Here she is, massively pregnant, surrounded by a crowd of fawning fellow tradwives who all want to grab at her belly to feel the baby kick. But at first everything is exactly as Serena always wanted it to be. I mean, it could absolutely be harder, but sometimes it’s about the minor daily indignities - like when your host hands you a bottle of prenatal vitamins and stares until you take them. Meanwhile, Serena is realizing the limits of her own dream life the hard way. They slow-dance and Jaden spotlights them with colored lights, so the whole moment comes together like a precious, perfect little dream. His voice gets extra soft when he sings, “whether times are good or bad, happy or sad,” to maximize the lyric’s heart-melting potential. He decides they need music, so he finds a keyboard (handy!) and starts playing “Let’s Stay Together,” because not only is Luke an above-average bowler, he also has a lovely singing voice. June is stressed about how Jaden got the beer, but Luke is just having the time of his life right now. Nobody seems to care if they make any noise, and Raspberry Beret (real name Jaden, it turns out) even has beer in the fridge. Like, when has that ever gone well?Įxcept for once, the other shoe doesn’t drop. I’m not always on June’s side, but in this case I think she’s totally right to be extremely anxious about trusting this complete stranger from Gilead in an abandoned building for an entire day. Looks like they’re stuck with this guy for the rest of the day. Once RB has given them the information they were after - Hannah is a “Plum,” meaning she’s been sent to Wife School with the other daughters of High Commanders, and also here is a USB drive with all the information he has on Wife Schools where she might be - he informs June and Luke that to leave before dark would be dangerous. It’s too dangerous to stand around talking out in the daylight, so, against their better judgment, June and Luke follow Raspberry Beret to a run-down building that turns out to be a bowling alley from the Before Times that’s still mostly operational. But for now, they reach the meetup spot by morning, as Lily promised, where the awaiting “Friendly” jumps out from behind the tree and shouts “Raspberry!” June responds with the corresponding password, “Beret.” Get it? “Raspberry Beret.” I chuckled, anyway. They look completely, terrifyingly exposed as they traipse across the wide-open field into No Man’s Land - for a reason, as it turns out. How predictable, in the sense that it is completely believable for their characters, that Luke would be so haunted by Serena’s taunt that he immediately volunteers to head into the danger zone himself and that June would immediately insist on going with. I found the last Mayday plot to be a big, expository disappointment, so I was pleasantly surprised when Lily’s plan went awry, compelling Luke and June to heroically march into No Man’s Land themselves. As June and Luke and Moira are driving through crowds of anti-immigration protests and meeting up with Lily in the woods to follow up on this lead, I have to admit I was mentally preparing myself to be bored. It’s Mayday, and they have something for her. We open with Hannah at the aquarium, and then there is a jarring transition to the present as June wakes up from her dream to the sound of a buzzing phone. All in all, I found this to be a darn-near-perfect episode of this particular show. Of course, we end on a cliffhanger, because this is The Handmaid’s Tale. For Serena, it is finally achieving her ideal of Peak Womanhood - 32 weeks’ gestation - and losing every ounce of freedom and self-determination in exchange. June’s fairytale is a brief, unexpected respite from her life-and-death to-do list when she and Luke are temporarily stranded in the liminal space between Gilead and Canada - in an abandoned bowling alley, of all places. Like many of the earlier episodes, “Fairytale” draws a link between June and Serena’s parallel universes, in this case how real life punctures a fantasy for them both. (You’ll note this is the second episode in a row with no Nick.) Actually, for an episode that contained zero Janine, “Fairytale” was pretty banging all around. I did enjoy the lip-smackingly delicious satisfaction of watching Serena squirm under the oppression of a Gilead pregnancy. What! No! Not June and Luke! Not again! Can’t this show just let us have one good thing without wrenching it away and throwing it into the back of a black armored truck in the dead of night? Okay, that’s not quite fair.
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