After the shock of the closing moments of last week’s episode Together, events quickly spiral out of the control of the women now hurtling through no man’s land in a stolen car. With a heavily pregnant Serena having shot and wounded her bodyguard and kidnapped a bewildered June at gunpoint, both of the vehicle’s occupants are now escapees. June has won at least a temporary reprieve from execution and is again on the run – albeit under duress. Serena has fled incarceration in the Watkins’ Gilead outpost, driven by the fear of losing custody of her baby, whose birth is now imminent.
What makes this sequence work so well is not just that it’s wholly unexpected but the way that it’s made clear that this break for freedom is the full extent of Serena’s plan. As the car speeds off, with June at the wheel and Serena yelling orders, it’s not just the audience who has no clue what will happen next. Struck by a jolt of pain, Serena accidentally fires her handgun and blasts a hole through the windscreen. After June slams on the brakes and runs from the car, Serena jumps into the driver’s seat and sets off in pursuit. When she slews the car off the road to a dead stop, June returns to check on her. As Serena is hit by waves of contractions, there’s now no doubt. On their own, as fugitives from all sides, and in the middle of nowhere, Serena has gone into labour.
The emotional turmoil of this ‘fight and flight’ is superbly played by both Elizabeth Moss (June) and Yvonne Strahovski (Serena), as the two women struggle with their disbelief at their calamitous predicament. The inevitability of a one-on-one showdown between these two key antagonists has been foreshadowed throughout this season. But even amongst those who track the show’s plotting with a forensic attention to detail, few would have predicted that their conflict would have delivered them to a moment quite like this. While their mutual loathing remains undimmed, they’ve now arrived at a point where Serena is completely dependent on June’s sense of mercy.
What unfolds is an intense two-hander in which these two characters, holed up in an abandoned barn, confront an inescapable fact. If Serena is left to give birth alone and unaided, it’s likely that both she and the baby could die. The only person who can help her is June: her husband’s killer and a freed handmaid who’s repeatedly sought the opportunity to take vengeance on her too.
The script by Rachel Shukert takes full advantage of the complexities and contradictions of the situation and avoids the lure of the mawkish and the melodramatic. Serena’s inability to recognise the ironies of her sense of injustice about how Gilead’s enforcers have treated her during her pregnancy are especially deftly handled. June has to deal with a rollercoaster of responses to the position of power that she’s been thrust into. Does she abandon Serena to a fate she deserves, or does she commit to trying to save her and her baby? Serena realises that she has no cards left to play but is repulsed at the idea of putting her trust in June’s good intentions.
As the two women argue and trade accusations, director Natalia Leite builds the tension around the impending birth. What ups the ante very effectively is the inclusion of flashbacks to the earliest encounters between Serena Waterford and soon-to-be handmaid Offred, under the watchful eye of Aunt Lydia. With so many episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale now switching focus away from the appalling realities of the handmaids’ lives in Gilead, these scenes provide an instructive reminder of the regime’s absurd cruelties and its theistic-soaked misogyny. It’s a repellant world that Serena’s pregnancy has compelled even her to question.
No Man’s Land ends not with the high-stakes cliffhanger of Together, but with something altogether more unnerving. The life-or-death crisis that June and Serena have been compelled to share has affected each of them in ways that others in their lives will struggle to understand. That leaves both June and the audience with an uncomfortable question: when Serena experiences the traumas of would-be motherhood that so many handmaids have suffered, is the only legitimate reaction one of schadenfreude? Is there any way in which that response might develop into something closer to sympathy?
New episodes of THE HANDMAID’S TALE – SEASON 5 premiere Sundays in the UK on CHANNEL 4
Read our previous reviews of THE HANDMAID’S TALE below:
Season 5, Episode 4, DEAR OFFRED
