The Handmaid’s Tale season 5: The 3 biggest talking points from episode 7

June and Serena are back together again. What could go wrong?

Well, we’re on the lam in No Man’s Land with June and Serena, but it’s not nearly as fun as I hoped it would be. June (Elisabeth Moss) is pissed off and confused; the stress of the scenario sends Serena (Yvonne Strahovski) into labour. And oh yeah, they barely make it a mile away from the scene of last episode’s jailbreak before Serena drives the getaway car into a ditch.

The frantic present

Luckily – I guess? – the ditch is near an abandoned barn that looks about one stiff breeze from crumbling into dust. It’s amazing what The Handmaid’s Tale has conditioned its viewers to see as good luck. Now, Serena’s giving birth in the cold while June paces around wondering why she doesn’t just desert her. June gave birth to Nichole, scared and alone in that empty house in Gilead. That’s Old Testament justice, right? An eye for an eye.

Alas, it’s not June’s call. When she tries to check Serena’s cervix for dilation, Serena accuses June of trying to kill her baby.

June fares better with rescuing the car from the ditch. This series is so crushingly dramatic to watch that it’s easy to forget what a bear it must be to make. These actresses look legitimately freezing, and the roles are taxingly physical. To get the car out of the ditch, for example, Moss has to throw her body into pushing it, scour the nearby woods for a log to brace the tire, drag it across the field, etc. Watching this show is hard work but making it doesn’t seem like a picnic.

Even with the getaway car out of the ditch, June can’t bring herself to ditch Serena. Mercifully – especially considering this show rarely shies from female pain – the birth of Serena and Fred’s baby boy is medically uneventful. The show lets birth be a bonding experience for these women who have been enemies in Gilead and enemies in Canada and now find themselves together again in some lawless in-between. When Serena’s too tired to push one last time, June pleads with her sweetly and supportively. Serena calls her baby Noah.

The plaintive past

The forward action of this episode – called “No Man’s Land” – is about shifting power balances and uncomfortable alliances. But in devastating flashbacks we get glimpses of June and Serena’s terrible meet-cute. I’ve wondered before what the first few days might have been like with a new handmaid in the Waterford household and now we know. June and Serena exchanged hopeful, sympathetic glances when they went together to their first birthing ceremony. Briefly, they were almost on the same side.

But that day ends in tragedy for the handmaid in labour, who dies after a Caesarean section. It’s slightly unclear to me what the circumstances were, but Gilead is so obsessed with population growth that there must have been no saving the fertile mother. When June and Serena are reunited afterwards, the looks between them are grave. There can be no real attachment here. June is a vessel to Serena, a body to hold what she wants. When she’s done with it, she’ll be done with June, too.

The painful future

June and Serena bond quickly in the barn over motherhood. They talk about the present – Noah is latching well – and their ugly past. When Serena asks June why she didn’t shoot her months ago when she brandished that gun outside the immigration centre, June answers tearfully: “I didn’t want to.” It’s been years since I’ve thought of June as a fundamentally soft person, but she says this to Serena as softly as she’s said anything.

Yvonne Strahovski in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale' (HULU)

Serena worries aloud about who Noah will become with a father like Fred and a mother on the run from Gilead. She likens herself to the Wheelers’ handmaid and is willing to do anything – even the hardest thing – to keep Noah from their clutches. She begs June to take her son and raise him with Luke. “He’s a good man,” Serena says. “He could teach Noah to be a good man.”

Maybe it’s just the pregnancy hormones, but Serena seems like a different person – contrite and clear-eyed. Then… she suggests that God sent June to her in the form of an avenging angel to rain fire down on her former life yet show her son the light of the Lord. But June is done being used by Serena in this way. She didn’t want to be her vessel into motherhood with Nichole and she refuses to do it now. Instead, she offers to take a feverish and dehydrated Serena to the hospital in Canada. She vows to make sure she can raise her own son.

It’s the most beautiful, meaningful episode – full of gorgeous shots of the fading sun and genuine female solidarity – so it makes sense that it’s all undone by a man. It’s not Mr Wheeler who finds Serena in the hospital, where Noah’s been brought to the NICU for observation. Luke, it turns out, is an avenger, too.

Elisabeth Moss in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale' (HULU)

When he comes to collect June, he brings with him 1) the good news that he was able to hang on to the USB drive with information about Hannah and 2) the worst kinds of cops. A refresher: as Serena left the immigration centre in Toronto to become a cultural attaché for Gilead, she gave up her diplomatic status, which makes her re-entry into Canada an illegal border crossing. Luke (O-T Fagbenle) calls the country’s immigration cops, who take Serena into custody and her infant son – not even 10 hours old – into welfare protection.

The Handmaid’s Tale is a battle between good and evil, but it achieves a savage and affecting kind of pathos when that battle takes place within June herself. In the wake of the most healing episode of season five, the show introduces a ripped-from-the-headlines child separation storyline that had me crying for a character who, 45 minutes ago, I would have left for dead if I was June. The episode ends with Serena screaming for June’s help, and this time, I really, really, really need her to find a way to do it.

‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ season five is releasing episodes weekly in the US on Hulu. It premieres in the UK on Sunday 23 October