincing. Holly searched for her daughter, we’re told, but limited phone access made it difficult. Okay, fine. But wouldn’t the trains and planes bringing supplies up North occasionally fly a newspaper to Alaska? The Americans in Alaska would surely know about Angel’s Flight, the largest rescue operation in history. And June didn’t exactly keep a low profile during her time in Toronto. Did Holly never see a front-page photo of June at a rally, standing by Mark Tuello’s side? What about June’s testimony at Fred Waterford’s highly publicized trial? Am I missing something? It seems so slapdash that I’m inclined to think that I am, in fact, missing something.

I was curious to see how June would react to tranquility. Could she shed some of her calluses and find solace in raising her daughter here, at least for a little while? At first, it seems to be working out. Mark and Moira spring Luke from jail. He’ll need to wait around for his hearing, but then he can hop a train to Alaska. Understandably, though, Luke is done waiting. He waited for years and now that he knows what it’s like to see his family again, he can’t wait anymore. He needs Hannah back, too. He tearfully pledges himself to Mayday alongside Mark and Moira, joining the fight that’s been June’s whole life since they were first separated.

Nick, too, finds himself in a precarious situation in New Bethlehem. At his father-in-law’s request, he patches things up with Joseph, but Nick’s still working with the Americans, specifically Mark. The same Mark who has just started coordinating with Mayday, which now includes Luke. I hate to be distracted by the soap opera — I understand that this is a serious, life-and-death drama set in the world of ideas — but it’s also true that the showrunners have plopped a good old-fashioned love triangle in the middle of it. Nick and Luke can’t both be with June when this show ends in another seven episodes. Is she going to choose one over the other? Doubtful. Choose neither? I’ll scream. The tidiest way out of this mess would be for one of her suitors to die, and they’re both flirting with the idea of a hero’s death. Right now, Commander Wharton is living in Nick’s house, which he has to sneak out of to play his espionage games. In his meeting with Mark, Nick talks about Mayday fighters as though its a suicide mission. If Luke dies getting Hannah out of Gilead, it will be as tragic as it is tidy.

When June eventually gets wind of Luke’s defection from the land of law and order, she decides to join up with Mayday, too. Nick has gone radio silent since his last rendezvous with Mark, and June is the only one who can get him back onside. It’s a worthy thing to do. It is, without a doubt, what June Osborne would do. And yet I could not stop myself from yelling at the television, Do not leave your daughter, June! Alas, she leaves her daughter, a sacrifice that’s somewhat alleviated by the fact that Nichole will be with her grandmother. Of course, Nichole barely knows her grandmother. She’s barely met her father. She’s never lived anywhere for more than a few months. All of the women in this show have seen so much strife, but this baby was born in hell. It was naïve of me to hope that Alaska was introduced to the story as a sanctuary for June; June has forgotten how to sit still. But maybe this can be where Nichole learns to walk and talk. Maybe it’s her last chance at a normal life.

When June arrives in Alaska, she is as far away from Hannah as she’s ever been. When she rejoins Mayday, she’ll be just as far from Nichole. From the beginning, The Handmaid’s Tale has been about motherhood as much as it’s about anything else; impressively, even in its sixth season, the show resists growing dogmatic about what good mothering means. In a previous season, June told Serena that she can’t protect her baby unless she’s with him. That was true then. But how do you protect your daughter from an encroaching ideology? Maybe you hide her a world away. The Last Frontier.

Ultimately, “Exile” walks back a lot of what I found so thrillingly kinetic about the season premiere. Serena and June are heading back into the war they’re always escaping, and neither of them is prepared to accept a version of freedom that doesn’t look like absolute victory. These women are shrewd and difficult and fearsome, but The Handmaid’s Tale never lets them be truly complex. They don’t evolve. No one can change their minds. They are precision-guided missiles hell-bent on their objectives.

Before June heads out to rejoin Mayday in another leaky safe house in the middle of nowhere, Holly offers to remove her ear tag. “Not until all the handmaids are free,” she tells her mother. (It’s a more optimistic spin on what Mark tells Nick about when America will capitulate: “When there’s no one left to fight.”) But what if these people’s insistence — their resilience — is more complicated than they even know? Serena claims to be motivated by maternal instinct, but she could have kept Noah safe in Canaan; it’s going to be a lot harder for her to run away from being the “global ambassador” of New Bethlehem’s shiny island prison. And June could have kept Nichole safe in Alaska and let Luke lead the search for Hannah down South. Are they fighting now because they’re such good mothers or because neither can remember how to live any other way?