Mirrors: Handmaid's Tale, Season Two, Episode Ten
(This post contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 10)
I sure am glad that I was wrong about this being the last episode of the season. What a cliffhanger the final shot would be! Fortunately, unlike Season 1, we get not ten, but thirteen episodes this time.
Noticeable to me in “The Last Ceremony” are the statements, the actions, and ideas that—mirror-like--reflect other lines, occurrences, and concepts from earlier in this script or from prior episodes. We also see reverse mirror images: things people say or do or enact that are an inversion of what went before. This starts with the first shot: Emily is going through the Ceremony with her Commander and Wife. As the man is thrusting away at her, an act that must be extra painful after her clitoridectomy, we hear her internal narration: “You treat it like a job. An unpleasant job to be gotten through as quickly as possible. . . . [He is] no more to you than a bee is to a flower. You pretend not to be present. You leave your body.”
Later, we see and hear a distorted mirror image of Emily’s Ceremony, when at Serena’s suggestion, Commander Waterford rapes the nine-months pregnant June, while his wife holds her down on the bed, in imitation of the Ceremony meant to lead to conception. Like Emily, June narrates: “You treat it like a job….” But, while their voiceovers are the same, and both are being raped, one is the sanctioned Ceremony, while the Waterfords are breaking the rules. After Emily’s Commander is done and turns to zip his pants, he has a heart attack and drops to the floor. After the wife goes to summon help, Emily gets up and delivers a couple of swift kicks to the man’s body. After June is raped, she is left lying on the bed only to have the Commander give her a couple of figurative swift kicks in the heart the next day when he sends her off to see Hannah and be stranded in the snow. (My presumption is that Fred set Nick and June up. He’s the only powerful person who knew they were there. Why else would those Guardians drive their van to this isolated spot, just as Nick and June were ready to leave, if they hadn’t been tipped off or told to go there? This gets Nick punished for fathering Fred’s handmaid’s child, which he likely has figured out, and leaves Offred to be apprehended as if she’d tried to run away. That could get them the induced labor they want. I’m glad I only have to wait a week to find out if I’m right or not.)
The centrality of these two “Ceremonies” to this episode’s plot highlights another inverted mirror image, this one to last week’s episode. In episode 9, before leaving for Toronto, the Commander says to his wife that the Canadians think Gilead’s women are “oppressed and voiceless.” He wants them to think otherwise, yet in episode 10, he decides to double down on the oppression of his handmaid. He probably didn’t expect, back when he was constructing this society, that he’d get a feminist handmaid with a penchant for speaking her mind. Or at least didn’t expect that she would get this far into the job without having her voice tortured out of her. But, June’s sense of self and of what is fair and just will not be silenced easily. When she goes to see him to ask about a transfer to her daughter’s district, she starts out talking sweetly to him—“You have been kind to me….” But Fred will have none of it: “Who are you to tell me what’s within my power?” he roars at her. “I’ve been too lenient with you, too indulgent. I’ve spoiled you.” He uses language that one might use with a pet. She’s approached him with deference, but as one human being to another. He sees no such equality.
She starts to walk out, but will not be treated as sub-human. If he hurts her, she will come back to hurt him—another assertion of equality. She returns to his desk, leans in, and looks straight into his eyes: “You have no idea what it’s like to have a child of your own flesh and blood. And, you never will.” Last season, Serena told him that God would never let him have a child of his own, so he must have suspected he might not be the father; now, this kicks him where it hurts, but unlike Emily’s commander, Fred doesn’t die. He lives on to fight back the next day. And, if my supposition about the trip to visit Hannah is correct, he does this to show her that she might have a voice, but that a voice without the power and authority to back it up is worthless in this society. Despite his pre-Canada rhetoric, handmaids are to be oppressed and voiceless.
Serena Joy’s voice has been beaten back to encompass just Commander’s Wife-appropriate utterances: quoting scripture and proposing rape of a woman beneath her on the social ladder. This, too, mirrors what we have seen before. In the fifth episode of the first season, after she arranges for Nick and Offred to have sex, and oversees the encounter, Serena asks Offred if she feels different and quotes Jeremiah 1:5 to her: “Before I formed thee in the belly, I knew thee…” She does the same this week, when Offred returns home from the market in what turns out to be false labor. She seems to want very much for this child to be “set apart” and special. Perhaps she is also--after the challenge from the man in the Toronto bar—talking to reassure herself that this arrangement is “God’s will.”
After leading me and many to wonder if she might be prone to form an alliance with other women, as she regrets aspects of how Gilead turned out for her, she once again reveals her selfishness. She may regret losing her autonomy and the ability to put her intellectual skills to use, but it appears to be all about her losses, not those of others. And, so now we see the mirror image of her original work to design the relationships of Gilead: her proposal this week that her husband rape Offred in order to induce labor. The rape mimics the Ceremony, but veers from it in purpose. However, the underlying ideology is the same: the handmaids are there to be used by a Commander and his wife for whatever purposes they see fit. She can brush this over with her pious proclamations from the bible, but rape is rape, and rape is about power over. Serena’s participation in this act gives her the power she was missing. It also—as my husband pointed out—reveals her to be the real “gender traitor.”
Not unrelated to this is the mirroring of Offred’s labor by Serena. This ridiculous ritual is also a power play, representing the wives’ attempt to appropriate the labor of the handmaid and to justify stealing another woman’s baby. It is, though, the closest thing the wives have to some sort of solidarity with other women, although it is in the service of oppressing different women. We see a distorted mirror image of this in the actual solidarity that exists among the oppressed women of Gilead. In this case, the distortion renders it more true. From Rita reassuring June that “I’ll tell the baby about you,” to the handmaids’ concern for each other, to the Martha at Hannah’s house assuring June that she will love Hannah for her, these women have each other’s backs.
One additional example of this in episode 10 is in handmaids’ realizations that the children stolen from them are no longer their children. When Emily is despairing over the loss of her son, June exhorts her: “You cannot give up. You’re going to see your son again.” “He’s not my son anymore,” Emily resignedly answers. At this early point in the episode, it seems that June is stressing this to herself, as well as to Emily. She needs to believe that she will see Hannah again. The mirror image of this, of course, comes at the end, in the most gut-wrenching, get-the-kleenex-now scene of her brief meeting with Hannah. June demonstrates her excellent parenting skills when she tells Hannah that “It’s okay for you to be mad at me.” When Hannah says, “It’s okay. I have new parents now,” it seems that Emily was right. But, the situations are actually more complex. While June is heart-broken, she acknowledges to Hannah that she has a new set of parents: “Enjoy your life. And love your parents. . . . I need you to keep yourself safe,” she says to her daughter, who is no longer legally her daughter. But, she leaves the door open for the re-uniting they both need: “You’ll always be my baby. I’ll always always always love you,” she says through tears. “Am I ever gonna see you again?” Hannah asks. “I’m gonna try,” is all June can promise. All of the inhumanity of Gilead, of Commanders, of Wives, of the Waterfords is on display here. But, also on display is the resilience of parental and child love, human decency, and determination. The question at the heart of this show—and the book on which it is based—is whether these positive aspects of human character will be able to prevail over the evil aspects.
This episode aired the week that we in the U.S. continued to see and hear stories of migrant children being torn from their parents at our southwestern border. The concurrence of these events made this scene even more poignant; it also points to a possible answer to the central question. Although the Executive Order Donald Trump signed this week still upholds a number of unjust policies with regard to people seeking asylum, with “zero-tolerance,” with unlimited family detention, it did show him succumbing to public and political pressure on the practice of separating children and parents. In our real world, at least, enough loud voices can still make a difference. We’ll see what they can do in Gilead.
The final image of the episode offers one more example of mirror images and raises the questions I’m glad I don’t have to wait a year to see answered. While last season’s finale showed June taken away in a van to who knows what fate, with Nick left on the outside, this episode ends with Nick hustled into the back of a van, and Offred outside in the snow. Is the Commander behind Nick’s capture? What will happen to him? How will June get away from this isolated place? Will she escape the Waterfords’ clutches? How might she possibly do that when nine months pregnant? If she’s taken back, what will happen to her and her baby? And, what will be the actual cliff hanger after three more episodes?
