This episode of The Handmaid’s Tale feels a lot like the calm before the storm, with June about to give birth any day, Serena teetering on the brink of something unspoken, and Waterford’s long-awaited diplomatic trip to Toronto backfiring in spectacular fashion. More importantly, though… Nick and Luke met for the first time and I may never recover. Here are five things to discuss from Season 2 Episode 9, "Smart Power."
1) Serena is evicting June after she gives birth.
So much for the newfound sisterhood. Serena is about to go to Canada with Fred, and admits to June that she hates to leave so close to the due date. June promises Serena everything will be fine, and they almost feel like partners in this moment—until Serena says this: “You’ll be leaving the house as soon as the baby is born… I think we’ve all had more than enough of one another. Don’t you?” Brutal.
Serena’s decision to tell June this right now, right before the Waterfords leave for an extended trip, is interesting. Is she subtly giving June the chance to make escape plans? I may be giving Serena too much credit, but her loyalties have wavered so much this season that it seems plausible. After the flogging last week, maybe she shares June’s concerns about raising a child in a household with Fred.
Either way, June starts making preparations. She’s not plotting an escape at this point, instead desperately trying to find someone kind she can trust to look out for her child—a godmother of sorts. She asks Rita first, who promises to do what she can, but with the caveat that “what she can” is pretty limited as a Martha.
June’s next stop is Aunt Lydia, who stiffly tells her that kicking out her Handmaid is Serena’s prerogative, but falters when June keeps pressing. After what happened with Janine and the Putnam baby, Aunt Lydia can’t help but be open to June’s concerns about her baby’s well-being. “In my experience, any man who would hurt a woman would hurt a child,” June says, stopping short of actually describing what Fred did while making the stakes very clear to Aunt Lydia, who admits that in the time before, she was godmother to a baby who died at four days old. “I would never let anything happen to a baby,” she promises June.
June is genuine when she asks Lydia to protect her baby, but she’s also being strategic here, I think. She’s putting a bug in Lydia’s ear about Fred, building on the concerns she already has about this household not being a positive environment for a child. One way or another, the Waterfords are not going to get to keep this baby.
2) Luke and Moira both get to confront Waterford.
And Luke comes close to getting a punch in before he’s restrained by security! Glorious. When Luke and Moira first learn that Waterford is coming to Canada, they insist he should be arrested as a war criminal and serial rapist, but are told (infuriatingly) that this is diplomatically impossible. The Canadian government is still playing ball with Gilead at this point, albeit uneasily.
But the cracks are showing; the deputy minister for immigration pointedly mentions how much he liked visiting the U.S. with his husband, and protests await the Waterfords everywhere they go, with furious citizens holding up photographs of their loved ones stuck in Gilead. At a protest outside the Waterfords' hotel, Luke manages to break through a barrier and launch himself at Fred, telling him “You raped my wife.” While Fred gives him a smarmy line about fake news, Serena catches sight of Luke’s banner—a picture of him with June and Hannah—and seems shaken.
Later, as the Waterfords are leaving the country, they drive straight through a protest in which women hold up banners stating their real names. Moira makes it right up to the window of the car (how early are she and Luke getting up each morning to be right at the front of these things?!) and looks Waterford in the eye as she holds up her sign.
3) Nick and Luke’s meeting.
I. Just. Cannot. Wrapping your head around the emotional dynamics of this scene is such a trip: here is Nick, delivering the news to Luke that his wife, June, is pregnant by her rapist and Nick’s boss, Waterford, prompting Luke to give Nick an emotional message to take back to June, not knowing that Nick is in fact both the baby’s father and June’s lover.
O. T. Fagbenle is phenomenal in this scene, which requires him to go through a true emotional rollercoaster in the space of maybe three minutes. He’s initially furious with Nick as a representative of Gilead, then blindsided when Luke says he’s “a friend” of June’s, then so overwhelmed with what looks like both nausea and emotion at the news of her pregnancy that he almost punches Nick and kicks him out of the bar. Then, he instantly regrets it and runs after Nick, who ultimately gives him the bundle of letters from Handmaids that Moira smuggled out of Jezebels last season.
4) Gilead’s cover is blown to the world.
“I thought that package was gonna have C4 in it or something,” Moira complains after discovering the letters. “Something to make Gilead go boom.” But as her housemate points out, these letters are very much their own kind of bomb, and end up doing a lot more damage than Ofglen’s literal explosion a few episodes back.
Luke puts the Handmaids’ letters on the Internet, and they spark such an intense level of public outcry that the Canadian government finally comes to its senses and severs its diplomatic ties with Gilead, kicking the Waterfords out midway through their visit. Finally, Gilead’s spin and propaganda have been revealed for exactly what they are, and this cathartic moment is summed up in one perfect, powerful line from the Canadian minister: “We believe the women.”
When Nick delivers this news to an overjoyed June—along with the confirmation that Luke is fine and still loves her, and that Moira made it out against the odds—it relights a fire within her. She was resigned to having her baby in Gilead, but not any more. She wants to get out, and she may actually have a shot. We know from earlier this season that the Canadian and British armies have been conducting military exercises along the border. Now that the truth is out, will they attempt an invasion?
5) Serena is offered an escape route, and seems tempted.
Fred and Serena’s marriage has reached a whole new level of stilted creepiness in the wake of her “punishment”—to the point where she clearly has to try not to recoil when he touches her. In Canada, she looks wistfully through the car window at normal society; women and men going about their working, loving lives. But the people she meets, from diplomats to regular citizens, can barely contain their disgust when they look at her.
And then, at her hotel bar, an American politician offers her a way out. When this scene began, I was getting “Betty Draper goes to a bar and bangs a stranger at the end of Mad Men Season 2” vibes, but instead of picking her up, this guy wants to fly Serena to Hawaii—which is apparently one of the few states that remains part of America, and not Gilead. Serena tells him that she would never betray her country, but she’s clearly affected and holds onto his matchbook after he leaves.
This scene really sums up how conflicted I am about Serena: I want her to take this offer so badly, and yet she’s a deeply privileged woman being offered a free ticket out of a nightmare that she helped to build. This politician has read a lot about her, he says, so he knows she’s as complicit as anyone in the creation of Gilead. But he still thinks she deserves to be saved, because Gilead is founded on the idea of punishing women: it blames them for the fertility crisis, yet American scientists, he tells her, have now figured out that the problem likely originates with men.
“It’s sad, what they’ve done to you,” a female Canadian minister tells Serena as she and Fred are unceremoniously kicked out of the country following the letters' publication. Back home, Serena takes out the politician’s matchbook and throws it into the fire. Did they do this to her? Or did she do it to herself?
