A question regarding this episode. When the Waterfords stay overnight in the household before they reach the Canadian border, the householders sing a few songs which set Serena off.
Neither of the songs was familiar to me. Were they particularly significant, or were they just allowing Serena to reflect on what they were about to do?
The border itself doesn’t appear to have been defended, or particularly marked. But I just looked it up - its nearly 9,000 km long so even if they controlled a small remnant section Gilead would need thousands of personnel to manage all the crossings. And considering that Canada remained a country with which they were desperately attempting to maintain civil relations, so they didn’t descend into a warlike footing, I could believe that backwater roads were not patrolled.
I must admit, apart from the general darkness and occasional mumbling that annoys me, I don’t have the same problem with the story that some others up the page seem to have. Not as good as Series 1 but still serviceable TV.
Well I honestly can’t fault June for letting Mrs. Lawrence die; she really didn’t have much of a choice. It was a huge mistake to let her in on the plans. That being said her death is still going to complicate things. Cmdr. Lawrence has less incentive to leave Gilead now (especially that he seems to be getting his status restored), but he’s also in way too deeply now to easily abort now.
Also now that he’s a widower won’t June have to return to the Red Center for reassignment to another household? I was expecting Aunt Lydia to take her back after the service. Maybe there’s a waiting period to see if she’s pregnant. I can see Gilead allowing a widowed Commander to keep his own children (since he’d have Marthas to help) even if they take don’t allow Widows to do the same. They probably get assigned new Wives as soon as their mourning period is over. :dubious:
Doing the free 30 day trial this month specifically to catch up on this show, which (like every other hulu show) I hadn’t seen before. Unfortunately I already caught up to current so now I have to wait four days for the season finale like a sucker.
I’ve read the endless complaints about how the scenes are too dark, but I think that’s an intentional bit of cleverness. Gilead is green, I think to the point where Commander Waterford claimed complete carbon neutrality. The show seems to be implying that part of it is because they don’t really use lights, instead relying mostly on natural light. By contrast, the scenes in Canada are all brightly lit. Gilead has no street lights, and not much in the way of interior lighting by modern standards. I got the impression that when the sun goes down, everyone stays indoors until sunrise.
June never knew how good she had it until she went to DC. Good grief, those rings seem impractically harsh. I assume they can be removed to eat; even if they all drank their meals with a straw, that can’t be the best way to maintain a healthy diet for a pregnant woman. If they can’t be removed, I would assume they’d have all their teeth pulled before being ringed since there’d be no way to maintain proper dental hygiene.
For all of the mutilations the society inflicts on handmaids – chopping off hands, gouging out eyes, cutting out tongues, burning while chained to a stove (!), FGM, silencing with mouth rings – I would think they’d just do ice pick lobotomies instead. Hell, I’d expect they wouldn’t even bother with it as punishment, but instead have a lobotomy be the first order of business on day 1 of handmaid school. No further mutilations required. Surely some of the commanders and wives would voice concern over having visibly mutilated women living in their house, right? I mean, Janine’s pussy and leaking empty eye socket can’t be appetizing around the kitchen.
I still can’t get over June not getting on the truck at the end of season 2. Totally agreed with the comment in the thread that the only reason she stayed is because the show needs her to be in Gilead for the show to continue, which is the height of bad writing. For me personally, I think I would have been more invested if June got out with Emily (and Nichole/Holly) and season 3 was all about refugees in Canada working together to set up an underground railroad.
Yeah, that was possibly my worst “misspelling” ever. I’m almost tempted to beg the mods to edit it because it’s so jarringly bad. In my head while typing I was thinking “gas => gassy, pus => pussy” and pronouncing with a short U in my head, not even realizing the word I was actually writing.
I’ve been thinking about June’s plan to save the children, and I’m not sure if it’s an entirely moral choice. Not saying I’m against her plan, but I’m picturing it in the context of the real world and it doesn’t sound great. Imagine a Western democracy sent in special forces to [del]steal[/del] rescue children from a Taliban-style regime. That would rightfully be decried as a heinous war crime, I would think.
One line delivered by June also implied the children could also be seen as a commodity of value to Canada. From memory, this was in discussion with Commander Lawrence, perhaps appealing to his economic mind.
And don’t worry about the ‘pussy’ typo - it made you sound so presidential.
Agreed. We haven’t seen any Canada’s doing weird things because of a fertility crisis. On a side note I’m at Fierte Montreal now and kinda wonder what Pride celebrations are like in this world. I can picture the Waterfords being burned in effigy.
Looking ahead to next season, refusing to return 50+ stolen children in an essentially childless world could be considered an act of war.
Gilead apparently controls most of the continental US with the exception of the Chicago area, plus much of the west coast and gulf coast. (And Texas, because of course Texas told them to fuck off.) I think that means Gilead has pretty much all the nukes. And they’ve already used nukes on their “own” soil during the revolution, so it’s a real threat that they could nuke parts of Canada in retaliation.
It’s doubtful anyone in Europe or Asia would be interested in a nuclear conflict with Gilead over what amounts to a local dispute, and they’ve all already embargoed Gilead anyway so there doesn’t seem to be much more pressure anyone else could bring to bear.
Canada has a pretty decent military force. From what we’ve seen in the show, my impression is that Canada might be able to wipe the floor with Gilead in a conventional war. But Gilead has how many hundreds (thousands?) of nukes ready to go? With the stolen children in Toronto, Gilead could threaten to flatten Quebec unless they’re returned. What could Canada or anyone else do in that case except meekly return the kids?
In any case, I’m looking forward to the fallout (no pun intended) next season. The anguish and fury of the Gileadians will be delicious, but their retribution against the Marthas and Handmaids involved in the conspiracy could end up being unspeakable. Not to mention that their investigation into the conspiracy could rival the Spanish Inquisition.
I don’t think it’s the worst show now, but I do agree it’s gone way down hill after a great opening season. Season 2 was OK, season 3 is tolerable. The acting is still strong, but the writing and story arcs make it hard to suspend disbelief.
We have barely seen anything relating to this on the show, and it’s one of my complaints - we’ve seen approximately 8,279 minutes of people mumbling in dark rooms and tight close-ups of Elizabeth Moss’s grimacing face, but I don’t think we’ve seen 60 continuous seconds discussing Gilead’s military capability at all (maybe because the writers lack the ability to explain how a small cult of religious whackadoodles was able to hijack the greatest military force on the planet which has thousands of highly educated and eminently sane officers who would never in a million years go along with their plan.) Nonetheless, it would still be interesting to have some expository world-building as regards Gilead’s military. But nah, we apparently don’t deserve to see that.
I think that Joseph Fiennes is going to spend the rest of his life kicking himself that he wasted so much time with this show.
I finally got around to watching this, at JFK about to go overseas for work. I’m tired, but holy fuck. The opening scene was the most fucked up Naziesque thing we’ve seen on the show. Not much mystery what happened to the disabled women. At least June got the children out. Did she kill Cmdr Lawerence too? I had to stop and run to a different gate at one point.
No, Joseph Lawrence is staying to clean up the mess he made. I’m assuming June will go underground now, since she will be executed on sight at this point?
Commander Waterford throwing Serena under the bus was interesting, and it serves her right - she is a war criminal as much as her husband.
Agreed. Serena really didn’t help her request when she reflexivly refered to June as Offred. I wonder if Fred got anything out of it, or if it was just pure spite. Is Lawrence actually going to get to do anything? When Ofglen #2 suicide-bombed the Red Center her entire household, including the Commander and his Wife, were put to death.
