Praise be, at last: Fred Waterford, the inscrutably sadistic commander at the center of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” has met his demise.
After learning that her rapist and tormentor has saved himself from prison by becoming a government informant, June persuades her allies to implement a bait and switch.
And suddenly women pour out of dense woods, as June and her cadre of Gilead refugees enact their own salvaging — the ceremonial public executions that handmaids were forced to participate in.
Fiennes had been anticipating Fred’s death for a while now, ever since the showrunner Bruce Miller had hinted that Season 3 would be his last.
He was calling on Zoom from his home in Majorca, his face clean-shaven and his shirt the color of the Mediterranean, and unbuttoned far lower than his fundamentalist TV power-player would dare.
I think if anything, Fred now has a taste of what fear feels like, and has felt like, for all the people that his regime has put through hell.
They filmed that wonderfully through a very, very thick, muddy, cold forest at three in the morning with this high camera on wires that would zip along at 20 miles an hour.
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Even before the salvaging, there are moments when Fred seems to comprehend the pain he inflicted on the women of Gilead after learning that Serena is pregnant with his child, a son.
Those several months he’s spent in this five-star cell have given him moments of reflection, not only how to wriggle out of facing the responsibility, but to reposition the narrative to blame the victim as any predator might do.
And I stayed, I feel, the more difficult course, which was to actually stick with his love of power and the predatory aspect that’s hidden behind this theocracy, this belief, this religion.
The people who have to change are the forgivers, which is the interesting paradox of June’s journey: She becomes the thing that she seeks to destroy.
One, which I love and really is the basis of Fred, is that Atwood describes him as this pathetic withering limb that lives inside a military boot.
It’s a complex line, where you have to honor the face of Gilead and the person that we want to see taken down.
But at the expense of someone losing their spiritual higher self? Bring down the regime, fight back — I’m all for that.
It’s a sense of knowing that we are participating in an extraordinary narrative, a vital, important feminist narrative that reflects upon our circumstance today.
And maybe the more dark and complex the piece, the more happy and funny and jovial everyone is.
If I think about torture and mutilation outside of our dystopian world, in the real world, it goes on.
He does say that he would love it to go on as long as Lizzy’s there, and I can understand the virtue of that.
He is dead, but there are flashbacks, so who knows? I miss them all, but it feels the right amount of time.