AllyB

I honestly found the episode really, really boring for the most part. Just so many long, long scenes of June moving slowly and close ups of her face as she emotes. As has been said, the initial scenes were good, bringing back the sinister feeling of the first days of Gilead. The nastiest part being that the first prisoners June saw being moved were mainly disabled people and undoubtedly this was for a Gileadean version of the Nazi's Aktion T4. Then we had to move on to June and her handmaid fans being really, really obvious that something was up while her one on one "ruthless" guardian was entirely oblivious. Aunt Lydia knows something is up but settles for berating June a little while June mouths off and Aunt Lydia just lets it all slide. Then we get 10 minutes of soap and sandwiches. Entertainment and tension building at it's absolute finest. I don't know about everything else but I really was worried about how the kids would manage if they didn't have healthy snacks on the short flight and I just really, really needed to see long scenes of sandwich making, lunch wrapping, bottle filling and 50+ backpacks being packed and stacked. I also thought it was just great that Beth had the prescience to tear up sheets to use as route markers on the walk they didn't yet know they were going to be taking while Sienna watched her portentously. The lamp in the window may be a nod to the underground railroad but it's just great that none of the Guardians or Commanders could figure that out while searching for a missing child. And what sense it made for Beth to light the lamp, as June smiled on, hours before they were ready to start gathering and then get annoyed that after they lit the beacon the first Martha and child showed up. How badass of June to wait until the day itself to figure out how she'd get those kids to the airport, and again, lucky that Beth had the torn sheets ready to go. And obviously, the morning after the Pied Piper has seemingly danced through Boston despite a Guardian lock down, 6 handmaids can meet for an unsupervised walk in the woods near the airport that a plane just flew out of and a guard went missing from. So little of it even makes sense. That's before we get to the fact that as of Smart Power, Canada isn't supposed to be trading with Gilead even though Gilead is desperate to and the flight was initially set up to be an unsanctioned Mayday flight. Then last week the Commaders are threatening to cut off trade with Canada because of the Waterfords' arrest and Winslow's assumed abduction so Lawrence has to use Eleanor's death to make the other Commanders feel sorry for him (a totally legit way for Gileadean leaders to act) and continue trading for one more week so the flight, which is now a part of Gilead's official trade agreement with Canada, will still happen. I hate this show.

I’ve just been substituting heartache with Gilead. Except we get June VO stating that she is the warrior right before the song starts.

Just been watching Glow, so knowing THT’s fondness for ‘borrowing’ from better shows, my money is on The Warrior.

I'm just wondering if they are going for a full Breaking Bad homage with June allowing someone to die. If even one of the 52 kids carries a teddy bear onto the plane I'll be expecting to next see it floating charred and one eyed in a pool.

Exactly. When Fred was telling Luke he saved lives while Luke ignored the fertility crises, it would have been so easy for Luke to laugh in his face and say "I might have done nothing but at least I didn't wilfully pretend the problem was with the women when we all know it was the men, so that I could enslave and rape women to make myself feel better about my useless sperm. Oh, no wait, I did do something, I fathered a child because my sperm isn't useless like yours. And I would almost certainly have fathered another if you hadn't destroyed our family you delusional little tosspot." And then much as it would have hurt him a bit but he's had time deal and know it would hurt Fred more, he'd have rubbed Nick in Fred's face and mocked him for being such a useless gimp that he even had his wife name June's baby after her biological father. Instead we got Luke looking down and feeling bad about how Fred has a point about him saving lives!!!!!!! WTAF!!!

Think it or don't think it but facts are facts. Prospects for the average person in Colombia changed dramatically for the better over the course of Maritza's lifetime. And the odds are significant that Maritiza's mother would be living a better life than the life she lives in America because the average person in Colombia has a better life than the life she has as an undocumented person living on the fringes of society constantly aware that one wrong or unlucky move will remove her from her life. As for the chances of upward mobility for the poor, I'm from a country where university education is free for all, subsidised for those on lower incomes, where people out of work for whatever reason are entitled to a weekly payment that provides a comfortable standard of living and medical care is either heavily subsidised or free depending on your circumstances. It isn't perfect but upward mobility for the poor is unremarkably normal.

Of course poor countries still have wealthy people, that's not what being an Upper-Middle Income economy means. It's an official designation given by the World Bank based on criteria that looks at the functioning of the whole economy. The Colombia Martitza's mother left and the Colombia of today are two completely different places and prospects are utterly different for people. Maritza's mother would almost certainly have a better life now if she had stayed in Colombia because people in Colombia now generally have a much, much better life than poor illegal immigrants in the US. Colombia has world class affordable healthcare for example, at a standard above Canada's never mind the US's. It has free education and university is paid for on a sliding scale depending on your family's income making third level education an option for far, far more diverse a population than it currently is in the US. Obviously Maritza's mother wasn't to know that her long term prospects would have been better by staying where she was. For all we know her life could have been in danger at the time and she may have needed to leave urgently. Colombia in the 90s would have meant a tough life for most people and moving to the US would have felt like the better move. It's just that as it turns out, it wasn't.

A lot of the time it's a case of the grass just seeming greener. People are chasing an ideal that just won't exist for them. Maritza's mother was cleaning floors in some empty building. Odds are she has terrible wages, no or at least incredibly limited health insurance. I doubt most forms of third level education were a realistic option for her children. Did she live in New York like many of the characters? She probably doesn't have a great home in a great neighbourhood. And for all that nothing, she has lived, a sort of half life not entitled to participate fully in the society she lived in, all under the Sword of Damocles which eventually fell on her daughter. She could potentially currently have a better standard of living in Columbia. A country which is now classified as Upper-Middle Income and expected to soon meet the Higher Income classification standard. She might have had a harder time in the past if she'd stayed in Colombia, and perhaps she was someone who would have fallen foul of the Farc civil conflict so needed to leave. But if she wasn't, the life she's carved out for herself in the US really doesn't seem like it would have been worth sacrificing so much for.

It's such a pity for Piper that there is nothing in the world in between being bleak and miserable on the outside and finding someone else to have sex with. Nothing at all, either she's in a boring job with no friends and feeling constantly terribly sorry for herself or she finds someone to screw so she can be happier in her life. If only she had taken the time to say goodbye to Suzanne before leaving prison then she too could be reminded of the existence of bicycles, ice-skates, roller skates, anything with wheels that people have a lot of fun on! Even scooters if she can get past the negative judgment of Suzanne's father! Seriously, Piper's life does seem miserable as her job is boring, her home life would be extremely irritating and she has no friends. But there is plenty she could do in between just being in a grim rut and having sex outside her marriage, something where she could carve out a few hours of pleasure most days. That said, the marriage would not last and I have zero investment in it. But Piper has a myriad of options to find enjoyment in her days, she's just choosing to wallow.

A thought just occurred to me and I figured this would be the place to post it. How in the name of his holy fruitfulness did Natalie (Ofmatthew) get posted to not one, not two, not three but four, that's right FOUR fertile commanders. The fertility issue lies mainly with the men, not the women, so Ofmatthew wasn't super fertile, she was just defying all realistic odds in each of her postings. Natalie coped by forcing herself to accept Gilead as a good and right society so she wouldn't have a Guardian lover who was following her around and actually knocking her up repeatedly. It also gives us quite a few fertile commanders in Boston. Warren Putnam, Andy and all four of the commanders Natalie was posted to. It's pretty remarkable really.

.....go sit on the well and monologue manically about how someone can come up behind you and kill you just as Don E essentially does just that. This show used to be so delightfully tongue in cheek with it's foreshadowing, like Blaine singing Whiter Shade of Pale as Stacey Boss broke in and took him away to murder him and he survived because he had just turned back into a zombie. But Blaine chatting to the memory of his not there father about exactly what was about to happen was just painfully on the nose.

Back in the first episode Ravi said Liv had a very slow pulse. So I assume that zombies have working bodies but that they are extremely efficient so they would need some air and water, just not as much as a human colonist. Bathrooms I don't know, if they are just on brain tubes, maybe not, but if they are creating Whoppers, Type A noodles and (strip) club sandwiches then they'd probably need to move that on. But if they don't need to drink or eat very often, then it's probably a couple of times a week type of need, not a multiple times of day thing, so a lot less bathrooms would be needed.

I wonder if the zombies can alter their form as a zombie? Presumably not. So if you were overweight and out of shape when you were turned that's how you'll stay. The thing to do then, would be to spend a year or two getting into the absolute best shape of your life and then turn. As for the over population aspect, the show should have gone full sci-fi and had an Elon Musk type, who'd willingly zombified himself and was planning a zombie colony on Mars. Zombies would need less habitation resources to live on another planet, as long as they got regular brain supplies. Then once Mars filled up they could move out, Ceres, Ganymede, Callisto, Enceladus and beyond as the zombie population increases. Of course they'd have to work on simulating brains because if becoming a space colonising zombie in your 20s or 30s is the norm, there would be very, very few brains to go around.

He might not have been available for VM as he's a regular on Glow. He's great on that btw. I wasn't a Piz fan but I do like Bash. Highly recommend it if you don't watch it already. In fact I'm a bit envious as I'd love to watch it all again unseen.

Not necessarily. Fred could be traded to Gilead for US operatives that Gilead has captured. And then Gilead would hopefully just go ahead and execute him. Maybe Gilead could demand Serena back as well as part of the trade deal and we'd get to see her experiencing the underside of Gilead for herself. Then again that makes little sense narratively when she has already chosen to leave.

That was Winslow's wife, Olivia. She is freaking out because she's now a powerless Gilead Widow with 6 children. By massive co-inky-dink she decides to lament her plight to her late husband's old golfing buddy, who as it happens is planning to abscond the country with 52 children that very night!!!! Eleanor wants to take her and the children with them, bumping their child cargo up to 58. June, sees Olivia as a possible true believer and so too big a risk, leading her to physically threaten Eleanor. Why they would have let Eleanor in on the secret is beyond me. She's too unpredictable to be let in on that.

Well I absolutely loved that Kate Bush song at the end. I didn't think I'd ever heard it before so I googled it and watched the music video which was directed by Terry Gilliam and stars Donald Sutherland. That did feel vaguely familiar to me, so possibly I saw it a few times when I was a kid. It's a great song though, I can tell I'll be playing it a lot in the next few days. And I'll add it to some of my playlists, driving and figure skating I think. That's my main takeaway from the episode. I really enjoyed a 34 year old song.

I was under the impression that it was their hotel/temporary accommodation for their visit to Boston.

This feels like a minor quibble when we have so much to quibble about but I thought it was so, so, so, so stupid that the "scones mean no, muffins mean yes," messaging system hadn't been introduced near the start of the season and been a minor recurring background thing that we'd see every now and then. I'm not going to be awed by baskets and baskets of muffins if right at the start of the scene I have to be told that muffins have a meaning and that the meaning is yes. Especially when we'd only earlier in the episode been told, as a total non sequitur, that scones mean no. It was obvious then that the episode would end with a different delivery meaning yes. (It's also stupid that the Marthas would communicate this way in the first place. The Marthas don't get to decide to give gifts of baked goods in baskets to other households. At best the Wives and Commanders would see it as potentially problematic if the Martha sent a basket to the house of a Commander/Wife that her Commander/Wife had a problem with or never sent them to the household of a good friend and caused an insult. At worst all but the stupidest of Wives and Commanders would consider it weird and suspicious.)

Right up until Serena showed Fred the satellite phone, I thought she was working with Truello and has been since not too long after she got to DC. Admittedly it was the 'previously on' scenes with him and the phone that put the idea in my head, so I could have been seeing what wasn't there. But I thought that the way she was questioning Fred and Winslow about how other commanders were reacting to changes, was her specifically gathering information that Truello had asked her for. The fact that Fred and Winslow reacted oddly to her questioning and she immediately dialled it back, really made it seem like she was fishing for information. It would also explain why she didn't report June for trying to shiv her in the previous episode. And why her affection for Fred was reignited after walking through the house of the baptist family in DC. She was actually upset by the evidence of the destroyed family and she called Truello and he convinced her to play Fred. Then she went and showed Fred the phone and said it would help them get Nicole back and my theory fell apart. But maybe, just maybe, it's all part of a longer game to have Fred captured by the US while Serena swans off to Hawaii. I suspect just a little that Caleb was written as dead for a "positive" reason. In the last episode, Charlotte will be crying and risk endangering the great escape and will need her mother to keep her quiet. Janine will have to go with her. And unlike June, who rejected the same escape opportunity so she could stay and save Hannah, it will be alright for Janine to leave Gilead because her other kid is dead. That said, I always thought Janine had two kids pre-Gilead.

I may be alone in this but I absolutely loathed the "at least it wasn't you" line. Fred is a bona fide psychopath and June is an obsession for him. June knows this. June knows that the reason he came into her relatively safe home and insisted on witnessing the ceremony was because of his obsession. During the inspection, he made a beeline for her and let her know that he wants her to be in DC with him. She made a massive mistake when she said Lawrence treated her with respect. It inflamed Fred to interfere with her life right there and then, to exert his power over her and make sure she was raped while he sat and controlled it all, then had her examined by the doctor in front of Lydia to further the violation. The retort of 'at least it wasn't you" may have felt satisfying in the moment but it would have terrible, terrible consequences.

Brad was born in 75, Wallace Langham in 65. Brad is a decade younger.

Ok so this is a very weird observation. Whenever I see Brad Morris, who played Matty's dad Sul, I think he looks just like a younger version of the actor Wallace Langham. So I was so confused when the courthouse clerk appeared, played by Wallace Langham. Everyone else watching may have been having an emotional reaction to Logan's 'sorry' text. I was just wondering why Sul had reappeared (or at least Sul's big brother) and how the shock of it should be distracting them even a bit from Logan's text.

Veronica teased him about being an 09er as they walked into his house so he's obviously living in a very expensive house in the wealthy 90909 ZIP Code. So either his wife has an amazing job and/or Wallace had a high level job where he received an excellent share package/payout of some kind which then allowed him to switch to a lower paid career that he found more satisfying/suited him better as a parent.

A man needs to carry an astonishingly tiny amount of body fat in order to have 6 pack abs (usually under 8%). And sometimes that just really won't suit a person's facial bone structure. Tbh, I suspect that's possibly true for most people as we age and that men in their late 30s onwards who have 6 packs and beautiful full faces are the exceptions.