Gates and bars erected all around them keep the women moving straight, into funnels, cattle going to slaughter. Naked women are prodded, their flesh pushed open for examination. Guards are ripping walkers away and tossing them into piles like those heaps of shoes and dolls and suitcases that line the halls of the Holocaust Museum and Dachau’s memorial site. If you’re wondering what footage of entry into Auschwitz might have looked like - or how refugees are treated when they cross our borders now - I imagine it would be something like this. So it’s fitting, and wrenching, that this season finale opens with June in the dark, behind those tentacles of plastic used in commercial refrigeration, lights flashing in her eyes, screams bouncing off the walls, as she stands frozen in the first moments after she’s been taken into custody and Gilead has her in its zealous, self-satisfied jaws. They are the next steps in a dissolution that some of us worry could happen right now (and that is happening at our border), that a woman’s rights could erode until she’s again nothing more than a piece of property, liable to be penned up and shuffled along with no recourse to exercise even an iota of your birth-determined freedoms.
Those glimpses of the sudden slide from democracy to sheer hell: when June’s credit cards were cut off, or when she laid in bed with Hannah as the Capitol Building imploded, or tried to protest with Moira only to face a hail of bullets. The scenes from the time just before Gilead have always struck me as The Handmaid’s Tale’s most powerful.