This is an episode all about doors and precision, carefully designed cruelty.

The door motif begins with Offred having been trapped in her room for 13 days. The door isn’t locked. It’s even ajar. That doesn’t matter. Serena Joy has trapped Offred in her room, and in her role. That cruelty, that rendering of Offred down to nothing more than a womb, is something which plays as both cruel and desperate. In an astonishingly good cast, Yvonne Strahovski is consistently one of the very best elements. Her Serena Joy is clearly massively unhappy, guilty, terrified and will knife anyone she has to in order to maintain her position. Offred may be banished to her room, but her captor is a prisoner too.

We see a different side of this motif in the scene at the doctor’s. The choice to keep him deliberately abstracted and to portray the room in dreamy, minimalist white lulls you and Offred into a false sense of security. As a result there’s a snap focus moment when you and she both realize just what the doctor has offered: asking Offred if she’d like him to rape her in order to get her pregnant.

This is the sort of broad spectrum horror that this show excels at. The moment is horrifying every way you look at it. If he’s sincere, and he may well be, it’s a polaroid of how men view women in this society. It’s also a stark reminder that, from one angle, he may have a point. Offred is being punished for not being fertile enough. Offred is, as he hints and we find out explicitly later, being punished for Commander Waterford possibly being either impotent or sterile.

But it’s still rape. And rape being suggested from a man in a position of trust and safety. A man who could, it’s just as like, see an opportunity present itself and try his luck. See a door and wonder if it’s open.

That brings us to the flashbacks, and to June and Moira’s escape from the Red Centre. Again, there’s a door that opens for them but there’s no safety on the other side. The carefully suburban, precisely anonymized landscape they wander through is a beautiful representation of the ethnical carpet bombing the Sons of Jacob have succeeded at. This is their world. This is their city. But they’re aliens in it now.

That leads to the moment the door motif really comes into its own: Moira’s escape. There’s not been a better moment yet than Samira Wiley and Elizabeth Moss’ silent conversation on the train platform. The courage both June and Moira show is titanic. Whether or not it matters is a question that hangs in the air long after Offred’s screams from her punishment beating.

And it’s that question that drives Offred, that fundamental refusal to let all this be for nothing. She pushes her luck with Nick, she manipulates Waterford and rebels against Sabrina and better still, she wins a single, vital, luminous piece of information; the translation of the graffiti that gives the episode its name;

Don’t let the bastards grind you down.

Verdict: A call to arms from a dead Handmaid. A suit of armour for the next woman to wear her name. The single best closing line the series has yet. Precision cruelty dented and deflected by will. A door, wedged ajar, just a little. A victory. And another stunningly good episode. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart