But they don’t look at each other that way anymore.
“It’s their own fault,” she says now.
“They should have never given us uniforms if they didn’t want us to be an army.”
Credit: George Kraychyk/Hulu
Makeup on the collar of her cloak.
And in this time, finally, her prayers are answered: Offred is pregnant.
For Serena, it’s joyous news.
For Offred, it’s much more complicated.
“You think I prayed for this?”
she asks Serena Joy.
“You think I prayed to bring a baby into this house?”
Serena Joy also confronts the Commander (Joseph Fiennes), albeit with less bodily harm.
She’s waiting in his office, Scrabble tiles out, offering to play.
He reminds her about that pesky rule about women and reading.
(She remembers she helped write it.)
When he dismisses her, Serena reveals Offred is pregnant and casually adds that the baby isn’t his.
When Offred breaks the news to Nick, she’s still conflicted.
“It’s terrible,” she tells him, as he crouches down to her belly.
“No it isn’t,” he replies.
“Of course,” she says, but he knows she’s lying.
And then there’s the package, opened by Offred later that night.
What was it that needed smuggling out of Jezebels?
She reads them all in horror and falls asleep surrounded by them.
Waterford seems happy to let him off lightly (perhaps thinking of his own dalliances?
), but even Mrs. Putnam is on board to give him the harshest punishment possible.
That path to redemption?
Losing a hand and part of his arm, amputated below the elbow in an operating room.
Maybe that’s what makes Waterford go home and apologize to his own wife.
The handmaids assemble in the park again, but this time, stones are brought in.
In the first episode, the group attacked the accused man on command.
When Ofglen first tries to object, she’s beaten by a guard and taken away.
They’re all sent home, but you know that’s not the end of this.
They’ve won this battle, for now, but not the war.
It’s enough to make her collapse from shock and joy, but her journey isn’t over yet.
Welcome to Canada, indeed.
It’s a tearful reunion, and it’s all the more bittersweet because June is still trapped.
Offred knows she and the other handmaids will be punished for defying orders and refusing to kill Janine.
And so, she waits.
“This might be the last time I have to wait.
But she’s not scaredinstead, she feels “serene.”
“There’s a kind of hope, it seems, even in futility,” she muses.
She tried to make the world a better place, even just a little bit, for Hannah.
“), and the Commander, who can’t stop what’s happening.
Her head held high, she enters the back of the van and embarks toward an uncertain future.
“And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light.”
Is this a journey toward imprisonment and death?
An escape plan devised by the resistance?
We don’t know, and neither does she, but Offred is ready to accept whatever comes.
And we’ll find out more when the show returns for its second season.
