Stream It Hulu This content is imported from {embed-name}. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site. And just like that, season two of The Handmaid’s Tale has come and gone. It was another harrowing ride over 13 episodes and through it all, June remained the beacon of hope for everyone in Gilead. Below, a list of the craziest, most shocking moments from season two, which aired its season finale on July 11. We are with you, June. Season 2, episode 1 (“June”): The opening minutes leading up to Fenway. In seamless fashion, viewers follow June from the van (from the season one finale) to a parking lot, where other Handmaids are let out, gagged, and herded like animals into what used to be Fenway Park. They’re lined up in front of several nooses. One of them — Ofrobert, formerly Alma — is so terrified she pees. When the lever is pulled, nothing happens. Aunt Lydia shows up and reminds the Handmaids of God’s love. Her voice is heard all around the ballpark as she says this is merely “a lesson” to them. The Handmaids are released from the nooses, June the narrator says, “Seriously? What the actual fuck?” The title card finally appears. Hulu Aunt Lydia shows June what her next nine months could look like if she doesn’t follow the rules. The lights turn on to reveal a Handmaid named Ofwyatt, who is pregnant and chained to her bedposts. She’s there because she tried to kill her baby (and possibly herself) with drain cleaner. Ofrobert’s hand meets a burner. As punishment for not stoning Janine, one by one, the Handmaids are taken to a stovetop, where their hands are cuffed to a burner. “You girls, so willful and full of apologies when it comes time to pay the Piper,” Aunt Lydia says. “It’s shameful for me as well, but only in suffering will we find grace.” Offred, who is sitting down while all of this is going on and is not stovetop bound because she’s pregnant, continues to eat her soup as Ofrobert’s bloodcurdling scream fills the room. Hulu A hospital worker grills June in a flashback. June visits her daughter Hannah, who was sent by her school to the hospital for a fever. June is immediately questioned by a nurse/social worker type, who repeatedly calls her Mrs. Bankole even though June never took Luke’s last name. “She’s your biological child?” she asks June. This is followed by her making June admit that she has to “miss work” to take care of Hannah if she’s ever home sick and not at school. There’s more: June is forced to admit that yes, she gave Hannah Tylenol because she felt warm, but it wasn’t so that she could bypass the school’s fever policy. It’s too late. The nurse has already made her own conclusions. “I understand, Mrs. Bankole. We have busy lives. But children are so precious we have to make certain that they are in a safe home environment with fit parents. I just have a few more questions, Mrs. Bangole.” The most horrifying part of all this? Things have only gotten worse. Hulu June slices into her ear to get rid of the tag. After finding her way to Nick in an abandoned building, June is instructed to shed her Handmaid clothes so she can continue with the next part of her escape. As her clothes are burning, she cuts the top of her ear open to remove the tag, just in case Gilead really was using them as GPS-like devices. The scene is not for everyone, especially if you’re scared of blood, but what June says next is chilling: “My name is June Osbourne. I am from Brookline, Massachusetts. I’m 34 years old. I stand 5’3” and bare feet. I weight 120 pounds. I have viable ovaries. I’m five weeks pregnant. I am free.” Hulu Season 2, episode 2 (“Unwomen”): “What will happen when I get out? I probably don’t have to worry about it, because there probably is no out.” June the narrator delivers these morbid words as she’s transported at night to her next destination. She quotes Aunt Lydia and tries to make light of the thought. “‘Gilead knows no bounds,’ Aunt Lydia said. ‘Gilead is within you. Like the spirit of the Lord.’ Or, the Commander’s cock. Or cancer.” In a flashback, Emily is advised to change her phone home screen, which is a photo of her wife and their son. As her colleague, who is also gay, tells her, “It’s caution. An overabundance of caution. The new board of regents is concerned that you’re not maintaining a healthy learning environment.” Hulu “Don’t waste it. She can’t even hold down water.” After Emily shares that someone found duck eggs and traded them for Tylenol, a fellow Unwoman suggests that she save them for another time instead of using it on the nearly lifeless body before them. This is how bad things are in the Colonies. “Maybe some mint tea could settle her stomach,” Emily offers. June realizes a massacre happened at the Boston Globe offices. Not long after June sees a lone shoe in the abandoned office building, which turns out to be the Boston Globe offices, she makes her way to the basement, where printers used to run and where dozens of nooses are still hanging. She turns around to see a wall with hundreds of bullet holes. Hulu Hulu In a flashback, Emily’s colleague at the school is hanged. This is the same colleague who warned her about her phone screen and who admitted that he himself took down all the photos of his partner as a precaution. This being The Handmaids Tale, it was too late. In a flashback, Emily is separated from her wife and their son at the border in the name of “the law.” One of the most heartbreaking scenes of season two so far belongs to Emily and her Canadian wife Sylvia. When they present their marriage certificate to the first border patrol officer in hopes of catching a flight to Canada, he tells them, “[You were] smart to bring this. That will help for sure.” Again, it was too late. Gilead law had seemingly changed everything overnight, making their marriage illegal, or in the second border patrol officer’s words, “forbidden by the law.” When Emily asks, “What law?” He says, “The law.” In the same scene, Emily is also interrogated about how she conceived her son – was it her own egg or an implanted embryo? You don’t need guess very hard as to why this was asked. Hulu Emily kills a Wife (Marisa Tomei). The Wife, who was recently punished and sent to the Colonies for committing “a sin of the flesh,” has a bad reaction to the radioactive shit in the Colonies (join the club). Emily gives her “expired” antibiotics, which turn out to be poison. “Every month you held a woman down while your husband raped her,” Emily says. “Some things can’t be forgiven. It’ll take a few more hours.” In the next scene, the Wife’s body is tied to a cross. The bell rings to signify that it’s time for another day of digging. Emily is the first to walk away. Hulu June watches the Friends episode, “The One with Phoebe’s Uterus.” June finds an old Friends DVD and watches Monica describe the seven erogenous zones of a woman to Chandler. The scene is a classic for any longtime Friends fan. For June, it’s an eerie reminder of a time when women were free. Free to talk about sex. Free to tell a man how to please them. Free to star on one of NBC's most coveted Must See TV shows. Season 2, episode 3 (“Baggage”): June sees the Boston Logan Airport sign. She’s taken to another abandoned building, which is packed to the brim with stop signs, arrows, street names, and other billboards that have since been torn down by the Gilead regime. Hulu In a flashback, June’s mom Holly (Cherry Jones) tells her she shouldn’t marry Luke.<doc-sep>“The Handmaid’s Tale” left off with a massive cliffhanger. During the opening ceremony for a new red center, the new Ofglen led a terrorist attack. She blew up the Rachel and Leah Center, and Season 2, episode 7, aptly titled “After,” will deal with the fallout of the incident. Offred/June (Elisabeth Moss) was at home recovering from her fall, so she wasn’t in danger. She will, however, have to mourn those who were lost. The trailer for Wednesday’s episode of the Hulu drama shows the handmaids at a funeral with red coffins. They’re remembering their fellow handmaids. Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) says, “I wish I could give you a world without pain.” Offred might be in slightly less pain this week, though. Her rapist, Fred (Joseph Fiennes), won’t be entering her room to whine about how much he missed her. Photos reveal that he survived the attack, but he obviously is in the hospital. Photo: George Kraychyk/Hulu Without Fred there to control everything, Serena gets a taste of freedom. “The commander will forgive my trespasses,” Serena (Yvonne Strahovski) says in the trailer. According to the synopsis, “Serena Joy makes a dangerous choice in order to protect her family.” That choice will once again leave her and Offred in a situation that puts their relationship on another rollercoaster ride. With Fred away, there is an opportunity for other men to come in. The trailer shows a man questioning Offred’s escape. The story, at least to everyone in Gilead, has been that Offred was kidnapped. Another commander tells June that he isn’t so sure her story is real. Serena tells the handmaid that she has to answer those questions very carefully. “The Handmaid’s Tale” will also bring viewers to Canada this week. The news of the explosion in Gilead will spook Moira (Samira Wiley). “An incident sends shockwaves through both Gilead and Little America,” the episode 7 synopsis warns. In the flashbacks to life before Gilead’s regime took over, June and Moira will discuss babies. With infertility rates skyrocketing, Moira reveals that surrogate mothers earn $250,000 for carrying healthy babies. Is she ready to make that kind of commitment? And who is the blonde that the trailer keeps flashing to? Viewers will have to watch to find out. “The Handmaid’s Tale” Season 2, episode 7 will be released Wednesday at 12 a.m. EDT on Hulu. Photo: George Kraychyk/Hulu Photo: George Kraychyk/Hulu Photo: George Kraychyk/Hulu<doc-sep>So, when Offred reveals that Cushing wants to know who facilitated her escape — and that Ofglen’s commander and his family have been executed for her crime — Serena understands that her own life is in danger. Canny as ever, she and Nick draw up a warrant for Cushing’s arrest, on behalf of Waterford. In the final moments of the episode, Serena enlists Offred’s help in editing more official documents. A turning point in their relationship, it also marks the first time Offred has done skilled work, or maybe even held a pen, since she was still June. It isn’t June’s only victory over Offred this week. Pleasantly surprised to see Emily (a.k.a. Ofglen No. 1) back at market — and haunted by the realization that she never knew Ofglen No. 2’s name — she tells her old confidante, “My name is June.” When another handmaid overhears them, Offred repeats her real name to that woman. Suddenly, a shop full of women in red who have, in many cases, known each other for months or even years are meeting for the first time. Rendered in slow motion and scored by soaring strings, the scene implies that this quiet act of resistance is every bit as crucial as the bombing. The handmaids are, in effect, giving each other access to the people they were before Gilead. Even more important, they’re establishing a way to trace each other as they’re relocated from home to home, changing names with each move. The scenes in Canada, where Moira spends hours searching photos of unidentified dead for her fiancée, and where it takes days to establish the identities of the handmaids who perished at Rachel and Leah, underline the importance of permanent names. They are a human right so basic that we rarely think of them as such. In this sense, the show’s writers seem to be drawing a parallel between the handmaids’ predicament and American slavery, which destroyed families of African origin, in part, by robbing them of their original names. (As always, on a series whose post-racial vision of dystopia is naïve at best, this unstated connection between black slaves and the multicultural casualties of totalitarianism comes across as both poignant and slightly tone-deaf.) Last week, I wondered if the bombing would make things better or worse for the oppressed people of Gilead. To its credit, “The Handmaid’s Tale” envisions a more complicated outcome. Commanders die, but so do innocent people. Fallen handmaids return from the Colonies, where they’re given one more shot at making sexual slavery work. A more brutal leader replaces Pryce, but his ascendance radicalizes Serena.<doc-sep>
The Funeral. In one of the most visually arresting sequences of the series so far, we see lines of handmaids in black mourning outfits circling red coffins in the snow. They’re surrounded by rows of guards. Are they there to protect the handmaids, or to police the handmaids? Aunt Lydia is leading the service, and she is believable when she says, emotionally, that she wishes that she could give her girls a world without violence or pain, and that that’s all she ever wanted. She has an odd way of bringing that about, given that she’s regularly hitting them with cattle prods. But in Aunt Lydia’s insane perfect world, the handmaids would all be willing and there would be no fertility crisis. Aunt Lydia lists the deceased handmaids, while the remaining ones recite, “We remember them.” But the names they recite are not the deceased handmaid’s real names. They’re their “of” patronymics, which can offer only a vague red shadow of a woman and changed with the assignment. Notably, no memorable handmaids were killed in the bombing. There were no memorable scenes in past episodes built around Ofduncan or Ofzed, and we learn at secondhand that Ofedward was “kind of a jerk” who “never washed her hair.” The frequently seen handmaid later named as Dolores remarks that she barely knew any of them. Nick Won't Be Transferred Anytime Soon. Suspense defused: Commander Waterford survived the blast. He’s currently drifting in and out of consciousness in an enormous private hospital room. We quickly learn that Commander Pryce is dead, which means that Nick’s cowardly request for transfer will most likely be forgotten. Nick claims to have not known Pryce well, a clear lie: We know that he worked directly with Pryce behind the scenes as an Eye, and we know from the flashbacks in season 1’s “Jezebels” episode that he worked with Pryce since long before Congress fell. How Moira Was Tagged. “After” ties off two intriguing, irritating plot threads dangling around Moira: How did Gilead know she was fertile, and who was her partner, Odette? In this season’s third episode, Moira mentioned that the abortion clinics destroyed their records, which still didn’t explain how Moira or Gilead would have known that she was fertile. The mystery of Moira’s proven childbearing abilities is solved in a flashback: Moira was paid $250,000 to be a surrogate mother, donating her egg as well as carrying the child. Moira’s $250,000 is significantly higher than the current top quotes for eggs and surrogacy, but it’s a reasonable guesstimate on the compounded cost if the rate of healthy births dropped by the 61 percent figure cited by Serena Joy in last week’s episode. June’s daughter Hannah is an infant in Moira’s flashbacks, so we can guess that the flashbacks would have taken place roughly seven or eight years ago in the series timeline, when Moira would have been a few years out of college. The money gives her a new start in life; as Moira mentions, she can pay off student loan debts. Moira’s high fee demonstrates that the pre-Gilead methods of dealing with the fertility crisis were class-based. The difference between a commander and his wife using a handmaid for a baby and an elite couple in the old world paying a younger, fiscally disadvantaged woman a quarter-million for surrogacy and an egg is that the first case is nonconsensual. Either way, elites get the baby. But at least paid surrogacy was consensual. Binders Full of Victims. Rachel Tapping has a tough job. Who is still paying her salary, and in what currency? She is a model of calm and decency and deserves her weight in gold bullion monthly for the difficult role she fulfills. Ms. Tapping, the face of the remnant U.S. government now based in Alaska and Hawaii, is a model of diplomatic composure as she calmly offers the available information to the refugees. She leads Moira into a room full of printed binders full of images of unidentified victims of Gilead. There’s a row of white binders for murdered children. So much for Gilead valuing children. Ray Was a Blowhard. Commander Cushing has needlessly imposed a state of terror since assuming Commander Pryce’s responsibilities. Practically every yard in the neighborhood has a hanging body decorating at least one tree in the yard, and a Martha is shot in the street while reaching for her pass.