The Handmaid’s Tale Recap: Adventureland

Gilead versus America. Theocracy versus Democracy. Serena versus June. The longer this series goes on, the less these characters resemble real women than mascots for their cartoonishly simplified politics. It makes a kind of sense then that “Devotion” sees them each running around their own personal Disneylands — theme park renditions of the real worlds that the people they used to be once lived in.

For Serena, that’s New Bethlehem, which has about as much in common with Gilead as Disney’s Main Street USA does with, well, anywhere in the USA. Today, foreign diplomats are invited into the picket-fence community to kick the tires on the “reformed” conservative theocracy. Commander Lawrence leads a whistle-stop tour of his one-gazebo town. Over here, we have Ambassador Serena Joy Waterford; she has a son, and you can smell his newborn scent. Over there, we have Mrs. Rose Blaine, and you can put your hand on her bump for a Gilead dollar.

The diplomats are in New Bethlehem to determine if it’s safe to let Americans repatriate there, supposedly on a “voluntary” basis. Serena’s job is to soothe their concerns, which apparently extend only so far as a woman’s right to literacy. That foreign countries have sent envoys into this sham-state at all tells us everything we need to know about the global appetite for resisting Gilead. If Canada is willing to allow refugees to move to a tiny island inside a monstrous country that forces women into sex slavery just because Serena Joy gets to wear a pantsuit, then the war for America is already lost.

No, this charade isn’t about the safe relocation of Americans but seeding the ground for normalizing relations with Gilead. Countries want to dump their refugees — a growing source of domestic tension — and import a little bit of that birthrate pixie dust. Imagine more New Bethlehems and not just in the Eastern District. Imagine New Bethlehems across Gilead. Imagine them across the world. New Bethlehem Paris. New Bethlehem Tokyo. Each with its own gazebo and its own newborns and its own baby bumps to pet. Each with its own pantsuited ambassador to assure women that a little bit of patriarchy can be a good thing. If only someone walked by licking an ice-cream bar in the shape of a handmaid’s winged bonnet, this picture of a sanitized, commercialized Gileadland would be complete.

The foreign diplomats will believe in the illusion of New Bethlehem because it’s politically expedient. The more compelling question is how sincerely Serena and Joseph believe that their incubator town is the real future of their country and not just a one-off marketing gimmick. I would give Serena, who asks Joseph to profess his love of the Lord before they continue their work together, a gullibility rating of 10 out of 10. She genuinely believes that God’s master plan is to present her with a series of opportunities to remake the world to her liking until she succeeds or dies.

Joseph is less credulous. He’s not motivated by a “calling” to reform Gilead but his own guilt at having, you know, destroyed the world. “We broke this country, and now we have to fix it,” he tells Serena, but neither addresses the scope of the project. The Eastern District where they lived wasn’t even the most conservative state. Gilead may have started with their badly executed ideas, but it’s not theirs anymore. It belongs to men like Nick’s father-in-law, High Commander Wharton. Wharton believes in the real Gilead, the place that saved his frail daughter, Rose, after America killed his wife. Serena’s not going to convince him to disempower himself and endanger his family over the course of a few evening strolls.

June spends most of “Devotion” wandering the premises of a derelict water park where Luke and Moira have been trapped behind enemy lines for the past four days. They initially infiltrated Gilead to collect intel for a Mayday assassination op to kill radical commanders, which strikes me as futile. Gilead is a fundamentalist factory now. The commanders that replace the assassinated ones will have risen through this country’s ranks. They have diminishing memories of America, and they can see that the world is poised to accept Gilead. Regardless, it would still be a waste for Luke and Moira to die at Action Park.

To recover them, Mayday needs the help of someone who can move freely among the Gilead patrols. One of the diplomats visiting New Bethlehem informs Nick that June is waiting for him in No Man’s Land, and he runs to her rescue because that’s what he always does. And they do what they always do: a little run, a quick embrace, hurried updates about whether their daughter is hitting her developmental milestones. Joseph may have anointed Nick the “mayor” of New Bethlehem, but he spends the town’s first inaugural Doors Open Day in Gilead with his girlfriend.

That’s right. June doesn’t just send Nick into No Man’s Land; she insists on coming with. Given our understanding of the intensity of the Gilead surveillance state, this strikes me as an impossible ask. If Nick gets caught by the guardians on his own, he has to think up a good excuse. If he gets caught with June, they both die. It’s totally preposterous to me, and yet, there’s no way to keep a love triangle alive this long without at least a little proximity once in a while. “In the back,” Nick tells her as they get into the car, with the tone of a man who’s growing tired of asking. “I will,” June shrieks back, like a woman who’s tired of her man’s intimations. It’s mostly with Nick that June gets these glimmers of an actual personality — freedom from the political project of being June Osborne.

Like a regular couple, they spend the afternoon wandering the labyrinthine amusement park and bickering over which way to the gift shop. If only they had reusable water bottles and fold-out maps, this picture of decaying normalcy would be complete. In general, I wish the series did more to visually link the world of Gilead to the America we know. It grounds the more convoluted story lines to see our characters walking around our world. It’s a narrative shortcut to poignance.

As Nick and June walk, they also talk. She learns that he visited her in the hospital after the attack — that’s why he’s in Mark Tuello’s debt now. Nick made this perilous deal even though, to his mind, June chose Luke. Of course, that’s not how she sees it. June didn’t choose Luke. Luke waited for her and though she loves Nick as well, there’s a prize for waiting. “Do you even know what it’s like to be in love with you?” Nick asks her, the log flume in the distance.

Their little lover’s quarrel is so asinine and melodramatic that I half-worried we were about to cut to a shot of Luke, listening from over by the dried-up Lazy River. Mercifully, he’s between the sun-bleached T-shirts and expired SPF, memorizing the names of the commanders he’d like to kill if he ever gets out of this gift shop alive. Luke can’t die here because he has something to prove. He’s still hoping that his wife, who has smuggled women and children to freedom, won’t learn that he got lost at the water park. So imagine how he feels when she turns up to save him with her commander boyfriend. The series does well to let these almost embarrassingly unevolved emotional arcs play out absent of acknowledgment. It’s true that even in Gilead’s America, husbands get jealous. And it’s true that in Gilead’s America, there are more important things to talk about.

Remember the feeling of being an exhausted kid on the way home from the Y or the boardwalk and falling asleep in the back of your mom’s car? Getting to the car was basically synonymous with getting home. If you could just drag yourself to the car, you’d be home already. As June and Nick walk a very relieved Luke and Moira to the car, they run into patrolling guardians, who aren’t content to let Commander Blaine deal with these rebels himself. It’s consistently difficult to get a handle on who runs Gilead. Nick is the mayor of New Bethlehem, so shouldn’t these foot soldiers do as he says? From a strategic point of view, it’s better to have a powerful man like Nick owe you a favor than end up on the Wall. Alas, Nick is forced to shoot them, but if that was the big plan for rescuing Moira and Luke, I’m not sure why Nick was needed at all. Mayday has guns.

Later that night, Mark Tuello rendezvous with our awkward quartet so Moira, June, and Luke can rejoin Mayday, and Nick can figure out how he’s going to explain missing New Bethlehem’s big day to his suspicious father-in-law. “Thank you, bro,” Luke tells Nick because that’s how you save face in this situation. It occurs to me that on the only other occasion these men have met face-to-face (I think), Nick told Luke that his wife was pregnant with the baby Luke would eventually learn belonged to Nick. Now, the man who cuckolded him has also rescued him from certain death. What is there to say, really, except “thank you, bro”?

Sam Jaeger, who plays Mark, does well to deliver this scene’s sloppy dialogue with a straight face. Mark tells Nick that if he ever ignores him again, he’ll do worse than call June Osborne on him — he’ll expose Nick’s treachery to his fellow commanders. Nick rightly assesses this isn’t true because a dead informant is useless to Mark, though I’d argue a dead informant is worse than useless. Why would any would-be collaborator ever work with the Americans again if this is how they treat their men on the inside?

Then, as the others get into Mark’s car, Nick and June start to say a tough good-bye, exactly like they always do. “Make a good life for yourself,” Nick tells June, though by this point he must doubt the finality of these partings. The borders that once seemed impossible to cross are softening. Or maybe Nick and June are getting bolder. I mean, they did just spend a day together in Disneyland. So it was refreshing to hear June call them on their bullshit — the performance of “the whole good-bye thing.” There’s no good-bye. They can’t stop colliding. They don’t want to stop needing each other even when it endangers each other. There’s no love triangle without proximity. Instead, they settle on “see you later.” Nick and June will “see you later” until it kills someone.

And now that they’ve failed to make a proper farewell, I assume Nick will die, probably for gunning down those guardians to save his girlfriend’s husband’s life. If he wasn’t going to die, Nick and June would have said a properly overwrought good-bye.