The Handmaid’s Tale Recap: Wedding Crashers

I pity anyone who gave up on The Handmaid’s Tale. The last few episodes have been staggeringly good — twists devastating, turns galvanizing. I’m so pumped for the carnage ahead that I daydream about it. Imagine waking up at 6 a.m. in Vancouver because — yes, it’s embarrassing — you never miss a royal wedding. Kate. Meghan. You even watched Zara marry that rugby player. Now, Serena Joy, the de facto queen of Gilead. You make yourself a little mimosa as Al Roker, who is alive, tells you what the weather is like in Beacon Hill. (It will be 72 and sunny, as Serena has commanded it.) You sit on your sofa, primed to be stupefied by pomp and frippery.

Instead, you have a front-row view as a generation of commanders die on live TV.

If this was almost any other show, I’d worry that it couldn’t make good on the chaos it’s just promised us. The Handmaid’s Tale’s protracted cycles of torture and rebellion may test viewers’ patience, but eventually it delivers. Baby Nichole’s escape. Angel’s Flight. The gruesome death of Fred Waterford. When June looks this grave and vengeful, it’s already too late for her enemies to run.

It takes almost all of this week’s episode to get her back to her steely-eyed self, though. No time has passed between the end of “Surprise” and the beginning of “Shattered.” Nick and June are still hiding in a closet, motes of dust hanging in the pocket of light between them. She stares at him, shell-shocked. He stares at the ground — a loser. We don’t get to hear what Gabriel tells Serena, but we know that Jezebels is shuttered and all the women who worked there, save Janine, were slaughtered. We see their blood drain across the white shower pans. When Nick and June step out of the closet, they occupy a different world. She’ll spend the rest of her life doubting herself: how close June came to letting this villain kiss her on the Eiffel Tower.

What’s more awkward is that she still needs Nick to drive her out of New Bethlehem. Once a chauffeur, always a chauffeur, I guess. Rather than attempt a feeble defense of himself, Nick attacks June for the same willful ignorance her mother accused her of in Alaska. You can’t get in bed with a fascist — even a supposed “FINO” — and not expect to get hurt. He’s upset that June’s only right now reckoning with who he is outside their relationship. He wanted her to love him despite the fact he’s a Gilead commander and an Eye; she only loved him by pretending it wasn’t true. “We all want to save ourselves,” Nick says. “We’re fucking human. That’s what we do.” It’s not that he’s wrong — it’s that it sounds so craven coming out of the mouth of a man who has climbed his way to the top of this monstrous food chain. He’s not surviving Gilead. He’s thriving like he never did in America.

“You’re just like them,” June accuses, though, to be fair to Nick, that is the point he was just making. She walks away without a good-bye. None of their “make a good life for yourself” platitudes. Not even a “see you later.” To her credit, June heads straight into Mayday HQ and takes responsibility for the massacre she set in motion. In the last episode, I worried that Serena was the only person in June’s life who could be brutally honest with her — an observation that aged terribly. “Don’t be in love with a fucking Nazi,” Luke spits at her, no longer holding back. Elisabeth Moss is an acting marvel. She does almost nothing with her face, and yet she shows you all the effort it’s taking for June to resist breaking down in front of her husband.

Ellen won’t even talk to June, but Moira is more sympathetic. Unlike the others, she’s lived through the daily violence of Gilead. We all want to save ourselves. We’re fucking human. And isn’t that exactly what June was doing when she began to trust Nick — trying to survive? That Luke is absolutely fuming over June’s sloppy betrayal is more believable to me than how quickly they move past it. Yesterday, his wife was considering hopping on an AirFrance flight with another man. Now, she’s saving her marriage.

“Do you think she’s the only reason we’re still together?” June, who I think is using the word “together” a bit liberally, asks Luke. If anything, the fact that their relationship has endured the loss of a child without making them hate each other defies the odds. They agree that Hannah is not what bonds them now, but I wish they’d tease out what else there is. Nick and June are very different people, but their personalities could be complements. Where she was rash, he was calm. Where he was complacent, she was enterprising. If it wasn’t for the fact that he’s a genocidaire and she’s a holocaust survivor, they’d almost be made for each other.

After hearing about the executions at Jezebels, Joseph Lawrence must have called every American still in his phone contacts. Eventually, Mark Tuello picked up because the strange bedfellows roll into Mayday HQ later that day, in the winter of June’s disgrace. He’s as human as the rest so, of course, Joseph is there to save himself. What’s interesting to me is his assumption that he’ll need June’s help, which is bad timing because she’s just declared her retirement from the insurgence. Intuiting that her lust for vendetta is a more effective lever to pull than, say, June’s political commitments or even her guilt, Joseph brings up Serena Joy’s fairy-tale wedding. That woman clawed her way back into power with only nine fingers and is about to be coronated on the global stage. And June Osborne’s war on Gilead ends in ignominy and a broken heart?

Fat chance. Jealousy isn’t a sophisticated emotion, but it works. June’s new plan to kill the commanders — which is a hundred times better than the old plan — writes itself. Per Gabriel Wharton’s request, the Handmaids, as well as the Econowives and the Marthas and every other Gilead caste, will be represented at the wedding. June, whose unflinching stare is the surest way to persuade the Handmaids to revolt, is going to sneak into Beantown and arm the others with knives. Luke’s bombs, which were planted while his wife was busy screwing the pooch, are already in place. With security pulled into the city center to cover the wedding, its borders will be relatively unsecured, which means it’s time for Mark to call in the American military in exile. It’s Red Wedding Redux. Even Rita, who can no longer trust Nick to get her and her family out of Gilead, agrees to bake the poison cake.

And this isn’t happening weeks from now in the series finale. It’s happening tomorrow. By the end of “Shattered,” Moira and June have been smuggled into Gilead in the trunk of Joseph’s car, which is basically becoming their fave place to hang out. They’re welcomed to the Red Center by Aunt Phoebe (D’Arcy Carden), who sneaks them into a side room where, quite understandably, Moira starts to freak out. June does well to keep her calm. Forget the enormity of the mission. The stakes of bringing down Gilead. Keep it personal. They are here to rescue her friend Janine, who was spared the firing squad only to end up Commander Bell’s Handmaid.

Assuming all the women who work at Jezebels are still sterilized, I’m surprised this ruse is being permitted. Rats, cockroaches, and nepo babies will survive the sixth extinction. When we briefly glimpse Janine in the window of Bell’s deeply ugly house, her face is bloodied. For Janine, life has long been a series of prison cells, each smaller and more savage than the last. The glimpse we get is brief because Bell’s wife yanks her from the upstairs window, I think by the hair. The men may run the state, but much of the violence that holds Gilead’s communities together is girl on girl.

Which brings us to the wives, who have been largely absent from season six of The Handmaid’s Tale. In “Shattered,” the Boston set convenes to throw their girl Serena a bridal shower, which mostly seems like a pretext to nosy about New Bethlehem. They’ve been told by their husbands that the project is too reckless and too radical. When Serena makes the point that her New Bethlehem fertility center could result in more healthy children, the wives insist that the current fertility system already works. Which is to say, these women sitting in this room have the children they always wanted. Perhaps they were always this baby mad and ruthless — that’s how they became commanders’ wives in the first place. Or maybe the wives have relaxed into a life without choice or consequence — one in which someone else cooks your food and drives your car and tells you what to wear. Where the state will steal a baby for you, absolving you of the guilt. Serena can’t marry Gabriel Wharton or any other man. There’s not enough oxygen inside a Gilead marriage to support mental life.

But this isn’t just a marriage anymore. It’s a wedding. It’s a public spectacle too big to walk away from. Everyone will be there — except Lydia, who Joseph dispatches on a nonsense errand to D.C. so he can sneak Moira and June into the Red Center — and everyone has a role to play. Moira and June will free Janine and arm the Handmaids. Luke will detonate the bombs. Serena’s job is to wear a long white dress and make sure everyone is watching when the world catches fire. The only loose end, I suppose, is Nick, who Joseph tells June she was “stupid” to trust in the first place. “Don’t you want to be a man who does the right thing?” Rita asks Nick when she visits him after the Jezebels massacre.

“I don’t get to have what I want,” Nick replies, full of self-pity. You can actually hear him giving himself permission to become the monster he’s on the edge of becoming. I hate this quasi heel turn with all my heart, but I can’t convince myself it’s heading in the direction of a last-minute redemption arc. Because that would be a fairy-tale ending, and this is Gilead, brutal and capricious. People get put on the Wall or shivved by a Handmaid or served a slice of lethal wedding cake before they get a chance to change.