From the Bonnet to the Pistol
The Handmaid’s Tale, fifth season. Makes your blood boil, if you’ll excuse the unoriginal metaphor. The thing about THT5 that resonates with early 2024 is the gun. That is, the tempting notion — probably mistaken in most circumstances — that an evil force can be disposed of in the space of a heartbeat, without recourse to law and/or politics.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.
Friedrich Nietzsche

June Osborne’s character arc in the fifth season is Nietzsche’s aphorism made flesh. She finally gets her chance to rid the world of her onetime jailer and rapist, still potentially a danger to her and other women, and she takes it. She dispatches Fred Waterford with a bloody ferocity startling even to her. In the immediate aftermath she shows a weird, possibly mad glee. In the days and weeks afterward, the question — to her husband and friends, to a viewer, and probably most of all to herself, is what kind of person, in the wake of slaughter, she has become. That question is answered — again, for herself as much as anyone else — when she saves the lives of both another longtime enemy — the dead man’s widow — and the widow’s child. Said child thinks fit to enter the world a long way from the nearest hospital, or the nearest human other than his mother and June. And June finds, perhaps to her own surprise, a gentleness in herself. That gentleness is inseparable from her strength. I’m reminded of a line from a radical-left underground comic circa ’69: “And when you’re smashing the state, kids, remember to keep a smile on your face and a song in your heart.”