The Handmaids Tale
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Today, foreign diplomats are invited into the picket-fence community to kick the tires on the reformed conservative theocracy.
Commander Lawrence leads a whistle-stop tour of his one-gazebo town.
Imagine more New Bethlehems and not just in the Eastern District.
Imagine New Bethlehems across Gilead.
Imagine them across the world.
Each with its own gazebo and its own newborns and its own baby bumps to pet.
The foreign diplomats will believe in the illusion of New Bethlehem because its politically expedient.
Joseph is less credulous.
The Eastern District where they lived wasnt even the most conservative state.
Gilead may have started with their badly executed ideas, but its nottheirsanymore.
It belongs to men like Nicks father-in-law, High Commander Wharton.
Gilead is a fundamentalist factory now.
The commanders that replace the assassinated ones will have risen through this countrys ranks.
They have diminishing memories of America, and they can see that the world is poised to accept Gilead.
Regardless, it would still be a waste for Luke and Moira to die at Action Park.
To recover them, Mayday needs the help of someone who can move freely among the Gilead patrols.
June doesnt just send Nick into No Mans Land; she insists on coming with.
Given our understanding of the intensity of the Gilead surveillance state, this strikes me as an impossible ask.
If Nick gets caught by the guardians on his own, he has to think up a good excuse.
If he gets caught with June, they both die.
I will, June shrieks back, like a woman whos tired of her mans intimations.
If only they had reusable water bottles and fold-out maps, this picture of decaying normalcy would be complete.
It grounds the more convoluted story lines to see our characters walking around our world.
Its a narrative shortcut to poignance.
As Nick and June walk, they also talk.
Nick made this perilous deal even though, to his mind, June chose Luke.
Of course, thats not how she sees it.
Luke waited for her and though she loves Nick as well, theres a prize for waiting.
Do you even know what its like to be in love with you?
Nick asks her, the log flume in the distance.
Luke cant die here because he has something to prove.
So imagine how he feels when she turns up to save him with her commander boyfriend.
The series does well to let these almost embarrassingly unevolved emotional arcs play out absent of acknowledgment.
Its true that even in Gileads America, husbands get jealous.
And its true that in Gileads America, there are more important things to talk about.
Getting to the car was basically synonymous with getting home.
If you could just drag yourself to the car, youd be home already.
Its consistently difficult to get a handle on who runs Gilead.
Nick is the mayor of New Bethlehem, so shouldnt these foot soldiers do as he says?
Thank you, bro, Luke tells Nick because thats how you save face in this situation.
Now, the man who cuckolded him has also rescued him from certain death.
What is there to say, really, except thank you, bro?
Sam Jaeger, who plays Mark, does well to deliver this scenes sloppy dialogue with a straight face.
The borders that once seemed impossible to cross are softening.
Or maybe Nick and June are getting bolder.
I mean, they did just spend a day together in Disneyland.
So it was refreshing to hear June call them on their bullshit the performance of the whole good-bye thing.
They cant stop colliding.
They dont want to stop needing each other even when it endangers each other.
Theres no love triangle without proximity.
Instead, they settle on see you later.
Nick and June will see you later until it kills someone.
If he wasnt going to die, Nick and June would have said a properly overwrought good-bye.
