The Handmaid’s Tale Season-Premiere Recap: Trainwreck

The first season of The Handmaid’s Tale premiered in April 2017, right around the same time Trump celebrated his first 100 days in office. Though the series was green-lit back when “I’m With Her” placards still dotted lawns, it debuted in a climate of pussy-hatted resistance. The show couldn’t help feeling extra prescient as the president nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court and reinstated a global gag rule on NGOs offering abortion services. At political marches worldwide, protesters adopted burnt-red cloaks and snow-white bonnets, like Elisabeth Moss’s Offred then wore.

Too salient, too soon. The more the series (inevitably) deviated from Margaret Atwood’s 30-year-old novel, the more it sagged. The book was a tale of heroic resistance, but stretched across so many years of television, the bursts of rebellion were overwhelmed by long periods of suffering. On TV and in real life, the bastards were grinding us down. By terrible coincidence, the final season of The Handmaid’s Tale is premiering right around the end of Trump’s second first 100 days. The story of a woman taking on the patriarchy no longer feels freighted with prescience, but maybe it can offer its viewers something nearby — hope or catharsis. The American resistance to Trump has stalled, yes, but June Osborne doesn’t give up. The Handmaid’s Tale is a show about fighting the good fight until it kills you.

For “book people” — and I think we’re almost all book people — these ten episodes represent the promise of convergence. There’s much unaccounted-for space between where Atwood left off at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale and where she picks up in her sequel novel, The Testaments, set 15 years later. The TV series has already begun to bridge that gap, but there’s an expectation that the show, on which Atwood is a co–executive producer, will anticipate the events of The Testaments (now also being adapted for television). Dots will get connected, even if the picture remains incomplete.

But the thing that’s really got me most pumped for this season is the coda from the season-five finale: Serena and June, with babes in arms, thrown back together on a train out of Toronto, bound for a part of the playing field that we’ve never seen. What new shapes can the relationship between these two women possibly take? They’ve always been enemies, yet they’ve been allies, too. They’ve ruined each other’s lives and cared for each other’s children. Now, they’re on the same one-way train headed for the same safe haven. When the season premiere opens, June is holding onto Serena’s son while Serena finds a bathroom, assuring Noah that it will be okay: “Mommies always come back.”

It makes sense that Serena wants to focus on what binds the women — the hope for a future where they can live in peace and safety with their babies. Forget the past. The picture she’s painting sounds hopelessly naïve. How many times has June come close to escaping Gilead’s evil clutches, and how many times have we seen it find new ways to infiltrate her life? It was only the day before she and Nichole boarded this train that June was run over by a pickup truck, if not at Gilead’s direct orders, then certainly at Gilead’s incitement. Even if you do make it over the Canadian border, you can only get as free as the High Commanders allow.

But Serena mistakes the symmetry of her and June’s situations. June can’t forget the past, because she still has Hannah waiting for her. Her daughter is getting older in a wicked world of Serena’s making, where privileged girls will be forced to become commanders’ wives or worse.

June and Serena spend most of the hour tiffing, with Serena continually offering help that June begrudgingly accepts because she has no other choice. For example, June needs food and fresh diapers for Nichole, the most temperamentally perfect toddler in the history of the universe. Though I momentarily panicked that “Train” would feature a sanguine Serena offering to wet-nurse Nichole — a perverse callback that my fragile heart would not have survived — she actually just finds the kid a bottle of apple juice. And when it’s clear that June’s arm is infected, it’s Serena who goes from car to car until she finds a doctor. There’s no way for Serena to ever atone for what she’s done to June, but if I were June, I’d let that monster die trying.

Serena doesn’t stop at finding a doctor to treat June. She wants the doctor to triage every pregnant woman on the train. Every new mother. Before long, she’s organizing a women-only cabin. Once a family-values theocrat, always a family-values theocrat, I suppose. “We are the most important people on the train,” she says loudly, though June warns her to cool it on the “Praise be” routine. This isn’t Gilead or Canada. This train is barreling down the tracks toward the Wild West, where no one is empowered to protect a war criminal posing as a political refugee from mob justice.

Soon, the women who’ve been invited into the safe space of the caboose are bonding, trading war stories about what they’ve been through and whom they’ve lost. “I let her go,” June remembers aloud as she shares the story of Hannah’s violent abduction, which we’ve seen in flashbacks far too many times across six seasons. (I’ve cried at the same exact scene too many times across six seasons.) Wherever this train is headed, June can’t stay there for long. Mommies always come back.

And wherever this train is headed, Serena won’t fit in. She has no talent for lying low. The doctor she commandeers to treat the newfound sorority section is also a Gilead refugee. He recognizes Mrs. Fred Waterford and notifies a cop on the train that she’s not who she says she is. The cop is a victim of Gilead, too. He once had a wife and a son, and so he has no problem letting this carful of women (and some men) take their frontier justice. The only person standing between Serena and the righteous, furious scrum is June, who tries to talk them down. Give Noah to June, I found myself mumbling involuntarily as Serena gets shoved back and forth by the people who despise her. But soon it’s clear that Noah’s no safer than his mother. June saves their lives by pulling the emergency brake and pushing them from the train in the middle of the night in the middle of God-knows-where. I never thought I’d see June Osborne credibly called a traitor to the cause, but these women have a point. Serena is a principal architect of the most evil regime on earth, and June’s no stranger to extrajudicial punishment when it suits her.

When morning breaks, the train has reached its final destination. After being turned away at Vancouver, it hooks a right toward Alaska, where June is greeted by an American flag bearing only two stars. She and her daughter are safe, and yet I teared up (again) thinking about how vulnerable June is here. Moira is in Toronto, pledging herself to Mark Tuello’s shadow resistance and to Mayday. Luke’s in jail for killing June’s attacker. Nick’s in New Bethlehem with his pregnant wife. Canada’s shutting down the American Embassy in hopes of normalizing relations with Gilead.

June’s the most alone she’s ever been. She’s as crushingly far from Hannah as she’s ever been. Judiciously, the series resists the temptation to wallow in abject darkness. As the episode ends, we learn that June’s mother, Holly — who was presumed dead in the colonies — is alive. She’s an aid worker doing the medical intakes at the Alaska refugee camp. Some of what Gilead has taken may yet be restored. Mommies always come back.

It’s an exquisitely taut season premiere and one that suggests a storytelling boldness that previous seasons lacked, perhaps because they were tasked with moving the story on without really moving it forward. In season six, The Handmaid’s Tale is a series with a destination in mind and you can feel the difference. There’s a renewed curiosity for its biggest motifs — motherhood, justice, and guilt by complacency — and for the once-complicated women who have, over time, been whittled down to a handful of beliefs. I pressed play on “Train” wondering how this mirrored pair of ragged fugitive mothers would coexist, but the question that lingers at the end of the episode is closer to its opposite: Who will June and Serena be now that they have the space to be anything more than fugitives and mothers?

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