Captured by Gilead, June faces a vengeful Aunt Lydia and endures a torturous interrogation. Nick and Lawrence collaborate to protect June. When June does not reveal the location of the other handmaids, Beth and Sienna are executed. June finally gives up the location when Hannah's life is threatened. While en route to a "Magdalene Colony", a work and breeding camp for defiant Handmaids, June and Janine are able to escape, but Alma and Brianna are run over by a train. In Toronto, Luke struggles with how to help June and Hannah.
Tropes in this episode include:
- Anguished Declaration of Love: June and Nick trade these just before she is put in a van to a Magdalene (breeder) Colony.
- Break Them by Talking: Not completely, but June is able to briefly rattle Lydia by turning her Blame Game against her and spell out that a lot of the situation is because of Lydia's incompetence.
- Call-Back:
- Once again, June sings Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven is a Place on Earth" to herself while being tortured.
- June and Lydia throw insults against each other about who is at "fault".
- Cliffhanger: Though there's a brief flashback at the end of the episode, our last glimpse of present events is June and Janine running for their lives, with a train dividing them from Aunt Lydia and the Guardian.
- Character Death: Beth and Sienna are pushed off a prison building by Lt. Stans to their deaths. Alma and Brianna are killed in the end by a passing train during their escape from the van taking them to the breeder colony, leaving only June and Janine alive and free for now.
- Cold-Blooded Torture: June is waterboarded, threatened to have her fingernails ripped out, forced to watch Beth and Sienna murdered, locked in a tight box, and confronted with Hannah and the possibility of her being harmed by the regime.
- Contrived Coincidence: Lawrence mentions an incident in Pennsylvania in which 15 Commanders were felled by poisoned liquor, with 6 dying. This is likely not the same Jezebels that June used the nightshade on in the previous episode considering that for the Pennsylvania incident and June's attempt to be one and the same, this would require that Nick to travel to Pennsylvania to capture June and return her to Boston to be interrogated by Commander Lawrence and Lydia.note Not to mention that one of the locations that June initially sends Gilead is Burlington, Vermont, which is not far from Western Massachusetts where the Handmaids were likely hiding.note
- The Dead Have Names: The episode ends with a flashback to the Red Center during June's initial captivity. They take a moment in the darkness of night to all share their real names, and we are reminded of all the women killed at Gilead's hands.
- Defiant to the End: Beth tells June not to reveal the location of the handmaids, which results in her being pushed off the building to her death by Lieutenant Stans.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: The torture June goes through is almost explicitly based on the methods used in Guantanamo Bay. Brief Freeze-Frame Bonus moments show some prisoners are also subjected to sleep deprivation using flashing lights and constant noise.
- Lawrence's line about Gilead caring more about power than their actual conservative ideology can also be read as a thinly veiled Take That! against the Republican Party.
- "Eureka!" Moment: June has one when the van is stopped, and the guard has gone to piss, leaving Aunt Lydia alone with six handmaids and nothing but a cattle prod, with a train quickly approaching.
- Everyone Has Standards: June catches a glimpse of her next torture when Lydia places a comforting hand on her arm before she goes—it turns out to be Hannah in a glass box, her life implicitly at threat. This finally gets June to break, and as she leads her away, Aunt Lydia is soft-spoken and gentle with her. Later, as a Guardian is firing at the running Handmaids, she screams at him to stop.
- Fate Worse than Death: June pleads to be executed. Aunt Lydia refuses and says June will be sent to a Magdalene Colony, where not only will she toil for hard labour, but she will continuously be raped as a handmaid. June's expression after learning of this screams this trope.
- Faux Affably Evil: Lieutenant Stans conducts all the torture on June, from waterboarding to forcing her to choose between her Handmaids' location or Sienna and Beth's lives. He does all this with a warm smile and chipper politeness—clearly delighting in his work.
- Forced into Evil: Lawrence is forced to colaborate with the Gilead regime in exchange for his life.
- The Guards Must Be Crazy: This is starting to be a trend for the Gilead guards in this series. They may be okay at torture, but actually keeping the prisoners in line seems to be a foreign concept. First, they let June approach the ledge of the building, with no fear that she might jump off to escape them via suicide. Then, they transport the newly recaptured Handmaids in a van with nothing but a single guard and a cattle-prod wielding Aunt Lydia. With an unlocked door. They quickly make a break for it at the first opportunity.
- I Cannot Self-Terminate: After the Handmaids are captured from the safehouse, June begs Aunt Lydia to be executed. Aunt Lydia (with a smile no less) refuses, instead telling June that she is being sent to a Magdalene Colony.
- Internal Reveal: Lydia reveals that Esther is "Safely in custody" to June.
- It's All About Me: Lydia has the gall to ask June if she ever considered how her actions would make Lydia feel.
- Look Both Ways: Alma and Brianna are killed by the train when they try to outrun it by crossing the tracks; June and Janine make it across, but barely.
- Mutilation Interrogation: Combined with Fingore. June is threatened with having her fingernails ripped out. However, she falsely confesses the location of the fugitives before any can be torn out.
- Pet the Dog: Even Aunt Lydia is so appalled by Gilead threatening Hannah's life that despite her personal vendetta against June, she's very gentle with her as she leads her away.
- Plot Armor: Once again, June's seems to have a shockingly thick layer. For all her crimes, Gilead refuses to have her executed, and none of her torture seems to do any permanent damage. This may be justified for two reasons. Firstly, Lydia seems to revel in June being sent to a Magdalene Colony as a Fate Worse than Death, and even June dreads being sent there. Secondly, Gilead may want the information of her dealings with Mayday. As a result of being spared once more, she is able to escape again with Janine.
- Sacrificial Lamb: Sienna
- Sacrificial Lion: Beth, Alma and Brianna are all semi-main characters that have been around since season 1. All three get killed in this episode.
- Sadistic Choice: June gets two: The first when she is presented with Beth and Sienna, who will be pushed off a building if she doesn't talk. They both die. Next, June is faced with Hannah, locked in a glass box, and implicitly threatened with her life. This finally breaks June, and she confesses the location of her fellow escapees.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
- When a fascist and totalitarian political entity wants to hang on at all costs, ideology becomes secondary to power.
- The notion of the safehouse in Burlington, Vermont makes sense considering that the location is close to the Canada/US border, and that theoretically, the Handmaids (if they used that safehouse) would have abandoned it when they made their run towards the border. But June's lie is likely exposed by Gilead finding no evidence of a safehouse in the location provided, and Beth and Sienna are executed by Gilead as a result.
- Hannah has been been separated from June for too long. She no longer recognizes her mother.
- Gilead is still trying to find ways to exploit those already exploited as Handmaids but remain defiant. The Magdalene colony (a labour camp for women who are still fertile, while still being raped by Commanders) is a recent idea against those who cannot be exploited as regular handmaids nor being sent to the Colonies like Janine and Emily were.note
- Torture Chamber Episode: June spends the majority of the episode being tortured by Gilead.
- Torture Never Works: It's made clear that physical torture will not work on June, as she will just lie to make it stop, and Gilead will have to pause to verify her claims. Psychological torture though...
- Torture Technician: Lieutenant Stans, the Smug Snake Faux Affably Evil man who leads the attempts to torture the Handmaids' location out of June. He seems to be semi-competent.
- Water Torture: June's torture begins with waterboarding.
- Wham Line: From Lawrence:"Gilead doesn't care about children. It cares about power."
- Would Hurt a Child: June initially doesn't believe Lawrence's warning that Gilead will hurt Hannah, claiming that children is all Gilead cares about. Lawrence retorts that power is what Gilead cares about. They just want to enforce their old-world values and traditions, and will gladly use children to do just that.
