The Handmaid’s Tale Recap: The ‘Good’ Guys

Mayday is America’s best hope for survival, so why do I want June to scupper all their plans by rescuing Janine from Jezebels right this second? Nick is one of the series’ few “good” guys, so why do I feel relief when he U-turns into the ICU for another homicide? And Serena. Serena Joy Waterford is among the most frightening, dead-hearted women ever written for the small screen. How am I rooting for her to accept Commander Wharton’s marriage proposal and the safety that comes with it? Every single character in The Handmaid’s Tale is in a compromising struggle for survival — good people do bad things, and evil people make redemptive choices. This week’s episode, called “Janine,” is a standout example of the series operating at its layered best: urgent, tender, uplifting, disturbing, and conflicting.

At the plot-heavy episode’s center is the knotty friendship between June and Janine, who haven’t seen each other since their separation in season four. Across the years, June has been a mother to Janine, as well as an ally, as well as a complete disappointment. But despite the recent distance between them, “Janine” is quick to establish parallels that accentuate the depth of their connection. Janine now feels as responsible for her “girls” at Jezebels as June, who didn’t let her mother remove her ear cuff, feels for the handmaids. They’ve both reverted to calling Holly and Charlotte by the names they chose for their daughters before kidnappers rechristened them.

Their reunion is so affecting that I’m inclined to ignore the absurd choices Mayday makes along the way to get us there. For example, why is Ellen teamed with Luke to drive into Gilead? Surely that high-risk role would better be performed by an underling and not the leader of the rebels. Their plan is simple and also hopeless: renowned fugitives Moira and June, (thinly) disguised as masked Marthas, have two hours to infiltrate the Jezebels’ cleaning crew, gather intel, and make it back to the hotel’s delivery bay for exfiltration. It’s all going (unreasonably) smoothly until they learn that a gang of commanders is making an impromptu visit. Janine is already in the penthouse, “pre-gaming” the horrors that await her.

So June heads upstairs and into the fray — the last place in the decaying world where she’s comfortable. Janine has just enough time to instruct June and Moira to meet her in room 618 before that Masshole Commander Bell — who, with reluctance, I will stop referring to as “Jonah” — arrives to claim her. Not content to simply torment Janine, he orders the nearest Martha to wipe the Champagne that he’s spilled down his trouser leg. June, who has the most famous irises in Gilead, cannot stop making eye contact with people. She glances up at Bell and then back at Commander Lawrence, who helps her from the ground. It’s unclear if Joseph recognizes June or if something less passes between them — the faint sensation of familiarity. The ghost of his own guilt.

Naomi had told her husband that Jezebels was where he would make friends; he’d earn the other commanders’ respect through performances of his virility. Instead, the preference Joseph’s showing for Janine is putting a target on his back. Bell doesn’t want to give her up, but she’s the only woman that Joseph can safely not sleep with, which Janine gets. She preys on Joseph’s conscience, knowing that he’ll save her from Bell, which will give her the cover she needs to visit room 618. June never did give this girl enough credit for being crafty.

Joseph won’t be making the same mistake. Janine shows him the peephole that the girls use to spy on commanders; “You can’t let them win,” she tells him as she slips away to meet June. To pass the time, Joseph listens in as Bell and the commanders plot his downfall. Let New Bethlehem attract the American refugees who have more longing for their stolen loved ones than they do common sense. Then, in a few years, they’ll shut down the liberal enclaves, reabsorb the populations into Gilead proper, and put the architect of New Bethlehem on the Wall. Joseph, usually so shrewd, appears genuinely shocked to hear that these men don’t wholeheartedly embrace his plan to defang a country that’s made them each rich and powerful, gluttonous and untouchable.

While Joseph learns that his personal doomsday clock is ticking, Janine runs to Moira and June to download everything she knows. Commanders arrive at Jezebels via a private garage with a direct elevator to the penthouse. Janine knows the code; she knows that guardians change every hour. Crucially, she knows that the women here have been arming themselves with shivs, ready to rebel. Overcome to see that her friend is (relatively) safe after so much time apart, June suggests that Janine leaves with her when Luke returns to the rendezvous point. “I can’t leave without my girls,” Janine tells her. She’s the mother goose to her own band of misfit women now.

When Janine heads back to Joseph, Moira and June fight over June’s recklessness, plus her refusal to recognize Moira’s suffering. It’s the same fight they’ve had before, but it feels new because they have hit the relationship low point I call subtext zero. “Do you have any idea how fucking sick of you I am?” Moira spits, and we do. No one knows better than a faithful Handmaid’s fan just how much oxygen June Osborne uses up. I’ve been critical of how this show pits its women against each other, but in this scene, it’s at least acknowledged. “You don’t think I know that I’ll never understand what you went through?” June asks Moira, who was raped and beaten nightly for a relatively short time, whereas June was raped and beaten on a more generous monthly basis, but for a longer duration. Also, her children were abducted. “I know that,” June concludes. But if they get distracted by the Olympics of suffering, “then those fuckers have won.” I see June’s point, and yet it behooves me to point out that those fuckers have won.

Moira and June are patching things up, hopefully for the last time, when a guardian walks into the room. In retrospect, perhaps they should have just absconded with Janine because he locks the map that she drew for them in a hotel safe. Faced with the choice of killing the guardian or letting him rape them, they choke him to death with a landline phone cord. By the time they deposit the body in the building’s incinerator, alarms are sounding, and Luke and Ellen, the leader of the American resistance, are being detained. June and Moira make it to the commanders’ private car park, but the door code is back in room 618, and, honestly, how far can two Marthas, who aren’t really Marthas, make it on foot?

Cue Joseph Lawrence, who is pulling out of the garage, no longer fake horny for fake sex now that he understands the impossible depths of Gilead’s evil. He’d be a hero to his fellow commanders if he walked an AWOL Jezebel and Fred Waterford’s executioner back into the penthouse, but he’d still be four years from the Wall. Joseph could just ignore June and Moira, but instead he pops open the trunk of his car. Perhaps it’s Janine’s words echoing in his head that convince him to do it: “You’re not a good guy, but, just compared to them, you are.”

It’s a fitting description of the other two commanders whose narratives occupy the rest of “Janine.” Nick is not a good guy, but, just compared to the dead guardians who would have killed Moira and Luke back at the water park, he is. Except it turns out one of the guardians that Nick shot is on the mend. “Promise me you’ll find out who did this to him,” the young officer’s mother begs of Nick when the leader of New Bethlehem calls to visit. You know how I know Nick can’t possibly survive the sixth season of The Handmaid’s Tale? He tells that deluded woman that he’ll do it. He’ll catch the bad guys. But you can’t lie to a grieving mom and survive. That’s just not how TV works. After she leaves, Nick shuts the hospital-room door behind her to finish what he started.

Commander Wharton is also not a good guy, but, just compared to Fred Waterford, he is. He assures Serena, who he has coveted since she was another man’s wife, that he wants her to have a voice. To do the work that God has called on her to do. This week, that work includes launching a fertility center in New Bethlehem. Aunt Lydia, who these days darts around Gilead with striking ease, drops by Serena’s house to tell her what’s become of poor Janine and so many of her other No. 1 girls: The handmaids who made Boston’s barren wives into mothers are now languishing at Jezebels.

Serena tells Lydia that she was naïve to believe that the handmaids, who were resented for being fertile, could become “respected members of [a] society” organized around the importance of fertility. But then she has another one of her brilliant ideas that’s destined to end badly, kinda like Gilead. What if Serena could give retired handmaids, not limited to but including Janine, a second chance as attendants at the new center? The handmaids’ brand is fertility. In its final season, The Handmaid’s Tale has made conspicuous mention of Gilead’s pro-birth mission, and it’s menacing. What’s off-limits when a government understands its mandate as a fight for the survival of the human race? On the international stage, who can afford to defy Gilead if Gilead is the only country still growing?

Lydia is sitting in Serena’s living room when a bouquet of flowers arrives from Commander Wharton. “He is also a single man of good fortune in want of a wife,” she says encouragingly, though Serena chides her for misunderstanding Jane Austen’s use of irony. They are a dying breed: the last literate American women. They can adapt lines from Pride & Prejudice to make a point. They may be sitting around thinking up soft reforms to make women’s lives a little better, but they can’t possibly understand what the next generation of women’s lives will feel like. They aren’t creations of Gilead but Gilead’s creators.

A healthy womb “must never go to waste,” Lydia adds by way of convincing Serena to be wooed by Wharton. She almost looks like she hasn’t been considering it, but Serena’s a liar. More kids with a powerful man in a version of Gilead where women are venerated — isn’t that exactly what she wanted from Fred? As an engagement ring, Wharton presents her with a library he’s built for the boys and girls of the new community. He says all the right things. They can split their time between Boston and New Bethlehem; he wants to raise Noah as his own and give him siblings. Serena says yes. She’d be an idiot to say no.

And yet, she’d be an idiot to trust him. Wharton might not be the kind of guy to cheat on his wife at Jezebels, but I’d be curious to know what he’d have added to the conversation about the future of liberal reform if he was on the other side of Janine’s peephole. Earlier in the episode, when Wharton questions whether Nick can ensure the safety of the Americans returning to New Bethlehem, is he looking to keep a moral obligation or simply head off a diplomatic problem? Because, to me, the name “The Serena Joy and Gabriel Wharton Library” feels more like a romantic gesture than a political commitment. When the rest of the commanders eventually come to shut down New Bethlehem, Joseph Lawrence isn’t going to be the only name on their blacklist. Mayor Nick Blaine. Fertility Center co-founder Aunt Lydia. Global Ambassador Serena Joy. The last time she defied the state, Serena lost a finger for it while her first husband watched. Will Wharton be “good” enough to stand between her and the Wall?