‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Team on Breaking Down June, Serena’s Shocking News
Spoiler Alert
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the first three episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale Season 4, “Pigs,” “Nightshade,” and “The Crossing.”]
The Handmaid’s Tale kicks off its fourth season by dropping three episodes (a few hours early of its April 28 premiere) revolving around June’s (Elisabeth Moss) determination to fight back, heartbreaking choices, a bombshell for Serena (Yvonne Strahovski), and (too much) death.
Unsurprisingly, June did survive getting shot and manages to continue the battle (even if the other handmaids aren’t quite up to the task just yet). But sadly she’s captured—and Nick (Max Minghella) is the one to bring her in, promising to keep her alive. What follows in captivity breaks June.
Meanwhile, in Canada, Serena and Fred (Joseph Fiennes) are in custody for their crimes in Gilead and very much not on the same page. But might her news change that? Read on as executive producer Bruce Miller, Minghella, Ann Dowd (who plays Aunt Lydia), and Sam Jaeger (Mark Tuello) break down the key events of the first three episodes.
Putting June Through Hell
After being captured, June spends Episode 3—directed beautifully by Moss—being tortured in a cell where Lydia is in charge as Gilead demands the location of the other handmaids who were on the run. It’s not until she’s brought in front of daughter Hannah (Jordana Blake) and June realizes her own flesh and blood is scared of her, not Gilead, that she gives up the information.
“I was trying to explain what ‘hard’ means,” Miller says. “June has taken a measure of her own toughness. In this season, it’s put to the test over and over and over again. It isn’t necessarily a good thing, but, boy, is she tough this season. The times that she breaks, they have to push her very far. The psychological toll I was trying to put on June here was to show her that there are forces that are going to break you. What happens when you have to [give in], and how do you deal with that? How does that change who you are as a person?”
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In the end, while June might feel “like she’s a big fat failure,” the EP doesn’t agree. “I look at her as this huge, unbelievable, superheroic success. Episode 3 is full of strength, full of incredible endurance. And yet in the end she falls. She breaks because everybody breaks.”
June isn’t the only one who takes some emotional punches while Gilead has her. Lydia does as well when June tells her that she failed the handmaids—the very women the Aunt thinks she’s supposed to protect—in scenes Dowd describes as “wonderful to film.”
Serena’s Pregnant!
As fans know, Serena wants to be a mother, and in Season 4, she finds out she’s going to be one. “She changed the country to have a baby,” Miller reminds us. “She overthrew the government. Now she’s pregnant. Was it worth it?” Prepare for a “reckoning for Serena.”
Also get ready to see how her pregnancy makes the dynamic between her and Fred—”two narcissists”—even “more exciting,” the EP adds. “A lot of this season is about getting what you’ve always wanted, and then what you sacrifice for, what you put everything on the line for—then seeing what you’ve turned into.”
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So for Serena, while she is expecting, she’s experiencing it “under supervision and in prison,” which Miller calls “a level of justice that makes me happy because she deserves to not enjoy but to suffer through her pregnancy the same way she made June suffer.”
According to Jaeger, the pregnancy is also going to affect Serena’s already “complex” relationship with Mark, a representative of the U.S. government in Canada, who in Season 4 is getting to see “the full breadth” of who Serena is and how Gilead affected her.
“There is an attraction and an understanding in some ways,” he explains, but seeing her is “startling for him. He’s long known that she’s always going to try to remain in control of whatever situation she’s in, but the lengths that she goes to do that are really troubling to him.”
Serena’s baby on board “stalls whatever progress they were making in removing her from Gilead,” Jaeger adds. “That is such an important role in her life, the need to have a child, that he’s reluctant to give that news to her. He knows he’s going to lose her as an ally.”
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June and Nick’s Reunion
June’s capture by Gilead leads to her and the other handmaids (once they’re found based on her information) being sent to a breeding colony. On her way there, she and Nick do have a bittersweet reunion, complete with both saying “I love you.”
“There’s a forever understood at the end of that that there hasn’t been before,” Miller says of those declarations. “I think the last few times they’ve been together, they both have the feeling that this may be the last time they ever see each other. They may never know anything about what happens to the person after this. And as you see the season go along, you realize how attractive and simple and sexy that is. She looks back on that fondly as she moves forward in the story. Every time she crosses paths with Nick, you see that hunger and that desire for them to have a genuine [relationship], that their relationship is nurturing in June in a way that continues even after they are physically apart.”
But it’s certainly a complicated relationship, given that Nick is a Commander in Gilead. “The one thing he’s constantly trying to balance is how can he, in ways, redeem himself and protect the woman he loves without sacrificing any power or leverage in the process?” Minghella notes.
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So, while “he doesn’t maybe always make the right decisions,” he adds, “the heart of his agenda is acting from a place of trying to protect June to the best of his ability.”
Losing Handmaids
At the end of Episode 3, the handmaids make their escape on the way to that breeding colony. Lydia can only watch in horror as four handmaids are killed (two are shot, two die when they’re hit by a train) as they run for the tracks. Only June and Janine (Madeline Brewer) survive.
“When I did some ADR for that, when I saw that scene, I just burst into tears immediately,” Dowd shares. “I adore them, Lydia adores them. It was all just horrifying, a tragedy.”
The Handmaid’s Tale, Wednesdays, Hulu
