The Handmaid’s Tale Recap: Enemy of My Enemy

I’ve been reluctant to take us down this road, but after the jaw-dropper at the end of “Surprise,” ignoring The Testaments strikes me as disingenuous. It’s time to sit down for a zoomed-out, spoiler-free little book talk.

When Margaret Atwood released her follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale in 2019, there was an expectation that the TV series would function like a long, bumpy on-ramp to the new novel. The show wouldn’t be a slave to the sequel, but it would be “laying the groundwork” — a phrase Handmaid’s exec producer Warren Littlefield used when I asked him about this topic in 2021 — for its story lines. Personally, I believe that the assumption of convergence absolutely shapes how I interpret the events of the Hulu series, as I’m sure it does for most viewers who know Atwood’s books.

But showrunner Bruce Miller, who is now developing Testaments for TV, recently tried out a different line: “I didn’t want Testaments to dictate Handmaid’s Tale, and I didn’t want Handmaid’s Tale to dictate Testaments,” Miller told Entertainment Weekly. “Some of the characters overlap, but it’s about a different world.” Respectfully, sir, that’s bullshit. If it’s not the same world, then why cast the brilliant Ann Dowd as Lydia across both series? Regardless, Miller is clearly attempting to create some daylight. I’d still be shocked to see Handmaid’s suddenly detour wildly from “laying the groundwork,” but I am persuaded not to take certain outcomes for granted simply because, 200 years from now, Professor Pieixoto claims he’s decoded an inscription on an old plinth, ya know? Just because you’re (possibly) alive in The Testaments doesn’t mean you won’t be presumed dead or in a situation so horrific that you wish you were dead at the end of this TV show’s finale. Surprise! With only four more episodes to go, everyone’s fate is still up for grabs.

So, in service of enjoying The Handmaid’s Tale on its own terms, I am trying (read: failing) to keep The Testaments out of mind. I also believe that the Hulu series has earned the right to be appraised as an independent, noncontingent piece of art. The further it spins out from the source material, the more it relies on characters and conflicts that are unique to the show: Joseph Lawrence, Gabriel Wharton, New Bethlehem. Small modifications to Atwood’s world that perhaps felt unnecessary when introduced have, by season six, matured into emotional resonance. For example, in the novel, handmaids are marked by tattoos rather than earcuffs. It’s a season-one tweak that gestated into the power of June’s symbolic refusal to have her own cuff removed in Alaska.

This week’s episode picks up with June and Moira popping out of Joseph Lawrence’s car trunk like a couple of jacks-in-the-box. That Joseph and June immediately start arguing doesn’t count toward the episode’s running surprise tally, because everyone argues with June. But I was surprised how personal and acrimonious it felt between them. June accuses Joseph of allowing Gilead to down the U.S. planes; he accuses her of failing to save his wife. These people are fighting an ideological war, but they are far from ideologues. June is a mother searching for her daughter; Joseph is a widow struggling to operate without his moral center. If Eleanor were alive, he would have stopped the attack. If June had been different, Eleanor would be alive. What’s a couple of nihilists to do?

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Serena tells a reluctant June in the season premiere. “On a case-by-case basis,” June quipped then. It’s only been a few months since their train journey west, but Gilead has a way of pushing people into compromised positions. June’s only been back in town for a couple of hours, and she’s already throwing in with Joseph, who confides that the other Boston commanders intend to de-liberalize New Bethlehem and put its creator on the wall. (Or, as Bradley Whitford pronounces it, “the wawwl.”) But what if there were no other Boston commanders, June darkly suggests over Moira’s objections? Seeing as neither has other options, June and Joseph re-up their old alliance. Mayday will kill Joseph’s enemies in an ambush at Jezebels. All he needs to do in exchange is get Moira back to safety and let June call Nick.

Nick moves swiftly to recover Janine’s map, as well as the incriminating letters that the Jezebels girls wrote to their families. A few hours ago, he was alone in his bland and empty model home, ruminating on the boy he killed and pitying himself. It must feel to Nick like June knew he needed to hear her voice right then — a psychic connection that neither time nor distance nor totalitarianism can sever. His wife and father-in-law are in D.C., Nick tells June when they reunite in Joseph’s basement. June, who’s never seemed so anchorless to me, agrees to spend the night.

I expected scenes of poignance and pathos — good sex and a sad good-bye. Instead, we get a prolonged flashback. We watch June sneak into Nick’s apartment above the Waterfords’ garage. We linger on their morning-after small talk as we rarely lingered before baby Holly was conceived. June and Nick weren’t young then, but their love was; they had the embarrassing conversations that new lovers do. The places they want to travel together — Paris, how inspired. They lament how easy it would have been for them to live their whole lives completely ignorant of each other’s existence. In America, Nick could have been June’s Uber driver. June would have been another man’s wife. Gilead was their Sliding Doors moment.

In the present day, though, Wharton gets a tip that Nick’s been to Jezebels and decides to stick around to confront his son-in-law’s infidelity. Rather than spend a steamy evening in her lover’s arms, June runs through New Bethlehem’s sleepy streets to shelter at Serena’s house. Shocked to see a soaking-wet Martha at her door, Serena eagerly digests June’s hasty cover story: Lovelorn and pathetic, June has risked her life to beg Nick to run away to Canada with their daughter. It’s almost sweet how Serena lights up when June (lyingly) confides in her, like she can’t believe the cool girl knows her name. Still, because Serena’s as prim as she is juvenile, she can’t help judging June for wanting to break up so many families. Admittedly, June’s no better at small talk. When she learns about Serena’s upcoming nuptials, she condemns her boyfriend’s mother-in-law-to-be for subjugating herself to the will of another powerful man. Most people would have at least added, “Congratulations.”

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The more Serena comes to believe in the Gilead sham that is New Bethlehem, the less clear it is that she and June share a common enemy anymore. That said, in scenes like this one, they do seem something like friends. Girlfriends, even. Hear me out: They know each other’s shit, they enjoy gossip about the same people, and they’re comfortable enough with each other to be brutally honest. For the most part, the wider world has stopped being frank with these women. Luke and Moira don’t blame June for having an affair in Gilead, for example; they evaluated her behavior against her context and quite rightly awarded June a retroactive hall pass. But June and Serena have lived most of the last few years in the same creaky house. They know the sound of each other’s footfall on the stairs. They’re intimates and, in some way, equals. They’re not afraid to call each other out.

In that sense, Janine and Lydia are intimates, too. Despite the missing guard with the missing tooth, Jezebels is apparently no longer on lockdown by the end of the episode. Aunt Lydia strolls right in and calls for an audience with her special girl so that she can tell her the special news: She found Janine a new job, and it’s even worse than her current posting. Despite living with the trauma of child separation, Lydia wants Janine to rejoice that she’s being recruited to work at the New Bethlehem birth center. Even better: Serena Joy, the most fearsome bitch in Gilead, will be Janine’s boss.

They fight, as they usually do. Janine tells Lydia she’s a meddlesome bother. The hideously fickle Lydia slaps Janine across the face for being an ingrate. It’s hard to care because, unlike June and Serena, these women have never been more than adversaries, despite Lydia’s delusions. That said, their argument raises menacing questions about Aunt Lydia’s hold on reality. Janine can’t convince her to call Angela by the name of Charlotte — the girl’s real name, the one she was given by the birth mother who wanted to keep her. “You stole her from me,” Janine shouts in Lydia’s face, but does Lydia understand that anymore? Does she insist on using the name Angela because she can’t face the horrors she’s committed, or has she completely fallen for the system of brainwashing she helped invent? It has to be the latter. How else could Lydia muster the nerve to visit this bereaved mother at the brothel where she’s imprisoned and expect her to say thank you for a tray of homemade oatmeal cookies?

Serena, for her part, comes to understand in “Surprise” that forgiveness for crimes as ruinous as the ones she and Lydia have perpetrated won’t come in the form of a grand declaration of absolution. But maybe she can earn June’s forgiveness little by little. She can shelter June from the night when she has nowhere else to go. In the morning, she arranges for Rita, now working at a New Bethlehem bakery, to come see June.

Every time we see Rita, I worry it’s for the last ever time. The Handmaid’s Tale has already told us that New Bethlehem is a trap. Eventually, it will be forced to show us. It will have to punish the people who believed in it, and not just those who built it, like Joseph. Presumably, Gilead will come for Serena Joy, too, though her marriage to Wharton may save her. Maybe she ends Handmaid’s where she started: the bored housewife of a controlling man. Or maybe Serena takes Wharton down with her. The commanders don’t have much use for Joseph’s liberal agenda, but even the devout and dutiful can be inconvenient, too. At the end of “Surprise,” only one character seems safe: Nick.

He runs to Serena’s house in the morning and tells June the new family plan. They can escape to Paris — just like they daydreamed about when they were lying in bed together above the Waterfords’ garage. June, who has been through so much, looks like she’s about to say yes when there’s another knock at Serena’s front door. She and Nick hide in the larder as Wharton brags about his latest coup to his blushing bride-to-be. After years of railing against Jezebels, he’s finally seen the place shuttered. Not for being a house of ill repute, but for being an easy target for American aggressors.

We’ve seen Nick tell lies to survive, but it didn’t occur to me just how easily he would divulge the truth to save himself. Everything June confided about Mayday’s plot, he repeated to his father-in-law. (Just say you were thinking about having an affair!) This season has been preparing us for this kind of treachery, and yet I was dumbstruck to see it happen. Has Nick ever been loyal to June above himself, or has his nose for survival always steered him in June’s direction? The only dependable alliance is an alliance of one. Mayday’s assassination plot is ruined. Hannah is stuck in Gilead. Luke is never going to Alaska.

June will never see the Monets, mottled and dreamy, hanging in the Musée d’Orsay. She and Nick will never take their daughter’s small hands as she kicks up her legs and squeals whee, or whatever little French children say instead.

The light streaming in through the holes of the larder door falls only on June as the episode ends. It reminds me of a Catholic confessional. She’s just heard her lover’s sins — the new and plunging depths of betrayal. Next, she has to decide what to do about it.