Serenas Journey Has Become the Heart of The Handmaids Tale
Vulture and New York TV critic Jen Chaney previously worked for the Washington Post and has bylines at the New York Times and Vanity Fair. She also wrote As If: The Complete Oral History of Clueless.
Vulture and New York TV critic Jen Chaney previously worked for the Washington Post and has bylines at the New York Times and Vanity Fair. She also wrote As If: The Complete Oral History of Clueless.
Spoilers ahead for season five of The Handmaid’s Tale, including the finale episode, “Safe.”
In the final minutes of the season-five finale of The Handmaid’s Tale, June Osborne comes face-to-face with Serena Waterford. A wide shot of the two women, the former wife of a commander and her former handmaid, makes them look almost like mirror images of each other. At this moment, they kind of are.
June and Serena: both mothers, each with a child in her arms.
June and Serena: both women who have escaped from archconservative households where they were treated like baby-making machines instead of human beings.
June and Serena: now both refugees, fleeing Canada to seek safety in what’s left of the United States.
This is the imagery that The Handmaid’s Tale has been hurtling toward all season as it stripped away Serena’s agency and forced her to experience, to an extent, what it’s like to be a handmaid. This conclusion acts as a bookend to two previous scenes: the one in episode four in which June and Serena bump into each other during charged protests in Toronto and June nearly shoots Serena but opts not to and the one in episode seven when Serena has a gun in her hand and decides not to shoot June. Now, six episodes later, they’re standing in front of each other, holding children instead of weapons, seemingly equals.
But are they really equals? That’s the question this season of The Handmaid’s Tale ultimately raises: Can a woman like Serena both realize and admit that the political system in which she’s so deeply invested is immoral and needs to be abolished?
By the end of the season, we still don’t know the answer to that. Serena’s arc — which functioned as the emotional heart of these ten episodes to an even greater degree than June’s journey— has sent deliberately mixed messages. On the one hand, we have seen Serena suffer significantly after becoming a widow and trying to carve out a future for herself as an independent woman and single mom. On the other, she does not seem to connect the dots between that suffering and the severely flawed society she has been complicit in creating.
Following Fred’s death, Serena initially believed she could become an international flag-bearer for Gilead values. That’s not how things have worked out. Once she was forced to move in with the Wheelers, it became apparent pretty quickly that her only currency was her child. Her desire to do other, non-maternal things — like appear publicly as a Gilead spokeswoman or, I don’t know, not be forced to date her own gynecologist — was discounted, if not outright forbidden.
Serena’s problem is the same one that’s facing every white American woman who votes Republican in 2022, feeling perfectly fine about the way the party has eroded reproductive rights throughout this country: She believes she’s immune from the consequences of the policies she supports. Someone who considers themselves a morally correct child of God might believe they’ll never need an abortion, the way Serena never believed she’d be in a situation in which Gilead treats her the same way she once treated her handmaid. But in a society in which women don’t have rights, any woman can be treated like a second-class citizen. All that has to change is her circumstances.
Serena’s circumstances certainly changed. After having her son, Noah, with a major assist from June, she is sent to an immigration detention center and her child is put into the Wheelers’ care. It’s not hard to imagine that the Wheelers will eventually try to take full custody of Noah, especially since they keep implying Serena is not a fit mother. But throughout this season, Serena can’t give up on the idea that Gilead is going to save her, because certainly no one would let a person like her be treated so monstrously.
“I’m not going to live in the same house as my child’s kidnappers,” Serena tells Commander Lawrence in episode eight, assuming that he’ll see how outrageous her situation is and find another arrangement for her. (Yvonne Strahovski is exceptional in moments like these, playing them with pure sincerity and no hint that Serena senses her own hypocrisy.)
Instead, he looks at her, stunned. “Do you have an irony deficiency?” he asks.
Serena might have newly awakened empathy for what handmaids have had to endure, but she still doesn’t seem to understand the full extent of the damage she has caused or of the damage that Gilead continues to cause. During her meeting with June at the detention center in that same episode, she expresses the belief that June has forgiven her simply because June helped deliver her baby rather than leaving her and Noah to die on the floor of a barn. (A barn is … kind of like a manger?)
“I turned the other cheek,” June explains after noting she has not forgiven Serena at all. “Turns out after all this, I guess I’m a better Christian than you.”
It’s not really that June is a “better Christian”; she’s just better at something that is supposed to be a fundamental Christian virtue: compassion. As much as she resents Serena, she can’t let an innocent baby die, and Serena confuses her kindness for forgiveness. That’s not what an act of kindness is; it’s a reflex, a thing one does without thinking about it, an act of selflessness and sacrifice. Serena doesn’t comprehend that because some part of her probably aches for forgiveness that will make her feel better about herself and her own choices. Honestly, it’s to the credit of The Handmaid’s Tale writers that she doesn’t get that at this stage. It takes a while to develop that kind of clarity, especially after being indoctrinated into the Gilead way of life. She may never develop it.
It’s hard to know where Serena is on that front because after she seizes the opportunity to take Noah and flee from the Wheelers in episode nine, we don’t see her again until the end of the finale. What she went through between her escape and boarding that train remains a mystery for now, but I assume that during the sixth and final Handmaid’s season, we’ll find out more.
That seems appropriate. The Handmaid’s Tale began by revealing how easy it might be for the United States of America to slide into a form of authoritarianism that fully normalizes the abuse of women, and it should end by showing us whether it’s possible for enablers of that system to help dismantle it. It’s been powerful to watch June, Janine, and others push back against their oppressors. But it might be even more satisfying to see Serena, someone who wrote an entire book called A Woman’s Place, acknowledge that she was dead wrong about everything she put on those pages and then start doing what any decent Christian would do: atoning for her sins.
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