In just one of this episode’s moments of Shakespearean drama, Lawrence learned about the plot against him through eavesdropping. Now his goals and those of Mayday have come into unexpected alignment: to save New Bethlehem and salve his conscience, he also needs the Penthouse commanders gone. Does that mean he’ll work to get the Mayday plan back on track with the two freedom fighters currently hiding in the trunk of his car?
As June predicted, it didn’t take long for Mayday’s plan to go awry. A lone Guardian, emboldened by his country to treat women as property, saw an opportunity and went for it. Unluckily for him, he’s the latest in a line of assholes June and Moira have beaten their way free of and it was into the incinerator he went.
There was nothing celebratory about the violence this time; director Natalia Leite didn’t include a shot of Elisabeth Moss or Samira Wiley staring into the camera post-kill and splattered with the blood of their attacker, because this murder wasn’t a watershed character moment for either of them, it was just another damn day in Gilead.
The important character moment happened before the Guardian entered, when Moira and June reached an instructive conclusion about not forgetting who the real enemy is in the fight for gender equality. “If we start comparing our suffering then those fuckers have won,” said Moira in a line from screenwriter Ubah Mohamed that feels like a verdict this show wants to broadcast: rather than in-fight and play misery one-upwomanship with each other, let’s unite against the thing hurting us all.
June said it right when she told Moira that she would never understand what she’d been through (though she left unvoiced the extra part about her being a straight white woman talking to a Black lesbian, which, granted, might have turned the scene into a stagey educational video instead of a real-feeling confrontation between friends). Speaking of real feelings, the shift of tone from intensity to ironic humour in that exchange felt particularly well-observed. Nobody can joke about degradation like abuse survivors can.
On the subject of surviving degradation, Janine – who gave her name to this episode despite not being its main concern – remains a wonder. Instinctively heroic and somehow still capable of both hope and love, she refused to save herself before the others. Madeline Brewer has always been a thousand-watt bulb in this show, and she continues to burn bright.
