Though it’s redundant at this point to say The Handmaid’s Tale is tough viewing, this second season is taking its bleakness to a new extreme. "Seeds" offers up a double whammy of pure misery, dividing its time between the Waterfords’ home and the Colonies (which would you rather, honestly?), and with June’s voiceover now completely absent, there are no moments of relief at all. Interestingly, it’s Emily who comes the closest to replicating that defiant, tongue-in-cheek quality we’re missing from June, but after months in the Colonies, the cracks are beginning to show in her too.
Here are five key talking points from The Handmaid's Tale Season 2 Episode 5, "Seeds."
1) Serena is this close to committing actual murder.
If I were Fred or Aunt Lydia, I would not turn my back on her—especially now that she’s got the nicotine withdrawal going on too! A fascinating little moment in this episode was Serena eyeing Lydia as she writes down June’s measurements, and Lydia quickly downplaying it: “Special dispensation for aunts, it’s really a burden.” Serena had published books before Gilead, and losing her ability to write is one of the many, many sacrifices she’s made for the cause. While Lydia’s clearly conscious of Serena’s resentment, she’s not really making much effort to appease her; instead, she keeps reminding her of how important the “mood in the household” is to the baby’s development. The baby needs to know that it’s in a godly, harmonious environment within this fascist, deeply violent society! Sure, the baby’s biological mother is basically catatonic with trauma, but Serena’s mood is what’s really going to make the difference! I can’t say enough about Ann Dowd, and how convincingly she inhabits this character and her endless doublespeak about “godliness.”
2) Nick’s reward for his loyal service to Gilead: a teenage bride.
Just in case things weren’t grim enough for June, she’s forced to watch Nick be married off to Eden, a teenager who’s been raised in Gilead and has the quiet, devout demeanor to show for it. This “reward” for Nick’s loyal service comes after he makes the mistake of expressing concern for June’s mental state to Serena—who, of course, is well aware that he’s the real father of the baby. I think Serena might even have an inkling that more has happened between Nick and June than the ceremony-style sex she personally witnessed.
Whatever Serena knows, she sees the need to draw a firm boundary between Nick and June, and after Waterford briefly considers sending him off to Washington for a promotion, a solution presents itself in the form of a “Prayvaganza!” That’s right. I had to rewind this a couple of times to make sure I’d heard it correctly—and not just because I was cackling too loudly at Serena’s “Not one of the commander’s better efforts…” shade. But this nonsense is right out of Atwood’s book, a mass prayer meeting led by a commander, and in this case it culminates in Nick’s wedding to Eden.
This being Gilead, the key part of the commitment ceremony is “Be fruitful and multiply,” and before the wedding night comes a creepy pair of scenes in which Serena and Waterford remind Eden and Nick of their sacred duties as man and wife. But Serena does have a moment that’s unexpectedly… enlightened and sex-positive? Kind of? She obliquely tells Eden that sex is not just about the man, and that she should enjoy it too, because lust isn’t a sin between a man and his wife. And this tracks with what we saw of Serena and Fred’s marriage before Gilead: they did have passion and real feeling for each other, but that has since been completely stamped out.
3) Emily and Janine have developed radically different coping mechanisms in the Colonies.
As a new day begins in the Colonies, two women have died overnight. Emily has almost no reaction (this is an everyday occurrence, after all), but Janine notes, with her wide-eyed glass-half-full view of things, that they “look like they’re sleeping.” Despite almost being stoned to death at the behest of Aunt Lydia, Janine seems to be keeping the faith, and insists that God “holds her in the palm of his hand." Emily’s dry response—“He couldn’t hold you someplace else? Like Bora Bora?”—is pretty much the only moment of levity in this entire hour.
The thing is, both Emily and Janine’s points are valid, and the conflict between realism and optimism leads to one especially compelling scene between them, where Emily lets out some of the rage we saw when she poisoned the wife in Episode 2,"Unwomen": “Gilead took your eye. They took my clit. Now we’re cows being worked to death, and you’re dressing up the slaughterhouse for them,” she says after dragged Janine away from an impromptu wedding ceremony between Kit and Fiona, two other women in the Colonies. Kit is literally on her deathbed during the wedding, and Emily argues it’s not worth the risk—what if an Aunt saw them? But Janine says Kit will die happy, and that matters. Given how little everyone in the Colonies has left to lose, it’s hard to argue.
4) June comes close to miscarriage.
Early in the episode, June begins bleeding, but it doesn’t shake her out of her numb, near-silent trance. Instead, she goes about her day as normal, letting it happen, aware that her baby is likely dying and that she herself may also be in danger. It’s not clear that she actively wants either of those things to happen, but she’s not resisting either, and given the options available to her and her baby at this point, it’s hard to blame her. (Side note: June is being watched like a hawk throughout this episode, yet she’s conveniently left in peace to take a bath in bloodied water. Still, it was a beautiful shot that mirrored the white and red of the handmaid robes and wings, and worth the logical leap.) Fortunately, Nick did not give up smoking when Serena did, and while outside for a pre-wedding night smoke break he finds June passed out in a ditch after losing a huge amount of blood.
5) June has a new reason to keep fighting.
Last week, June seemed to give in to her future as Offred, because “Offred had an opportunity” where June didn’t—and because Omar’s execution was June’s fault, not Offred’s. She was just fragile enough to accept Aunt Lydia’s indoctrination in that situation, and throughout "Seeds, she resists all of Rita’s attempts to engage with her as June, offering more meek, bland platitudes along the lines of “We’ve been sent good weather.” It seemed like all her fight was gone.
But when she wakes up in the hospital to find, against all the odds, that both she and her baby are fine, she’s left with a new sense of purpose. “You’re tough, aren’t you?” she asks her baby, hiding beneath the covers for some measure of privacy. “I will not let you grow up in this place. I won’t do it. They do not own you, and they do not own what you will become.” She swears that she’s going to get her baby out of Gilead, and then qualifies it: “I’m going to get us out of here.”
