This season finale combines the two styles the show has used up to now to immensely successful effect. We get snippets of a narrative other than Offred’s in the near silent scenes of Moira reaching Canada. We also get an intensely intimate, deeply disturbing look at where Offred is at the end of season one.

Visually, this show has never failed to impress but this episode may actually be the best to date. Kari Skogland’s camera never quite relaxes, whether filming the army of Handmaids in slow motion or parking in Offred’s shopping bag as she nervously looks down at the package from the Resistance. Best of all though is the sense of the world being slightly too big for everyone. The massive doors of Waterford’s office, the echoey bedroom in which he and his equally cold, equally monstrous wife attempt to reconcile. Offred going into the darkness, perhaps for the last time, with the tiniest hint of a smile. Janine, crouched in the middle of a circle of her friends, none of which will murder her. Kari Skogland has a keen, multi-layered eye for how to put a scene together and of all the intensely talented directors the show has had this year, she’s one of the very best.

Miller’s script smartly contrasts Canada and Gilead to heart-breaking effect. There’s bleak humour in how nice the Canadian refugee liaison is at first but it’s only when Moira and Luke are reunited that you realize the truth. Moira hasn’t been stunned because he’s been so nice, she’s been terrified. People who make it across the border are cared for and also left alone and that sudden regaining of freedom is something she can’t handle. It’s only Luke’s arrival, and the off hand reference to her being on his list of family members that finally triggers the years of horror in her. The final sight we see of them is Moira wrapped around Luke, sobbing her heart out. Terrified, sickened, heartbroken. Free.

Offred’s freedom looks different. Serena Joy’s vile use of her daughter is a new low for both of them but the letters Offred has been trusted with are what she’s needed all season. Proof she isn’t alone. Proof that every Handmaid suffers the same thoughts, the same horrors. Proof that they walk in formation in more ways than one. It’s an incredible sequence, powerful, honest and simple and it evokes a similar moment in classic graphic novel V for Vendetta in the very best way.

As the episode closes everyone is in a different place. The Waterfords are aware of their place on the food chain for the first time, Nick may have helped secure Offred’s release, Luke and Moira are reunited and Aunt Lydia has learned that her ‘girls’ are women. Independent, strong willed, survivors all. None of them are free, none of them are in a good place but for the first time, Offred, and by extension her compatriots, aren’t alone. Like Offred says at the top of the episode, they look like an army. By the end of the episode, they may have begun to become one. Intense, horrifying, compassionate, essential viewing just like the rest of this astonishing debut year.

Verdict: One of the best pieces of TV drama I’ve seen in a very long time. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart