SPOILER ALERT

Season 5 Episode 10 - Safe

Author rating - B-minus

Sixty-eight million people today are refugees. Half of whom are children. June Osborne and Nichole are two.

'The Handmaid's Tale' is now Serena Joy's tale. June's is now 'The Refugee's Tale'.

Ably directed by Elisabeth Moss, and Lord-above we finally (!) get an end-game for Janine Lindo, almost forgotten for the last few episodes. (Esther Keyes, it seems, is still strapped to that bed, but who really knows?) Rita Blue and Moira Strand remain part of the background, set-furniture, Moira's sole function seemingly to see to Nichole while the adults carry the plot.

There's not much to build on in Season 6 for them. The Wheelers are now gone forever. Ezra Shaw is probably still lying on that road in No Man's Land. After betraying Ryan Wheeler and shooting Shaw, Serena is still able to talk him into another trip where she can be trusted!

But back to Episode 10, the finale. Naomi Putnam, soon to be Mrs. Lawrence, had a few whiplash moments. At one point she was dressing down her new Handmaid, Janine - as Wives do. Next scene? She was soliciting Janine for friendship! Leading the latter to dress Naomi down, as Handmaids don't. Janine gets lippy from underneath her demure facade. "I am not your friend," she scolds. It is one thing for Rita to say that to Fred when Fred is in prison, it is quite another to say that to the new Wife of Gilead's most influential Commander!

Janine has evolved to the full-on PTSD'ed psycho of Season 1, to someone who counsels 'tell them what they want because you need to survive', to a confident truth-teller, damn the consequences. Madeline Brewer has demonstrated some fine acting-chops in her limited on-screen time.

But there were escape routes hinted at in the Lawrence house. One of the otherwise anonymous Marthas there, she fills in Janine on June's status in Canada - June being in hospital. How does the Martha know? Does Lawrence still employ Mayday-minded Marthas? See season six.

Also, Janine is eventually carted off by Eyes of God, acting under Lawrence's direction. Yet Janine is oddly fine with that, even comforting an imprisoned Martha in the back of the van. Does Janine know something about Lawrence that we do not? I mean, he freed Emily and June!? See season six.

And June. Why'd she walk down the middle of the road, while being pursued by John L. Lanison, 56? He ran her over, right over her arm. All she had to do was stick to the sidewalk. Yet when he tried to back up to finish the job, Luke managed to stop Mr. Lanison, wrestle a rifle away from him, and deliver what turned out to be a fatal blow in rescuing his wife.

In a plot development rivaling Fonzie 'Jumping the Shark', it was then Luke charged! By Canadian police for some sort of 'murder'! The incident was so obviously 'self-defence', as to be begging for further explanation, when there was none - esp. given the ending when Luke (as public-enemy #1) cannot get on the refugee train, but June and Nichole can. Also, rather than Tuello offering Luke diplomatic protection inside the Consulate, Tuello shows up at the last moment with some miraculous forged identity for a Refugee Train to Vancouver and the remaining USA beyond. (The US Consulate in Toronto has had some spectacular failures recently, under the load of their citizen-refugees and the changing Canadian climate. Tuello shows he is worse for wear.)

And Nick? After setting us up for Nick and Rose's unique relationship where she cuts him all sorts of slack regarding June…. suddenly, she (unexplainedly) has had enough, while he was now languishing in prison. Unexplained, Wives in Gilead don't walk out on marriages but she did. Will Rose go home to daddy, or be sent to the Red Centre? It didn't say.

It leaves unexplained after a total of 56 episodes of THT, just who Nick Blaine is? Unemployed drifter? Hero of Chicago? Eye of God? Mayday operative? Commander of the Faithful, and in military control out West? It was true, he married well. But once June was targeted by Lawrence, he decomposed psychically quite quickly. He punched Lawrence for it all in front of the other Commanders, not a wise career choice. (And conversely he slips into and out of Canada with inexplicable ease, probably left his car running at the south end of strangely unguarded Bridge of Spies.)

Through those plot holes, THT and Director Moss do deliver on the main plot point, even as there are bumps on that road. That Osborne has figured out that she cannot make the same mistake she and Luke had made back in Boston - to wait before running - that point is driven home quite well. That seemed to be the sole raison d'etre of Season 5, encapsulated in one exchange between Luke and June.

Luke says, "Canada is not Gilead." June's reply, "neither was the United States. Until it was." There. Season 5 in one clip of dialogue.

The Handmaid's Tale is no longer what it was in the hands of then-director Reed Morano, who started off Season One with her devestatingly chokingly-claustrophibic depiction of the desperate life of an ordinary Handmaid. Who used to be, and is now again one of 68 million refugees worldwide. In a sense, THT is no longer about Gilead or Nick, or even June.

B-minus.

THE 5TH MOSS-MILLER FOLIO - POST 13th SYMPOSIUM NOTES

Notes by Professor James D'Arcy Pieixoto, for general release

On the cusp of the 23rd Century, the tiny world of Gileadean Studies has just endured one further shake-up. The analysis of the 5th Folio of the Moss-Miller account of June Osborne is now complete. There is no more data. It now is as we've been left with - the sources.

Scholars remain confident that following the analysis of that last installment (the 10th installment) of the 5th folio, that it is indeed the last. 'The last' until further potential finds invigorate the world of Gilead studies and cause us to reset our biases about that time, almost two centuries ago.

Perhaps a 6th folio will be found? That is to be seen.

As you know, all of us are now back home from the 13th Symposium, held earlier in 2197 in Passamaquoddy - the site of the original 'find' of the Handmaid's Tapes. Given that the site of the 14th Symposium is yet to be determined, I offer these notes in this paper - mainly as a way of organizing my own thoughts with regard to what we now know.

This fifth folio has caused me to reassess even the Handmaid's Tapes, that Professor Knotley Wade and I originally presented as 'The Problems with Authentication in Reference to the Handmaid's Tale'. That now seems so long ago. With that major find, one of the few offering day-to-day accounts of life in the otherwise hermit-Republic of the 21st Century, we thought we knew what drove the original woman who had dictated the tapes.

We though we knew her motivations. But her time as a Handmaid now seems so brief, in comparison to the wider story she can tell. On the basis of the tapes alone, her motivations were so insular - basic survival being core, but also how she had relied on Moria Strand and Nick Blaine to remain somewhat intact as a person. We had thought that that was the sum total of that Handmaid's person and struggle.

WHEN TO FLEE

What academic analysis now constructs is a whole different motivation for the woman known as June Osborne. It is revealed what her struggle had been, before being a Handmaid.

Gilead scholars had had access to the early 21st Century political climate in Canada, especially what we had thought of as one universally sympathetic to American-refugees' plight. Well known was how Canada had expanded their already generous social programs, to make sure that refugees were not wanting.

What is now revealed, is that it has been under-studied the rise within Canada of the populist-political right. That was under-studied even within history departments which specialized in the various political incarnations of North America north of the 49th Parallel in the 21st Century.

It is clear that Professor Knotley Wade and I had completely misunderstood June Osborne, when we had only known her through analysis of The Tapes she had narrated. Those had been transcribed as the original Handmaid's Tale, which we introduced in 2195. Naturally, we had only known her as a Handmaid.

On the basis of the Moss-Miller 5th folio, both Professor Wade and I have to now recalibrate, to include what is now later known. June Osborne's flight from Toronto, her 'targeting' by Gilead, her husband's arrest on sketchy charges by Canadian police…

….. all of that exposes a more primary motivation for June Osborne, that goes back to the time in Boston, when she first explored her (somewhat adulterous) relationship with Luke Bankole. All pre-Gilead. The birth of their child, Hannah, happened as the, then, fertility crisis was gripping countries worldwide.

Osborne had hinted at this in The Tapes, as to how she and others had 'been asleep' while basic human rights were slowly eroding in the old United States.

We now know her most basic motivation, even before her obsession with retrieving Hannah, was regretting in full her inability in Boston to see what was right in front of her.

In Toronto, it had taken getting shot at, as well as getting run over, to resurrect that original motivation - knowing when to flee. If she had known that when back in Boston, so her logic seems, she would have never lost Hannah, she would have never been a Handmaid.

Further academic finds (a Sixth folio?) await.

COMMANDER NICK BLAINE

Much still remains unknown as to the Constitutional structure of Gilead - either early in its existence, or as 'Constitutional reforms' (such as they were) proceeded during the 21st Century, now almost 200 years ago.

I say 'Constitutional structure' in the knowledge that countries hold their 'constitutions' in two forms - explicitly written, or like still here in the New United Kingdom, based upon precedent, but widely agreed upon otherwise unspoken norms.

Gilead was the latter. Indeed even following the 5th Folio, all we really know is that Gilead was subdivided into Districts. Each District had Commanders. Each Commander had a portfolio. It is still fuzzy within historical political science departments of the late 22nd Century, just how Gilead worked within that most basic of division.

But rather than bore you with what would otherwise be an essay for a political science symposium, let me explore what can be known about Commander Nick Blaine.

Or put more precisely (as a question), why is so much still a mystery about the man? Especially considering his centrality to this handmaid's narrative? Was he an unemployed vagrant? Was he an Eye, working for Andrew Pryce? How exactly were the Eyes of God constituted? Was Nick Mayday? He single-handedly brought down Commander Waterford's Toronto trade mission by handing off women's testimonies to Luke Bankole for their publication. He tried numerous times, and failed, to exfiltrate June Osborne from Gilead, for no other discernible reason than 'love'.

Who was this guy? Even after signing on to a secret espionage deal with the American, Mark Tuello, signed on the otherwise unattended (!) Bridge of Spies in the middle of the night, he told Tuello, "I am nobody."

By assaulting Commander Lawrence in front of senior Commanders of Gilead, he seemed to seal his fate. Yet just months prior to that, he had used what had to have been his own considerable influence - credibility accumulated militarily in Chicago - to shield no less than Commander Lawrence from the consequences of running a Martha-Mayday network out of a Commander's home.

Through it all, neither Professor Wade nor I can write coherently as to who the guy was. He's a man who figures prominently in any June Osborne related account, but he is virtually unknown in any of the other (admittedly sparse) accounts.

He will then be left to subsequent papers.

THE 13th SYMPOSIUM and AUNT LYDIA

The 13th Symposium in Passamaquoddy focussed upon the Ardua Hall Holographs, as well as Witness Statements 369A and 369B, statements which turned out to be from June Osborne's then-adult daughters. A hard-copy of the 13th Symposium's work in full will soon be available.

In it, you'll note that almost two decades subsequent to the events of the Moss-Miller folios, that Aunt Lydia remained in leadership at Ardua Hall, herself engaging in her own 'resistance' to the male-dominated excesses of Gilead. Even Elizabeth remained as a senior Aunt at that later time.

Yet in the Moss-Miller folios, Hannah Bankole, aka. Agnes Mackenzie, AKA Witness 369A, is noted as being at 'Wives School', specifically in Colorado Springs, in the old US State of Colorado. The 13th Symposium dealt with how a 12-year old in Wives-training, made the transition to be known as 'Aunt Victoria' at Ardua Hall. Indeed, it is unchallenged that Hannah Bankole is the author of Witness Statement 369A, along with the Ardua Hall Holograph within the trilogy known as The Testaments.

Returning to Aunt Lydia: following Angel's Flight, she was imprisoned for at least 19 days by both The Eyes as well as the Commanders of New Gilead, before being 'retired'. Her rise back to influence in Ardua Hall was because of a deal she had cut with the then lowly-Commander Lawrence, himself then hanging by a thread.

Since? The 10th installment of the 5th Miller-Moss folio offers an intriguing hint as to Aunt Lydia's full conversion into being a major Gilead-reformer. That motivation of hers was to last at least until the days of The Testaments, almost two decades subsequent.

How did that come to be? It is clear that the major hint was her relationship with Janine Lindo, a Handmaid in Lydia's 'care'. Up until Lindo's 'placement' in the Lawrence home, Janine had been Lydia's poster-child of kindness within Ardua Hall, who had wanted nothing more than to be reunited with her own Bilhah birth, Angela Putnam.

While decrying Lindo's final act of resistance, Lydia ferociously interceded in her arrest by Eyes. So much so that Lydia had to be pushed to the ground as the van doors closed with Janine inside - Janine quite calm about her fate. Janine, at least had been true to herself.

Lydia? Absent any further finds (a 6th Folio?) academics must assume that the Lydia we read about in The Testaments, was the one nurtured during the 4th and 5th Folios, but who came to full measure in the 5th folio's final installment, in relation to Janine's fate.

A fate that the once powerful Aunt Lydia, Founder Aunt of Gilead, was powerless to stop.

How did Lydia regroup after that? It is unknown, until her own words in the Ardua Hall Holograph.

But Lydia's regrouping allowed her to become the Lydia of two decades subsequent, one where Aunt Victoria (Hannah Bankole) had been seconded from Wives School, and where Lydia was routinely taking down Commanders and Dentists alike.

More notes later.

James Darcy Pieixoto