When June points out that if she just stays here she and Noah will both die, Serena decides maybe she is only a vessel. But she doesn’t want to go to Canada, either, for fear of the Wheelers finding her. She can’t go back to Gilead for obvious reasons. But where? Serena is now very much a woman without a country. How Noah turns out, she warns, depends on what Serena teaches him is “his to take.”Īfter a few hours of rest and lactation, it’s time to go. For these two, this is basically a declaration of love, but June isn’t going to let Serena off without a reprimand. As long as we’re being honest, why didn’t June kill Serena when she had the chance? “Why Fred and not me?” June says she didn’t want to. She tells Serena about Hannah - her difficulty breastfeeding, Hannah’s colds, wishing she didn’t have to stay home from work to care for her sometimes. Serena answers honestly that, at this moment, yes, it is. Serena names him Noah, after “the savior of humanity.” Heroically, she coaches Serena through the process of pushing her baby out of her body, gathering the newborn in her arms and ensuring his safe entry into the terrible world his mother created for him. forced her to endure, June is no slouch when it comes to midwifery. On the upside, thanks to all of those horrifying baby-delivery ordeals that Serena & Co. June notices and pauses to shake her head sadly - Ofclarence didn’t survive. While the Wives coo happily over the baby, Serena alone gazes sorrowfully outside the glass doors where the Handmaids are passing. Aunt Lydia tells the girls Ofclarence had fulfilled her purpose and so was sacrificed to please God, but Serena has an actual human moment. The Wives are hustled away, but the Handmaids are forced to watch the emergency C-section that saves the baby but leaves Ofclarence dead. The jokes end when the delivery has complications. Serena catches June’s glance and rolls her eyes in acknowledgement of their shared understanding that this is nonsense. While the Handmaid in labor breathes heavily through real contractions, her mistress straddles her from behind and theatrically cries out in pretend agony at the same time. Or at least Serena wasn’t yet too resentful to flash June a commiserating side-eye during one of those creepy Gilead birthing ceremonies. Their relationship didn’t start out wholly hostile, apparently. In between deep breaths, Serena and June are also sharing moments of connection in flashbacks. But simply having returned when she easily could have left is enough to convince Serena that June doesn’t have homicide on the brain this time. She doesn’t, of course, even if whether Serena would have done the same for her remains an open question. But if June really wanted to kill Serena and child, all she’d have to do would be to drive off and leave them there, which she momentarily stomps off and considers doing. She thinks June is trying to murder her son, which is not that unreasonable a fear. So June hauls a moaning, recalcitrant Serena to an abandoned barn that looks promising - “Maybe there’ll be a manger” - but as soon as she tries to check Serena’s cervical progress, Serena freaks out. “Has your water broken? How far apart are your contractions?” Serena only groans and says she can’t go to a hospital because “they’ll find me there.” “Are you in fucking labor?” she demands of Serena, who is still shakily pointing a gun at her. Plus, it gives these eternal frenemies several hours of bonding time, which is what “No Man’s Land” is all about.Īs soon as June realizes that Serena is in literal labor, she takes it as a given that she’s going to have to deliver this bitch’s freakin’ baby because she just cannot catch a damn break. Handsy? Aunt Lydia? Serena should be grateful, to be honest, because not only has June actually given birth herself (once in the middle of nowhere and all on her own), she’s also delivered plenty of babies au naturel back in Gilead as a Handmaid, as Serena well knows. Sure, June probably wasn’t on the list of people Serena would have liked to help her through labor and delivery, but she is pretty desperately short on alternatives. It is the June-Delivers-Serena’s-Baby episode. Hello again girls, gentlemen, gender traitors, unwomen, and any and all other Gilead misfits. June Osbourne no longer has patience for this, and she’s sure as hell not about to let Serena die of sepsis just so she can martyr herself on the altar of womanhood. How does one, as a woman, write a book arguing that it is not a woman’s place to do things like write books? But that’s a question for the likes of Phyllis Schlafly or Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Like all great purveyors of internalized misogyny, Serena never reckoned with her own hypocrisy. Until Serena believed that giving birth to Noah was going to be her last act on this Earth, she never really saw herself as merely a vessel.
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