![]() Janine’s presence is odd - isn’t anyone keeping an eye on her? (Yes, pun is intended.) - and their entire conversation unlikely. I wish the episode had continued down the same path, entirely dedicating itself to June and her days spent inside that one room. June’s slow plotting, and that grimacing reach into the sharps disposal box, are so off course for The Handmaid’s Tale that they feel fresh and invigorating. Is it crazy of June to want to kill Natalie? (It’s certainly crazy of Aunt Lydia to leave June alone with her.) That depends on why exactly you think June bends that air tube and tries to cut off Natalie’s oxygen - whether it’s because she’s still infuriated by Natalie’s betrayal or because she thinks her baby is better off dead than brought up in this society of wack-jobs. Elisabeth Moss, as always, uses her face so exquisitely that even without the voice-over, we’d know exactly how far gone June is. The light in the room suddenly flashes warm as day dawns, then cooler when the fluorescents come on. They’re already wearing scarlet robes and wings, for Christ’s sake, just tie a “Baby Onboard” sign to their heads or something.) But still, Natalie is stripped of every dignity, made to lie there helpless and maybe suffering so that her sick society can produce its next generation.Īs a pseudo-bottle episode, “Heroic” opens wondrously with that agonizingly long sequence of June perched on her knees, drifting from one moment into another hour, eyes red and skin more wan than the walls around her, and knees cracked open from such long stints in “prayer.” Her voice is softer, more trembly and high-pitched than usual, as she describes that what she knows - or thinks she knows - are delusions of little girls sweeping down the hospital’s hallways. Which makes me wonder why a government so hellbent on making more babies wouldn’t take better steps to mark pregnant handmaids. (It also didn’t help that two Guardians dragged her out of the market after she was shot like she was already dead. Could Natalie have been saved when she was brought in? Most likely not, as the doctor explains that she’d lost a tremendous amount of blood. Ofmatthew, who we should honor as Natalie with her real name, has become just a vessel for the safekeeping of this other human, a womb that just so happens to have a human attached. Wait, scratch that, she’s praying that Ofmatthew’s baby will make it to viability so the mother, who is a great uterus but of little other value to Gilead, can just die already.Īlong with June’s descent into madness, that’s the big takeaway of “Heroic”: the shudder-inducing reality of what happens when the life of the baby is valued that much more than the life of the mother, when the fetus, an unknown being, is considered more important than its creator by dint of society’s obsession with the “innocence” of babies. As punishment (for taunting Ofmatthew, possibly, or for just generally failing to comply with any of the rules governing handmaids for the last two years or so), June is forced to kneel in supplication all day long, praying that her walking partner will heal. That song is cruel in any circumstances (besides when it’s used in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion) and downright maddening here.įor June, who has no relief from the dings, the white glare of the room, or the smells of antiseptic and shit and encroaching death, it’s enough to push her around the bend. I found myself mildly relieved every time Ofmatthew (or Natalie, whose real name we learned at the end of the l ast episode when Aunt Lydia screamed it in Loaves and Fishes) seized or slowed her breathing and the pitch and tenor of the beeps would change. It’s the sort of oddity that at first might make you giggle but then feels suffocating, a form of auditory torture. “Ohhhh baby, do you know what that’s worth,” she mouths along with the chimes, calling up Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven Is a Place on Earth,” before she turns straight to the camera and, in a move that breaks the fourth wall a little more thoroughly than her prior stares and grimaces, tells the viewer, “You’ll hear it.”Īnd you do. June, even after 32 days - and then, apparently, several months - in a hospital room, with ventilators and EKG readers dinging mercilessly, all day and all night, still hears the beeps. All these bips and beeps and boops start to fade into the background after a while, so when the pumps and machines start to indicate there’s truly a problem, doctors and nurses aren’t always able to pick up on it. There’s a weird condition called “alarm fatigue” that hospital personnel sometimes develop.
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