The Handmaid’s Tale Recap: Eye for an Eye

How satisfying you find this week’s episode of The Handmaid’s Tale will depend partly on how you react to June’s voice-over, which ushers us in and out of “Exodus.” For me, her monologue about the awesome power of fashion, both in America and Gilead, comes a little too late. The Handmaids’ claret-red cloaks were astonishingly evocative when we first saw them in season one, especially as offset by their virginal white bonnets. They conjured the image of Little Red Riding Hood against the snow. A lurking wolf. A twisted fairy tale. Once upon a time in a land not far away at all.

In “Exodus,” June draws a parallel between Gilead’s uniforms and the relationship the last Americans had with buying clothes: ecologically destructive consumerism masquerading as self-expression. You are what you wear. By controlling how people dressed, Gilead could control how people saw one another. Maybe it could even control how people saw themselves: You are what you’re wearing. The red cloaks of the Handmaids — plus the bonnets and masks — are particularly dehumanizing, anonymizing, physically restrictive, and symbolically pregnant. June tells us they’re the color of blood and “rage.” Viewers will have seen the apple Eve plucked from the Tree of Knowledge, Hester Prynne’s scarlet A, and The Red Kimono, the suggestion of a theater curtain closing on the outside world.

At least, at first. By season six, though, we’ve seen a lot of these cloaks. Like the citizens of Gilead no longer accustomed to a world of unlimited fashion choice, we’re inured to the Handmaids’ livery. Am I glad they’re sturdy enough to support the weight of several dozen shivs sewn into the lining? Yes. But these uniforms are hardly the most menacing form of social engineering and caste enforcement at the state’s disposal, and so the Handmaids using them to their advantage in this way doesn’t pack the symbolic punch for me that it does for June.

The other conspicuous feature of “Exodus” is its pace. Serena and Gabriel’s wedding is not the bloodbath I envisioned when June was plotting aloud at the end of “Shattered.” Rita’s poison cake isn’t laced with cyanide — it’s just Benadryl. The Handmaids don’t brandish their knives in the middle of the “Macarena” to take out their commanders en masse, which, now that I think about it, would have been a horrible idea. The reception is being guarded with machine guns, and the uprising would have been put down before it started. Commanders are most vulnerable within the assumed safety of their own homes, sleeping the deep sleep that hay-fever sufferers know well.

I found I had untapped reserves of patience for this slow-burn rebellion, which didn’t feel dragged out, but tense and unhurried. The runtime is 48 minutes, but it took me over an hour to watch given how many compassionate pauses I took. Pretend it’s just a TV show, I told myself. The Handmaids file into the church first, which means June’s watching as Nick escorts his wife — the daughter of the groom — down the aisle. Serena looks gorgeous and demure as she processes the long nave in a full-sleeved gown. (Speaking of sartorial matters, is any single garment more scrutinized than a woman’s wedding dress?)

At first, I thought Nick was Gabriel’s best man but then he starts doing a li’l homily on the sanctity of flesh-joining. I don’t know, I didn’t really listen, because my heart was in my throat. Seeing so many switchblades hidden in so few cloaks, I still did not understand how June’s plan would unfold. I did not predict that it would call for small objects to be passed between nervous hands infinite times in a deathly silent cathedral and that we would all be forced to watch. This isn’t TV; this is torture. When the episode cut from the wedding ceremony to the reception, I sighed with (short-lived) relief.

I hadn’t imagined the Handmaids at the reception as well as the church. Will they be served food like the other guests? Are they permitted to de-mask in order to eat it? Will there be a band or a DJ? Are the Handmaids allowed to dance if they keep their hip circles to a minimum? Nor did I imagine the reception would be so windowless. Airless. Up-lit. Though Serena seemed reluctant when Gabriel first suggested the ladies in red attend the wedding, she now wants to welcome them personally.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: Put your damn eyes away, June. Just look at your lap, the floor, the beds of your fingernails. She wisely maneuvers to the back of the pack to listen to the new Mrs. Gabriel Wharton talk about the lack of appreciation the Handmaids have been shown until now. Serena even uses how she repaired her relationship with June as an example of how this cursed community can still heal itself. But Serena’s newfound sympathy for the plight of the Handmaids is nearly as off-putting as her old disdain for them. You can almost hear her say it: As the biological mother of a son that the state threatened to take from me, I understand what it’s like to be a victim of child abduction.

Anywho, busy bride’s gotta go cut the cake, but she’ll be back for a group portrait. No masks, she adds, proud of herself. Serena doesn’t want a photo with the red clothes but with the women trapped inside them. This would expose June and Moira as wedding crashers, but, luckily, Serena’s never seen again. Brides! Aunt Phoebe hurries the girls home — to their residences and to the Red Center — before any cloak-red blood gets spilled. I guess you’re meant to kill your own commander for homework.

But just before they’re out the door, Aunt Lydia turns up. She decided to skip the big, important decoy meeting Joseph set for her in D.C. to catch the final five minutes of the wedding of a woman who despises her. I knew she could recognize June by her irises, but I was surprised Lydia could ID the erstwhile handmaid by the drape of her poncho. Aunt Phoebe persuades her that she’s deliriously tired, and Lydia sits down for a reheated London broil and a slice of Sleepytime cake. Crisis temporarily avoided.

While the rest of the red army gets in position, June skedaddles over to Commander Bell’s house to rescue Janine. I know that some of you will question how a Handmaid is able to wander Cambridge and infiltrate a Commander’s well-guarded home undetected, but this is just a pet peeve, and I’m above it. June is not a regular Handmaid; she’s a super-Handmaid. By the time she’s in the house, Bell has been jarred from his cake stupor by a landline phone call, which I mention because, JK, I’m not at all above pet peeves, and for some reason the use of landlines in Gilead is mine.

But I’m glad he’s awake when June gets there. I’m glad he knows he’s in trouble in the moments before she stabs him to death through the eyeball. It’s a good kill, brimming with symbolism: This sadistic man tortured a one-eyed sex worker and imprisoned her in his home. When Janine comes downstairs, she’s a shell of the woman we last saw in Jezebels — ready to take on the top brass, prepared to protect her girls. This Janine whispers a barely audible “thank you” in June’s direction.

That’s the only real action we get this episode, as the climactic showdowns that close out “Exodus” are attacks of conscience. Aunt Lydia and Serena Joy are both true believers struggling to keep the ethical codes prescribed by their sad, brown work clothes and jewel-toned sheath dresses, respectively. Let’s start with our bride, who arrives home to find an unwanted gift from her groom: a Handmaid of their very own. Despite the pretense, it’s quickly revealed that Ofgabriel isn’t really a gift for Serena but a gift Forgabriel — what that patient, God-fearing man believes he deserves for putting up with all of Serena’s other radical mumbo jumbo about women’s literacy and family reunification. Can’t he have this one little Handmaid as a treat?

Serena tells Christina — her real name — to run from their house and never come back: “She’s not a vessel. She’s a human being.” It would be a heroic act of disobedience if (1) Christina had anywhere to go except the house of another Commander and (2) Serena’s rejection of her didn’t feel so personal. I do believe in the sincerity of Serena’s unimpressive epiphany that Handmaids are human beings, but she’s clearly insulted and defensive, as well. “I’m fertile!” she pleads when her husband announces his plan to impregnate another woman while Serena watches. But if she didn’t already have Noah, would Serena be so revolutionary? Even when she let Nichole go in season three, it was to spare the young girl a life in Gilead, not to return a kidnapped child to her real mother.

Still, I feel terrible for Serena, who realizes in the foyer of this ugly mansion that she’s in a “fool me twice” prison of her own making. Gabriel is likely the best man in this city, and he is a plainly terrible man, too. At first, he even refuses to let Serena take a crying Noah back to New Bethlehem. Eventually, he lets her go, but unless Serena has Mark Tuello’s new number, she must spend the dark drive home thinking about how she is going to die in this marriage, in this country, in this mess of a savior complex she allowed to determine the course of her life. It’s simply a matter of when.

Aunt Lydia’s reversal, on the other hand, is a dramatic and consequential swing at heroic redemption. As she picks at her cold plate of leftovers in the half-empty banquet hall, she realizes that something is up. The Handmaids — who live nutritionally balanced, conception-promoting lives of monastic deprivation — have not eaten their slices of wedding cake. Something must be wrong with the cake. And if the Handmaids know that there’s something wrong with the cake, then that must have been June Osborne who Lydia saw scurrying out of the reception.

Lydia darts back to the Red Center and demands to see her “sleeping” Handmaids, who are still fully dressed in cloaks and boots. There are only two paths for the episode to take from here: Either the Handmaids don’t revolt, or they do it with Lydia’s blessing. Lydia’s about to have a guardian execute the treacherous Aunt Phoebe on the spot — is that allowed? — when Moira, who I forgot was even there, speaks up. Did you remember that Moira was at the Red Center before she was at Jezebels? Because Aunt Lydia didn’t. Lydia believed she was a champion for her girls, the one person in this forsaken country to still see the human beings beneath the red cloaks and never just the vessels. But here Lydia is, unable to tell one of her girls — Moira — her name.

That’s when June walks in and calmly delivers a workshop in reverse psychology. June didn’t “do this,” as Lydia accuses. Whatever this is, it started when Lydia enslaved these women. Tortured them. Mutilated them. Stole their babies, pink and crying, from their delivery rooms. “You know rape is rape,” June goes on to insist, but how could she? If Lydia knew that rape was rape, how could she bear to call any of these women by their names? June delivers an emotional plea about how the life of a Handmaid is an insult to the dignity of the souls God gave them, which she layers with a thinly veiled appeal to Lydia’s ego: Is it possible that, if God turned His back on Gilead, He would empower Lydia to set things right? Perhaps June needn’t have bothered with the oratorical tricks because, ultimately, it’s seeing Janine that melts Lydia. Janine is the tenderest spot in the hard woman’s heart. “If you want to save us,” Janine tells the aunt who took her eye, “let us go.” For once, it’s not June who saves the day. It’s not the threat of vengeance that wins. It’s the promise of deliverance.

Lydia takes the guardian’s gun from him (though she should probably nab his walkie-talkie, too), and her girls wordlessly file out of the deranged orphanage she built for them. If there were an Emmy for jogging your chin in misery and regret, Ann Dowd would be a shoo-in. Janine leaves. June leaves. Serena, too, is on the move. The episode is called “Exodus,” but it ends with Lydia prostrating herself on the cold, hard floor in child’s pose, screaming out for God to help her for what she’s done and what will come next. After Exodus comes Leviticus. After God delivers freedom, he teaches his faithful what it really takes to be holy.