Photo: Steve Wilkie/Disney
Gabriel Wharton and his fire-and-brimstone disciples believe in a God that is aggrieved and relentless. They believe in a God that would deputize a small cohort of men to punish sinners to death. They believe in a God that hates and destroys what displeases him. In short, a God they can see scowling back when they look in the mirror.
The question of who or what God might be like is not one that this series needs to answer. The final battle between vestigial “America” and Gilead could be satisfyingly reduced to June versus Gabriel, democracy versus theocracy, good versus evil. As it rounds its last corner, though, The Handmaid’s Tale is as philosophical and ambitious as it’s ever been. A lesser show might jettison religious themes in favor of kaboom! and catharsis, but our heroine spends much of “Execution” explaining the contours of her faith — the God that June prays to each time she throws her body upon the gears.
Which feels true to who she’s always been. June isn’t a patriot before the fall of America, but she is a believer. Her daughters are baptized. “He trusts us,” June tells Serena in one of several scenes that moved me to tears this week, “to keep them safe and to raise them in a world that is filled with love.” In her hierarchy, love — not the protection that political power affords — is the meaningful precondition for safety, even in this hellish country. “He that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God,” she tells Gabriel in their adversaries’ tête-à-tête. The war for this place that was once America is a war of ideas. On the floor of a broom closet before Serena’s wedding, June rallies Moira’s fighting spirit not with chants of “USA” but with scripture.
“Execution” picks up in the chaotic aftermath of that wedding. Serena — running from a crowded marriage bed with baby Noah in her arms — takes refuge at Joseph’s house after witnessing someone stabbed on her own front porch. Lydia prostrates herself on the floor of the Red Center. Nick’s wife, who has been pregnant for a hundred million years, supposedly goes into early labor. No offense to Rita’s skill as a baker, but the poisoned wedding cake she whipped up is proving a less effective sleep aid than the Calm app.
And the Handmaids are still marching the empty streets, though I was initially confused about why or where to. Have they all done their kills already? Some, including June, Moira, Janine, and Ava (Aunt Phoebe’s real name), pile into the back of a truck that will transport them to a military checkpoint that Mayday should have secured by now. Having set the brushfires of freedom all around Boston — or at least the nice, leafy parts where Commanders live — these women are headed north.
Except they are not. “They’ll never see us coming,” June said of her own plan a few episodes back, hubris her favorite drug. But they did see us coming. They always see us coming. The uprising is put down on the same night it begins with only 37 dead Commanders to show for it, which does not sound like a lot to me. The truck is raided, and the women are taken back into Gilead custody, which they’d barely left.
Despite the modest body count, though, Boston is reeling. Gabriel calls for surviving Wives and children to be transported farther from the No Man’s Land border — that is, deeper into a country in which Wives and children are essentially hostages anyway. Naomi has Charlotte packed and ready, even accepting Joseph’s weathered copy of A Little Princess for the girl he’s come to love as a daughter. “This kid, more than anything, wants to learn,” he tells his sham wife, a Tin Man no longer. “We need to teach her.” Serena wisely refuses to join the caravan even after Gabriel promises that they can try for a baby the old-fashioned way — that is, without raping a stranger. Just before he heads out, he spills that it was June who orchestrated the attack that began even before their vows. “I thought that we were friends,” is Serena’s dumbstruck reply.
At first, I tried to convince myself that the Handmaids’ arrest was somehow part of June’s master plan — a piece of the strategic puzzle so sensitive that not even Moira could be trusted with the intel. When I saw June once again imprisoned in her little Hannibal Lecter cage, the dream died. Gabriel has emerged as a major character over the course of season six, but until the showdown with his new wife last week, Josh Charles hasn’t been given much to do. In “Execution,” Gabriel visits June for an overdue confrontation.
But Gabriel doesn’t want to talk to the June they keep putting in captivity. He opens her door for her. He fetches a chair. I guffawed when Gabriel tells June that she should have shown more patience for Serena’s reforms, as though her one-woman OSHA could meaningfully improve working conditions for women whose job includes enduring rape and kidnapping. Soon Gabriel reveals why he’s really here — to administer a twisted form of last rites to a traitor on death row. Gilead is God’s kingdom on Earth, and the Commanders are his wretched priests.
They are also his executioners. If ever a show could kill its main character in the penultimate episode — and in violation of the source material! — it’s The Handmaid’s Tale. In that sense, it was a relief to see Lydia and the rest of the Handmaids paraded to the gallows alongside June, because they probably can’t kill half the cast in one go. Gabriel’s plan to restore peace to his frightened city includes inviting the pious Econopeople to watch the rebels die, but the crowd grows uneasy when they see that the rebels are “sacred” Handmaids.
Given one final chance to redeem herself before the Lord, Lydia, whose chin has been jogging since last week, opts for a primal scream. She begs for forgiveness for her girls who “have been prisoners of wicked, godless men,” shouting her prayer to the heavens, where June’s God is surely nodding along. But, overall, I was more struck by the quiet of the scene. Why aren’t the Handmaids shouting their “I love you”s? Why aren’t the Econopeople throwing shit? Thirty-seven Commanders died yesterday — these people aren’t invincible. This is Gilead at its most vulnerable.
In true villain style, Gabriel delivers a last address before doing his murders, at which point we see Luke and Ellen and Rita infiltrate the crowd. But June doesn’t see them. Before she’s hanged, she asks Gabriel for the space of a prayer. She tells God that she’s failed her friends and her family. She begs him to give their lives meaning, even in death. “Don’t let the bastards grind you down,” she screams at the top of her lungs. It’s the phrase she discovered etched into the wall of the bedroom that Serena confined her to all the way back in season one — and here she is screaming it on her way to the grave.
All this time, Luke must have wondered how his wife stayed alive in Gilead when so many others didn’t make it. This is how. June Osborne has more will to fight than the rest of them put together. If the show killed her right then and there, it would have been okay with me. Nolite te bastardes carborundorum was the baton she was passed by the woman who played the role of Offred to Fred and Serena before she did. And June did more than heed that advice. She passed it on. She shouted it in the face of evil. On some level, what happens to any individual character on The Handmaid’s Tale is immaterial. Does June get Hannah back? Does Janine see Charlotte? Does Nick’s wife ever have that baby? If the ideas live, then in some way so does June.
The bastards have not ground her down — nor could they ever — but they do hoist June into the sky with a noose. That’s when Mayday’s attack finally begins. Grenades are thrown, and the Econopeople are incited to action. They manage to free all the women at the execution site, June and Lydia included. Next, American military planes start dropping bombs on strategic targets, though what that means in Boston I haven’t a clue. Fenway? Faneuil Hall? Those little “Make Way for Ducklings” statues? We don’t see much of the fight.
In fact, by the time we catch up with June, everyone is walking around makeshift HQ and talking about phase two. Mayday’s original plan — the reason they needed to recon Jezebels in the first place — was to take out the most extreme commanders in Boston, which still seems like the best next step, if they can pull it off. June almost smirks to learn Serena is alive and well in protective custody across the street. In this sense, they’re a lot alike — survivors.
For her part, Serena is pleased to see June alive again, though June pretends to be surprised by this. Friends or not, these women are dance partners and they taunt each other with easy familiarity. “I really thought you’d changed,” June says when Serena initially stonewalls her for the whereabouts of the Commanders. Ultimately, though, these women are on the same side. Same as Joseph’s Eleanor. The same side as Lydia. And it’s an alliance more profound than politics or motherhood or even friendship. At the end of the day, Serena divulges that her husband and the rest of the Commanders can be found at the Bedford airport, because they believe in the same God. “My help comes from the Lord,” Serena says earlier in the episode, when she and Joseph pray for June’s soul together. “The maker of Heaven and Earth.” These women believe in a God that creates and mends.
It falls on Joseph, who still has the airport clearance of a High Commander, to walk an altitude-activated bomb onto the plane and walk back off before his colleagues arrive. Anyone who’s seen a television show will understand immediately that this is a suicide mission; it’s clear that Joseph isn’t going to survive “Execution” from the exquisite exchange in which he tells Naomi that he and Charlotte are on chapter nine. We need to teach her. June agrees to drive the getaway car, which means she’s only a hundred feet away when the other Commanders arrive inconveniently early. The war hawks intend to lobby the federal government for the resources to destroy Mayday once and for all, and Gabriel magnanimously welcomes Joseph to the party. As he boards, a stoic Joseph touches his heart by way of good-bye. This is how he squares things for Eleanor, by finally dying for his mistakes.
June’s still hiding in the airplane hangar when the real twist drives into view. Nick. His wife has dispatched him to join her father’s fight for Boston. He agrees to do it because June’s schemes endangered the life of their unborn son — except Rose and the baby are completely fine so, to me, it’s really more of a “no harm, no foul” situation. Still, Rose pleads with Nick to show his allegiance to God and to Gilead, to finally choose their family over the mother of his daughter.
June’s still watching with stunned, watery eyes as the man she loves despite herself pauses at the foot of the airstairs, bracing himself for the monsters he keeps for company. Is it nauseatingly romantic to suggest his pause is the universe’s cruel way of offering her a choice? There’s nothing for June to do but let him board, but you have to wonder. If Nick hadn’t crossed her about Jezebels, would she have found a way to prevent him from climbing those stairs? When he disappears into the body of the doomed plane, is June praying that his father-in-law shoos him back to Rose’s bedside? Instead, Nick takes a seat next to Joseph and laments not listening to June, who told him so long ago to quit all this. June knew that there could be no such thing as safety in Gilead, even for the powerful.
June is a person who thrives on action. She’s never afraid to move, but here there are no moves to make. Joseph and Nick are bad men who kept her alive. They’re two of the people she is closest to in the world, but the world needs them to die. When the bomb detonates and their plane falls from the sky, it doesn’t look like a disaster. Sparks fly from the wreckage like shooting stars falling from heaven. Or maybe like fireworks on the Fourth of July.
The war hawks won’t make it to Washington. Next week, we’ll find out how much Gilead’s willing to put behind a rogue region with no High Commanders left to lead it — a region so beset with dissension that it allowed the experiment of liberal enclaves like New Bethlehem in the first place. Maybe Mayday really can win the Battle for Boston. Rita and her sister will be free together, like Nick once promised. Luke and June can reconcile in a world without Nick; they can walk down the streets of their old memories and see what’s left of themselves.
I’ve been continually impressed by how little’s wasted in season six; there’s hardly a line out of place. In “Exile,” Holly tells her daughter not to trust Nick, and in “Shattered,” he betrays her. In “Devotion,” Serena demands Joseph pledge fealty to God, and in “Execution,” he comes to her for prayer. The Wives and children are being moved deeper into Gilead, we’re told at the beginning of the episode. Mayday might finally save everyone still in Boston without reuniting a single mother with her child. Janine will be free and as far from Charlotte as she’s ever been. I’m not sure if there’s any God in that.