The consequences of Serena’s reckless, impulsive bid for freedom reverberate throughout the plot of Motherland. Thanks to June’s selfless decision to help her give birth, even after she had kidnapped her at gunpoint, Serena is now a proud new mother. But after Luke called the authorities, she’s locked up in a detention centre, and the callous Wheelers have custody of baby Noah. But it’s not just the Waterford widow who’s feeling the pressure.
In Canada, resentment towards the asylum seekers from Gilead is growing. Groups of angry protestors are demonstrating in the streets while some march threateningly past June’s and Luke’s house shouting abuse and demanding that US refugees are thrown out of the country. It’s a rising tide of hostility that leads them both to consider whether they can continue to make Canada their home. With his usual meticulous sense of timing, Commander Lawrence has decided that now is the perfect moment to reveal his plans for New Bethlehem. As the fifth season accelerates towards its endgame, writer Yahlin Chang keeps all of the show’s plot plates spinning – even as it’s clear that some characters’ hopes are going to be smashed to pieces by the time of the season finale.
When he first appeared in the series as a new host for the ‘wayward’ handmaid Offred, Lawrence appeared to be a peripheral figure in the leadership of Gilead. He seemed to be little more than a reluctant fellow traveller lacking the religious zeal of his compatriots. In what’s been a superbly judged performance by Bradley Whitford, it’s slowly become apparent just how astute and wily a political operator Commander Lawrence really is. Now revealed to be one of the central architects of Gilead, he had been sidelined by the fundamentalists more concerned with enforcing Biblical brutality than focusing on the need to ensure humanity’s survival through state-controlled procreation.
Demonstrating a ruthless streak of his own, Lawrence – aided and abetted by Commander Nick Blaine – has now moved against his enemies. Through the construction of the enclave of New Bethlehem, he intends to end Gilead’s isolation from the rest of the world by showing the regime’s more human face. New Bethlehem will rehabilitate Gilead’s reputation by providing its residents a degree of autonomy, ending the enslavement of the handmaids, and allowing families to live together. It’s an inspired narrative conceit by the Handmaid’s Tale’s creative team, not least because for some key characters, with few choices open to them, it’s a disturbingly attractive idea.
If the events of No Man’s Land forced June into action, she would have previously dismissed as unthinkable, the pledge from Lawrence that she can be reunited with her daughter Hannah if she moves to New Bethlehem again leaves her reeling. Luke rejects the proposal outright, but June is conflicted, and the renewed unity of purpose that once again bound Luke and June together begins to unravel.
After the horror of being separated from her newborn at the end of No Man’s Land, Serena’s situation worsens as she is imprisoned on suspicion of border violations. All of the hopes that she had of establishing a reputation of her own in a Gilead outpost in Canada have come crashing down around her as her pregnancy has led her to recoil from her previous fundamentalist certainties. Now alone, and having alienated all other allies, Serena reaches out to a preoccupied June.
In Together, June had been compelled to teach Luke the techniques necessary for survival when kidnapped by your enemies. As Serena pleads for a different kind of assistance, June is torn between her visceral loathing for her former captor and the natural maternal empathy Serena’s desperate plight evokes. She decides to give Serena a sense of the harsh lessons that she was forced herself to learn in Gilead: deceive and mislead your jailers, pretend to be acquiescent, and do whatever it takes to get in close enough to exact revenge. As she is returned to the Wheelers’ home, Serena, it transpires, can be an attentive pupil.
Director Natalia Leite deftly handles the episode’s dysfunctional character interactions, which contrast so effectively with the surge of unconstrained happiness with which Motherland ends. Yet because The Handmaid’s Tale is the show it is, it seems hard to imagine that events will turn out to be quite so joyous or straightforward as those eager to celebrate their victory expect.
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
