For three seasons now, The Handmaid’s Tale has been building up to one central question: How will June get her revenge? Moss has been ramping up the character’s long stares and twisted smiles.
And the symmetry was beautifully designed: the former handmaids arranged in a perfect circle around him, just as they’d been trained to do when told to stone and kill one of their own kind.
She isn’t wrong when she explains to Moira and Rita that the International Criminal Court cares more about what their new source can bring them versus what horror he’s wrought in the past.
What the show needed was to put June’s back up against the wall and force her to bare her fangs again.
Even if only for a moment, The Handmaid’s Tale finally threw a character in June’s way who wouldn’t yield to her demands just because she’s, as Moira puts it, “June fucking Osborne.” Tuello is the other side of the coin — dedicated to the rule of law, a company man.
But while she’s outwardly insistent that she and Fred will live together as a family once they’re released, there are signs she’s still hesitant to recommit herself to the man who placidly watched as his friends lopped off her finger.
Killing Fred and keeping Serena alive — and dangling — is exactly right, considering how much men have fallen by the wayside in The Handmaid’s Tale’s narrative.
Why would Gilead want Fred Waterford back at this point? Just to kill him? That doesn’t sound equitable, but the argument that Lawrence, that trickster, is doing this behind the backs of his fellow Commanders because at heart he’s a good guy also stretches the imagination.
What did June want from that final visit with Waterford in prison? Thematically, she was appeasing him the same way she did at Jezebel’s, convincing him that she’s in his thrall, that she too feels a spark – “not love,” but something like it — between them.
The moments before the former handmaids descend on Fred like wolves in some particularly anti-wolf fairytale Watching June stalk back through the woods with blood on her face, watching that blood smear on her baby daughter’s cheek, didn’t start a revolution or tear down the patriarchy.