The revolution is finally begun on The Handmaid’s Tale.
Written by co-showrunner Yahlin Chang, the eighth episode of the final season, titled “Exodus,” is full of key character moments, ranging from June (Elisabeth Moss) and Moira (Samira Wiley) successfully passing out their smuggled blades to the other handmaids, to June and Janine (Madeline Brewer) finally making Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) come to terms with the harsh reality of Gilead, to Serena (Yvonne Strahovski) marrying Wharton (Josh Charles) but leaving their marital home mere moments after their wedding when she learns has brought a handmaid into it. The handmaids — and a few trusted Marthas and Aunt Phoebe (D’Arcy Carden) — also enact the first phase of their revolution by having Serena’s wedding cake laced, so everyone who eats it falls asleep quickly, making the Commanders easier to kill with those blades after the event ends.
But before any of that, there is a montage featuring the iconic handmaid’s outfit with June’s voiceover reminding the audience that the idea of clothing telling the world who someone is did not start in Gilead.
“The whole episode really came together, for me, with the symbolism of that dress,” Chang tells Gold Derby. “To me, it’s not an interesting story unless it’s related somehow to the life that you and I and everyone is living right now.”
“I wanted to talk about how ridiculous it is to contemplate how important clothes are to us — that’s how I feel — and I wanted to relate that to show how that is a cause of environmental catastrophe and the problems that they’re facing and how that directly led to Gilead,” she continues. “If there was anything I wanted to talk about this season, it was about how our life, our country, our democracy is a result of a million individual little decisions. And so, even our individual decision to buy that 100th piece of clothing, it’s all connected.”
As the show says, that outfit becomes a new kind of uniform for the women; it marks them as an army. And June and Moira “kick-start” the whole thing by smuggling in blades, which they pass out to all of the handmaids in attendance at Serena’s wedding. Because for all of Serena’s talk about wanting handmaid reform, she still has to show off her status by having a sea of them in traditional garb one last time.
“The handmaids are her big weakness. She’s so upset at how the other wives treated her that her ego was like, ‘I gotta show them.’ The whole wedding is like a big ‘F you’ to them, and to have a traditional wedding, of course, you have to have handmaids there,” Chang says.
Serena may often take two steps forward and three steps back, but in “Exodus,” she finally makes one giant leap toward the right side of history by rejecting the new handmaid in her home and leaving her new husband. While at first he argues with her about how handmaids are supposed to ensure they have a large family, he, too, eventually takes a step toward progress by letting her leave.
“The same way we challenged June with Nick, we wanted to challenge Serena in terms of how she sees herself and how she really is and how she wants to be because she genuinely wants to reform, but she’s very flawed,” Chang explains. “That was probably one of my most favorite scenes that I’ve ever written for the whole show. It feels like Serena’s moment of truth is when she realizes how blind she’s been and that she’s been telling herself a story. Narratively, it makes sense to happen right after the moment of her most blindness, where she’s on top of the world at this wedding and she’s addressing the handmaids like she’s their best friend and she’s completely rewriting her relationship with June. So then when it came to the Wharton-Serena scene, this is where the wool is pulled from her eye. She lashes out at Wharton, for sure, but the first person she lashes out at is herself. … She knows that she is the one who got herself into this situation.”
While Wharton was written to be Serena’s “fantasy man,” Chang says, because he genuinely wants a big family and is pure enough not to frequent Jezebel’s, he is still a Commander. And, as Serena finally comes to terms with, men in Gilead in that position cannot be truly good guys because they are oppressing others.
“We went into the season with this question, which is, ‘Is there any such thing as a good Nazi? Can you have a good Nazi? Can you have someone who’s just partially Nazi?'” Chang says. “No, you can’t. There’s no version of that that’s OK.”
Still, the first step in this revolution is to lace the wedding cake with sleep agents, not a poison deadly enough to kill everyone who eats it. In part, Chang reveals, that was because there are some “relatively innocent people” at the wedding who might eat the cake, but also because “they wanted to do a surgical strike against the Commanders. It was a decapitation strike. It was about taking out the most powerful. And so, in a way, that’s the most humane way to do it.”
Aunt Lydia, who shows up last minute, catches on pretty quickly that something is amiss. She spots the discarded cake slices that the handmaids left wrapped in napkins, uneaten, under their chairs, and storms the Red Center to find out what is going on. She is also convinced that she sees June in the sea of handmaids, although she can’t prove it until she gets to the Red Center and June reveals herself, returning after killing Bell (Timothy Simons) and saving Janine.
It is then that Lydia has the “real awakening” the showrunners promised would be coming.
“If she had been screaming, like Moira yelling at her… Lydia would have fought back, screaming right along with her. But the fact that she places [the truth] in front of her, step by step, that’s it: The blinders are open,” Dowd tells Gold Derby.
“June is some sort of prophet. Not everybody can get through to people — especially Lydia. I think the fact that Lydia has such profound respect and love for June and what she’s capable of and her strength, she’s able to bring Lydia to that place,” she explains.
Of course, seeing Janine again makes it a “one-two punch” of emotion, according to Chang.
Lydia has acted out emotionally before — going so far as to punish Janine by taking her eye — and she believed the regime when they said Janine would be rewarded for her fertility. Instead, Janine ended up at Jezebel’s and then in the home of Bell, who beat her. For all of these reasons and more, Lydia has felt responsible for Janine. But all she can do when they are face to face again is apologize and then step aside so the handmaids can carry out their plan.
“I think when Lydia was thinking about how she was going to live in Gilead, I think she made the decision that [her] job was to help [the handmaids] live a life that is honorable, that has God in it, that has values. When she starts to have feelings for Janine, love is the most powerful; that’s what changes people. And when you take that risk, the wall begins to crumble. That’s what’s happened over time,” Dowd explains.
Now that love — and the hope of being forgiven — wins out. Although minutes before June and Janine return to the Red Center Aunt Lydia was ready to execute Aunt Phoebe for her “traitorous” behavior, Dowd admits she doesn’t think Lydia would have been able to pull the trigger against any of the handmaids who were in on the plan.
However, after finally seeing the truth she spent so many years ignoring, and getting Janine’s forgiveness, which is all she wants, Aunt Lydia breaks down and asks God to help her. It’s a cry to be shown the way forward because “she’s accepted what she has done in the past, and that means she’s going to have to accept the punishment that goes with it,” Dowd says.
“She is there with them, period. She’s not running away, she’s not hiding. She’s not saying, ‘I didn’t do it, they did it by themselves.’ She let the girls go. Wait until the Commanders and the Eyes get ahold of her. Her life is going to end, as far as she’s concerned,” she continues.
If you know about The Testaments, Margaret Atwood‘s sequel novel to The Handmaid’s Tale, whose adaptation went into production in April, you know Lydia’s life will not literally end. But certainly her life as she has known it has, as she has truly changed by this experience in “Exodus.” Dowd shares that where Lydia ends up in the series finale of The Handmaid’s Tale is “perfect” for setting up The Testaments.
Aunt Lydia is far from the last hurdle these handmaids will face with two episodes left in the series, though. Even though they are filled with rage for what they were put through and armed with weapons, when push comes to shove, some of them may not be able to strike a fatal blow. Chang shares that in the ninth episode, it will be revealed how many Commanders die as a result of this targeted attack, and it isn’t all of them. But killing everyone who oppressed them is not the mark of real victory: Being able to take back their power is.
“The reason why I had the knives sewn into the dress is because the dress they forced them to wear is the weapon. And so, at the end, after they killed the Commanders that they could using the dress, I needed a final voiceover to talk about how they took the tool of enslavement and used it to liberate themselves,” Chang says. “At the end, they reclaim their individuality. They get to fulfill who they are as women.”
The Handmaid’s Tale‘s sixth and final season streams new episodes Tuesdays on Hulu.
