Misadventures in Blissville

“The Other Side”

So now that we know Luke is alive and well and living somewhere in Canada, the writers grab the ball and run with it. I hadn’t thought about the scene with June and the Mexican delegation until I saw the recap preceding the show. The Ambassador’s Assistant knows who June’s husband is, knows him by name. How? If he knew this, he had to know about these abductions and the forced impregnation. He had to know families were being separated. Why would you leave your husband to help Gilead in their cause? We go back to the first episode. June, Luke, and Hannah are on a mad dash to Canada. They get separated. Luke is shot. We know what happens to June and Hannah. This is Luke’s story. I haven’t had much reason to comment on O. T. Fagbenle’s performance because, up until now he’d been rather unremarkable. While swept away into interesting times, he still plays everything as either dull surprise or charmed bemusement, like those are the only tools in his bag, because he’s not written to be interesting. For some reason, Guardians are ferrying the wounded Luke back to Gilead. Why? Why not just shoot him in the back of the head like they do so many other people? Why would they nurse him back to health when he’s going to wind up on the wall anyway? This must be the most dangerous road in the world, home to two separate car accidents in less than ten minutes! The ambulance flips off of a bridge! The Guardian-paramedics appear to be dead. Luke escapes with medicine and a gun. He hikes back to his wrecked car, but can find no evidence of June or Hannah. Logically, he has to know his wife and daughter were not killed, but he nonetheless panics. He wanders into a ghost town that seemed to have been destroyed by the devout of Gilead, and this is where we get some idea of the apocalypse that followed the terrorist attacks.

We flash back perhaps a few weeks to June and Luke with a sleeping Hannah in the back of the car making their escape. There is talk of Moira who had left prior to their departure and how they should have left with her. I would agree. They arrange for a “coyote” to facilitate getting them through check-points. Here we see that Luke is not fully aware of what has happened. The idiots even brought their cell phones with them. Luckily, the coyote (a friend of June’s radical mother, Holly) knows what to do. He smashes their cell phones and stows them in the back of his vehicle. Luke promises June everything will be all right. Luke? Don’t write checks your butt can’t cash. They hear a police siren. The vehicle stops. The trunk door opens. A man dressed like a Guardian does a perfunctory search, pretends he sees nothing. Excellent! The show is much stronger when it gives us this information rather than the constant torture and rape of present-day scenes. Our friendly coyote provides them with a nice cabin in the woods where they will lay low until they can figure out how to get across the border. The coyote doesn’t buy that Luke knows anything about guns, so he gives him a quick tutorial on how to handle a handgun. It’s shocking to me how naive Luke is; that he cannot even show courage. In Luke’s present, he is beset by others who have escaped and when they assume he’s a Guardian (because he took one of their coats), they start beating him. Luke is not having a good day. After they figure out he’s not a baddie, they take him and tend to his injuries.

The Scooby gang fills Luke in on Gilead’s plan to turn all the fertile women into handmaids. Back at the cabin, they decide to take off when a friendly enough neighbor (with a gun) and his dog stop by to say hi. The neighbor stops by again to tell them he knows who they are and that the Guardians are searching for them (for them specifically?). He tells them their coyote is dead, hanged from a lamp-post in town. Luke, idiotically, decides to leave the Scooby gang so he can go back and search for June and Hannah. One of them, a kind woman named Zoe, shows Luke a church where bodies are hanging from rafters. This is what happens when people fight back. She tells him if he goes back he will die. It’s like something out of a horror movie. I understand when something that could be considered Evil can be used in the service of the Good, but I can’t understand something so objectively evil as murdering people and then putting their bodies on display to frighten others. The Scooby gang tries to make its way to Canada by boat but are ambushed by Guardians. Zoe is killed. We jump forward to three years later (finally we have a basis for a time-line), and Luke is hanging out in Canada with one of his Scooby gang friends, a little woman who won’t talk, named Erin. He gets a call and appears at a government office where he receives the note June wrote for him in the previous episode. It reads, “I love you so much. Save Hannah.” This episode and “A Woman’s Place” are excellent book-ends for each other and proves the series can succeed on its own terms without having to rely on Margaret Atwood’s jigsaw puzzle, stream-of-consciousness narrative.