We’re one episode off the end of the season and it’s all on the table. Offred knows Luke is alive. She knows the resistance is real. She knows Moira is alive and at Jezebels and she’s ready to do something about it.

This episode, she gets to do just that. And the price almost breaks her.

After the fascinating diversions to look at Luke, Nick, Serena Joy and Fred this episode is solidly back in Offred’s head and much of it is concerned with her taking control of her life in the toughest way possible. She knows there’s a package at Jezebels she needs to pick up. She knows Moira is there. She knows the only way to get there is to persuade Fred to make a return visit. She knows that means she’ll be raped by him.

And she does it.

The show has done an incredible job across this first season on multiple fronts. Not the least of which is its continual refusal to romanticise the Handmaids’ plight. What’s happening to these women is an obscenity. For all Gilead’s talk of the Handmaids being held in high regard, they are little more than indentured wombs with no say in what happens to their own bodies. This episode, two Handmaids take that control back. Both pay a price for it

For Offred it’s both being assaulted by Fred and arguing with Moira. Moira is her single lifeline to her old life and she lets Offred down, yet again, this episode. Offred finally blows up at her and it’s ugly, cathartic, untidy and real.

Very little has come closer to breaking Offred than this episode. Having to choose to be with Fred and losing her friend at the same time is almost impossible but, like everything else, she just keeps going.

Offred’s incredible strength and compassion is what leads her to the second Handmaid to take control this episode. Ofwarren steals her newly christened baby and threatens to kill both her child and herself. Offred is ordered to talk her down and it’s almost the first moment where you see the power the Handmaids really do hold. They have the capacity for compassion in the exact way the Sons of Jacob don’t. Aunt Lydia recognizes that in Offred and calls her when Ofwarren makes her attempt.

A woman broken by the end of the world. A woman mildly surprised she hasn’t been broken by the end of the world. In a show full of incredible performances the work done by Elizabeth Moss and Madeline Brewer in this scene is some of the best ever. Brewer’s quiet, friendly ‘bye’ as she steps off the bridge is heartrending. Offred left literally holding the baby is worse. The revelation that Ofwarren has lived is a knife through the heart.

And then, the package comes through. Moira escapes not just from Jezebels but from her own defeat. Everyone breaks has been a recurrent motif this season. But what the Handmaids have learned, and no one else has seen, is that once broken you’re free to put yourself back together anyway you see fit.

Verdict: A slow burn but no less powerful for it and yet another amazing episode in the strongest first season we’ve seen this decade. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart