Archive of Our Own

Episode transcript:

Evdokia: Hi friends. I’m Evdokia.

Brigid: I’m Brigid.

Nasim: And I’m Nasim.

Evdokia: And this is the Handbabe’s Tale Podcast, where we discuss our favorite ahistorical drama adaptation of the text dubbed The Handmaid’s Tale , the anonymous document from the Early Gilead Period.

Nasim: Favorite is really doing a lot of work there.

Evdokia: Well right now it’s the only adaptation of the text, so there’s not a lot of competition.

Brigid: There have been several stage adaptations, I’d like to point out. 

Evdoika: Right, you’re so right.

Brigid: It’s a really popular text for live performance because people can play with the order, and because everyone’s doing one-woman shows right now. 

Nasim: So it might not be our favorite. Maybe there’s a one-woman show out there that’s actually done some textual research and combed through historical archives to inform their adaptation. 

Brigid: Probably not, but never say never.

Evdokia: Listeners, if you’re out there and you’re really passionate about one-woman shows that are adaptations of The Handmaid’s Tale , please reach out and tell us we’re wrong. 

Brigid: Thank goodness, I was worried you were going to recommend we all start going to live theater more. 

Evdokia: You don’t want to do that?

Brigid: My partner is a performing artist, and all of their friends are performing artists, so when I tell you that my calendar is full for the next 2-3 years with live theater—

Evdokia: I see. 

Nasim: We love that the arts are heavily subsidized nowadays, but at what cost?

Brigid: The cost to my sanity. Which does come cheap, so there you go I guess.

Evdokia: Well with that settled, do we want to dive in to that finale? Nasim I can already tell you have opinions.

Nasim: I think that’s just my normal face. I’m Nasim and I always have opinions about everything.

Evdokia: Yes, it’s one of the things we love about you.

Nasim: Thank you. In that case: the finale was bad!

Evdokia: Say more.

Nasim: I will. For starters, I know we’ve touched on this before with the series, but not really at length I think: we have no idea who made the recordings that comprise The Handmaid’s Tale . We know that June Osborne was alive at around the same time, and we know that she lived in the same areas that are discussed in the text, and they were both handmaids, but that is it. No one has ever claimed authorship. We have no idea if June Osborne, the Mayday soldier who gave birth to Baby Nicole, was the same woman who recorded these tapes. In fact, there’s evidence that suggests June Osborne was a name used by multiple people in Mayday. 

Brigid: So you’re saying that any of them could have been Baby Nicole’s mother or none of them?

Nasim: Both! Because the truth is we just don’t know for sure. And we absolutely don’t know who made the recordings. 

Evdokia: And it seems like the series ended, pretty decisively, on the side of the author being June Osborne. 

Nasim: Which is an extremely contested position academically! And there’s no evidence for it!

Brigid: Why is that exactly? Like I get that there’s no evidence, but then why do people think that the author of the Handmaid’s Tale was June Osborne? Like, if there is no evidence then where did the idea come from? 

Nasim: So, okay. Personally, I think it’s a lot to do with the mythology of June Osborne herself. She was extremely active in Mayday even before she fully escaped from Gilead, and then afterwards she did do a lot to combat the Republic politically and militarily. She’s one of the few people who we have a lot of documentation for, in part because she was in the news so much, but there are also surviving records from within Gilead about her. They did send agents to try to assassinate her, that’s how important she was within the resistance movement. 

Evdokia: And there aren’t a lot of records from that time, right?

Nasim: Right, there were a lot of purges so what we do have is very incomplete, but her name still comes up a lot, which is very rare. It’s clear that the Republic of Gilead saw her as a threat. 

Brigid: Is that where the mythology comes from?

Nasim: Well yes and no. Because now what we’re seeing is people learning about this period in history class and her name is one that people remember, she’s one of the easier people to write an essay on. And then you have this renewed interest in Gilead when the Testaments manuscript comes out—and we’ll get to that when we get to it—and about a year later the book Offred comes out, which proposes that the author not only survived the events of the text but managed to escape Gilead, and that book proposes that she was June Osborne because of all of the named handmaids in the text, June is the only one we never hear about again. It’s a wild leap, honestly. 

Evdokia: But the book doesn’t say that as a fact?

Nasim: No, it doesn’t, but every headline around the release of the book was like: Explosive new evidence! Could Offred have been June Osborne? And the answer is no: probably not. 

Evdokia: And for the sake of argument: why not? 

Nasim: Well to put it simply it’s far too neat. Like, it doesn’t make sense. One person simply could not have done all of that. 

Evdokia: Right.

Nasim: It’s very nearly suggesting she was capable of being in two places at once. 

Brigid: Do the timelines not work?

Nasim: Only if you’re extremely forgiving of how time works, and how long distances are. We know the author was in Gilead for a certain number of years, because the posting she describes was not her first, and we know around when she was born because she remembers being a child and going to protests with her unmarried mother. And we know she had a job and a bank account. Those things all match up with what we know about June Osborne—her age and her childhood.

Brigid: She had a single mother?

Nasim: She did. And she was actually alive for a time—she escaped and the last we know of her she was in a refugee camp.

Brigid: Oh, so the series kept that.

Nasim: The series borrowed a lot from June Osborne’s actual life, it just assumes that June was the handmaid from the text. 

Brigid: Right, like she was Offred in the beginning of the series. 

Nasim: Yes but—okay, we don’t know if Offred, from the text, if that was a pseudonym. If it wasn’t a pseudonym, there are a few commanders that she might have been assigned to, and Fred Waterford was one of them. That’s something I wish they’d examined, honestly, is how the politics of Gilead actually worked, because it was so dysfunctional and horrible obviously, but they didn’t just come into power overnight. It’s something that’s so important about the original Handmaid’s Tale recordings, that the author talks about how things descended slowly and then all at once. That’s what it was probably like to experience this transition of power, but from the inside it was quite a well-organized coup taking place when the former American government was extremely vulnerable, and all of these men weren’t just monsters, they were political figures with real influence over the way things were run. And I’m realizing I’ve been talking for such a long time and I don’t even know if I answered your question.

Brigid: I think you did. I wanted to know why people conflated the author of the original text with June Osborne and it sounds like it was a combination of like, romanticizing the past and our relationship with this figure, and also some bad journalism on a book that came out analyzing the text.

Nasim: Yes. It was Offred written by Professor Pieixoto. Who does good work generally, I don’t think this is his fault. I think the connection between the author of the tapes and June Osborne is more wishful thinking on his part, but it snowballed well beyond his control. 

Evdokia: Yes it sounds like it was a suggestion and people really latched onto it. Especially now when we’re having a—I don’t know what to call this moment. Not a revival. Maybe a renewed interest in the Republic of Gilead?

Brigid: I think it’s fair to call it that. Like we got all excited about the old-world fashions of the 1960s for a bit there, and now we’re latching on to the wave of pushback and regression that came after the era of incrementalism. Which is flattening it, I know, but for the sake of following trends, that’s what I think we’re seeing. 

Nasim: Trends do really flatten history. 

Evdokia: That is something else I wanted to talk to you both about. It’s kind of continuing our conversation we’ve been having every season, but now that the series is over I think it’s a good idea to revisit it. How does this text, both the original source material and this adaptation, shape our relationship with history? Or maybe a better question, which you brought up last time Brigid, is how does our relationship with history shape these texts in our consciousness?

Brigid: I said that?

Evdokia: Yes, when we did our episode on Serena Joy. You read her book and then you reported back to us on what you thought of it.

Brigid: Ah yes. I remember it was really difficult to find a copy because it wasn’t in the Internet Archive so I had to go to like a physical library where they had one, and because I wasn’t a student there, this was at the College at Wabanaki, I had to get special permission to visit their collection. And then the book wasn’t even that good.

Nasim: Which was unsurprising. But yes, I’m sorry you had to go through all that.

Brigid: I was so triumphant when I got there and then it was only like 200 pages and most of it was crap. Each chapter opened with a Bible verse and all it boiled down to was justifications for the subordination of women. Which wasn’t even justified if you’d translated the Bible correctly for about half of them. The other half were more or less accurate, but it did feel absurd to be reading a woman making an argument for removing her own rights. 

Evdokia: Agreed. So listeners, if you’re interested in hearing Brigid take Serena Joy apart piece by piece, I recommend you go back and listen to that episode. 

Brigid: Where I apparently said something clever about how our relationship with history shapes these texts more than these texts shape history.

Evdokia: Yes—well and you were getting there a little bit talking about Serena Joy just now, too. She wanted to find some particular justifications in the Bible, and so that’s what she saw when she opened that book. And because that’s what she wanted to see, and her advocacy was so effective, what she wanted shaped the world. Like, she helped shape Gilead. That wasn’t history informing her. She was telling the world what she felt the history was, and that in turn determined a lot of her future. 

Brigid: Wow. That’s quite a lot. 

Nasim: You’re also touching on something historians really grapple with. We all have our preconceived notions of what something is or isn’t. Archaeologists look at, let’s say burials, and they assume the person buried there is a man because there’s an axe or a spear. But then they do a forensic analysis and determine that, with the width of the pelvis and the remaining DNA, that person would have been assigned female at birth. Most likely. So okay, this was a woman then. But what if this person was intersex? Maybe they had male characteristics and just happened to have a wide pelvis and XX chromosomes or something. Or maybe it’s something else entirely—maybe this is someone who today we would assign female at birth but there were circumstances within that culture where they would have been seen as male, or as a third gender. Or maybe the way we think of gender or gendered roles has more to do with us than with the evidence we’re finding. 

Evdokia: So given all that, the biases that we carry with us from living in this present moment, how do we think that’s shaped The Handmaid’s Tale ? And what do we do with that?

Brigid: I think for me—it’s so difficult for me to imagine what this woman went through. Not only can I not imagine what it was like living in Gilead, I can’t really picture the world she lived in before Gilead, either. Which I assume is why she made the recordings, because in theory nobody really knew at the time. And so much of the regime was designed to silence women in these roles and to erase the records of their internal lives. So when I engage with source material from this period, that’s usually what I’m thinking about. Like, how can I try to understand someone I can’t talk to and ask questions of? 

Evdokia: Nasim, I see you nodding. 

Nasim: Yeah, I think Brigid was bringing up something really important: that what Offred gave us is in some ways all that we have. It’s why the text is still being read today. 

Brigid: It’s because she kind of has to speak for all of the Handmaids. Because they never got the chance to. 

Nasim: Certainly not in the unfiltered way that the recordings have. There were some who escaped and gave testimony at hearings at like, the United Nations. And the Canadian and Mexican governments had people seeking asylum, so they had to give detailed reports on what they experienced and the credible fear they had about returning to their home country. But those interviews they gave at the border were obviously to government agents and were very tailored to making sure they’d be able to stay in the country. And the ones who testified at the United Nations were also selected to speak, because their stories would be the most poignant. Offred’s story has a lot of really heartrending moments but it’s also a document of just someone’s day-to-day life. It wasn’t meant to be headline-grabbing or to prove a point. It’s more like a diary. 

Brigid: And we don’t have any others like that?

Nasim: If there were any, they were destroyed. But The Republic of Gilead would punish any women caught reading and writing, so it’s unlikely there are any more surviving records. We’ve likely found what there is left to find. Which is I think what upsets me so much about the tv adaptation. It’s so unfaithful to the lived experiences of the ordinary women who were caught in this regime. It focuses so much on one person, on June Osborne, who was an incredible figure and who deserves to be commemorated, but so do the women who were just surviving, you know?

Evdokia: Well-behaved women seldom make history.

Nasim: Exactly!

Brigid: Who said that? 

Evdokia: Well-behaved women seldom make history? It was Laurel Thatcher Ulrich I believe.

Brigid: Thank you.

Evdokia: She also wrote a book called A Midwife’s Tale , which is unrelated to The Handmaid’s Tale but it’s interesting that it’s a similar title. 

Brigid: Maybe it’s not a coincidence, maybe Offred had read A Midwife’s Tale and thought “huh, what a clever title, I’ll do an homage”.

Nasim: I hate to be a killjoy, but no. The author of the tapes didn’t title them. The title was added later as a way to identify them. It was kind of a casual nickname and then it stuck, they were originally called The Bangor Tapes or something, because of where they were found. 

Brigid: Ah well, what a shame. 

Evdokia: So the last thing I wanted to talk about, and I feel like we had a good segue a couple of minutes ago and then I lost it, is The Testaments . Because that’s another historical text that’s going to be adapted, and treated as if it is part of the same universe as the series that’s just ended. And I can already tell Nasim has thoughts about that. 

Nasim: I have so many thoughts.

Evdokia: Please.

Nasim: For starters, The Testaments is a completely different kind of text. It was intended to be read and from what we know of Lydia Clements, it was intended to soften any charges that might be brought against her. In addition to spreading information about the Commanders that she ostensibly wanted to see disempowered. She was an attorney, she absolutely knew how to play the legal system, and I’m sure she knew that even though she was a woman, she was going to be seen as a woman in power in Gilead, and therefore culpable for the choices she made. And she did make choices, let’s be clear. She was not a powerless cog in the machine. And we know these were things that she thought about because she wrote her Master’s thesis on asylum claims made by people who had committed crimes in their home countries. 

Brigid: Oh my.

Nasim: Yes. Before she went to law school, she’d studied law as an academic. Her thesis was about child soldiers and how their asylum claims were often challenged on the basis of the crimes they committed as minors. Clements absolutely did crimes. Beyond the ones she admits to in The Testaments she committed really heinous crimes and facilitated many more. And she was an adult! There’s no way that wasn’t running through her mind when she was compiling this information and collaborating with Mayday. 

Evdokia: You think she was positioning herself to maybe escape and be pardoned? 

Brigid: But she says in the text that she intends to commit suicide, right? Or did that not happen?

Nasim: There are no further records of her. It’s possible she was killed in the first wave of purges that followed the corruption scandal that was triggered after the information she compiled was released to the Canadian press. It’s possible she killed herself. It’s unlikely she was able to disappear within Gilead. If she survived, she would have needed to get across the border, and there is no record of her having done that. It doesn’t mean she didn’t, and she could easily have given a false name, but we just can’t know.

Brigid: What would be the purpose of giving a false name? If she went to all that trouble compiling evidence of corruption within Gilead and making herself look like a victim, like you said, wouldn’t she be able to then present herself at the border and claim asylum? Like, I know it was more complicated than that, even though it was the law at the time, but—does what I’m asking make sense?

Nasim: It does. So I think she would have had a credible fear that Gilead would send agents to kill her, just as a reprisal for what she’d done. And I also think that, even with her trying to clean up her record, she still would have been culpable for what she’d done. Like, she personally executed people. She absolutely would have ordered people to be tortured. It would have been done with the understanding that if she didn’t do it, she would be tortured and the other person was going to be tortured anyway. But she still had complicity—and while she had no way of knowing what was going on with the Canadian government at the time, she would have known to be really careful about revealing who she really was.

Evdokia: And what was going on with Canada at the time? Obviously it wasn’t like it is now, sort of midway through the process of land-back and reconstructing our governments around that, they didn’t have this dual-state system we’re looking at now—

Nasim: Not at all. It was—we have to be careful calling them conservative, because the country was not a monolith obviously, and also because we can’t be using our standards to describe behavior from that far in the past. What there was, I think, was a growing concern about the birthrate and a line of thinking that was “well maybe the way they’re going about it is nasty but Gilead might not be wrong”. Especially when Gilead was claiming their programs got results.

Brigid: Did they?

Evdokia: My understanding is that the birth rate did go up, but they were killing so many of their own citizens they were well below replacement level, like worse than comparable countries at the time.

Nasim: That’s correct. Especially their eugenics programs, they executed Jews and they sent nonwhite people to the colonies. And they often didn’t care for visibly disabled children as well.

Brigid: How awful. 

Nasim: Yes. But even if you were just looking at the number of white nondisabled babies born in the Republic of Gilead, the number was lower per capita than in countries like say Sweden, which had a very low birth rate. 

Evdokia: But you know what it also had? A very low killing-of-our-own-citizens rate. 

Nasim: Exactly. 

Brigid: So what else was going on with Canada at the time?

Nasim: Right, so some people were looking at the propaganda from Gilead and thinking maybe this was the way. And other people were looking at Gilead and seeing all of the horror and violence and becoming afraid the same thing was going to happen to them. And then plenty of other people had this sort of, well, “not my problem” type of response, where they knew things were horrible but they weren’t particularly bothered. As long as they didn’t have to go to war or see their tax dollars being used to help refugees, they didn’t care. 

Brigid: Ah, so that would have been a problem for anyone trying to escape.

Nasim: Yes. We see this throughout history unfortunately. It’s something I think the series did, I would say poorly at first, but then as it went on it did become more accurate. Those trains to Alaska were real. Those people had no idea where they were going, they were just being shipped away with nothing. 

Brigid: It’s kind of amazing, honestly, to see how awfully refugees were treated in the past. Because today I’ll be reading the news and thinking “how on earth can we be doing this”, we’re just shutting people into hotels and making them jump through all these hoops to get jobs and just, you know, making them reliant on the aid fund for much longer than necessary, like months. And then I see this where like, there are armed border patrols and everyone is being taken care of by other refugees who are just volunteering because if they don’t then nothing is getting done. Like, wow, I thought we were doing a bad job. 

Evdokia: To be fair, we are doing a bad job.

Brigid: We are. 

Evdokia: Okay, so I’m trying to think of how to segue that into my last question, but I’m really struggling. Let’s just pretend this is a good transition.

Brigid: Absolutely, it’s brilliant.

Evdokia: Thank you. So Nasim, earlier you were talking about the ordinary women who were trapped within the Republic of Gilead, and how hyperfocusing on June Osborne, who was already this sort of outlier, larger-than-life figure, does a disservice to the women who don’t make history but whose lives are still important. So I’d like to dig in a little bit on the other characters in the series and where the finale leaves them. Janine, Moira, and Emily.

Nasim: Okay, with some caveats, I do really like this, and I wish the rest of the series had been more like what we got with these three women in the finale. Because we have some bits and pieces of the stories of other women—the episode in season two for example with the letters, that was based on real events.

Brigid: That happened a few times, didn’t it?

Nasim: Yes, moreso at the beginning of the Republic of Gilead because as time went on fewer people were able to read and write. But yes, people did write letters from within the regime and smuggle them out.

Evdokia: And was June Osbourne involved in that?

Nasim: I feel like you’re baiting me.

Evdokia: I am a bit.

Nasim: It is unlikely that one woman was at all of these events! There were other people. In Gilead. Who did things. 

Brigid: I do agree with what you were saying a moment ago, about the emphasis on these other womens’ lives and overall the… maybe consequences isn’t the right word, but just the aftermath of what they’ve been through. We saw that a little bit in earlier seasons with Moira—she was hooking up with a woman and wasn’t comfortable being touched. She’s thrown herself fully into volunteering with other refugees, and then she’s in a support group and she doesn’t like the more vindictive way that June is going about things. In that moment it seemed like she was really looking for peace. Not with Gilead—I mean just internally, that she was trying to heal herself. And then by the end of the series she’s a Mayday fighter. Like maybe she’s given up a bit on having a normal life. And that wasn’t explored much, but I imagine that the transition from welcoming to hostility that we see coming from Canada at the time probably would have changed the options available to a person like her. 

Evdokia: Yes.

Brigid: So I guess that all is to say that I, too, wish to have seen and learned more about these women. Were any of them based on real people?

Nasim: Reading interviews, it sounds like they were constructed, but there was no one person that each woman represents. 

Evdokia: Got it.

Nasim: And I also have to point out, I think we did an episode on this where friend of the show Martyna came on and talked about it in more detail, but the racial politics of Gilead meant there would not have been a Moira.

Brigid: Right because they—obviously they had very different ideas of race than we do today, so it’s hard for us to do a 1:1 ‘this was this category and this was this other one’, but if I’m remembering that episode they did… eugenics?

Nasim: Well they deported anyone Jewish, which was a pretty broad category and included a lot of people who would not say they were Jewish today and may not have been then either. And the boats they used to deport them on—will there be a content warning at the top of the episode?

Evdokia: In the show notes.

Nasim: Good. It was a bit late for me to ask that, but good.

Brigid: Yes, that's a relief.

Nasim: So they basically put all of those people onto a boat and then abandoned them in the middle of the ocean. If you were, the term they would have used then was white but that’s a very nebulous term and it’s hard to understand it today, because it usually meant people of European descent but there were a lot of exceptions. Like in Gilead you couldn’t be white and Jewish, for example, you would have just been Jewish. Anyway—for anyone who didn’t meet their criteria for whiteness, they were all banished to the colonies or doing hard labor. They were often sterilized against their will. 

Evdokia: So when people in this period were worried about the birthrate, they weren’t really worried about just babies. They wanted more babies from a very specific racial group, and anyone outside of that they didn’t want bearing children. Is that correct?

Nasim: Yes. It’s similar to a lot of programs from earlier periods, but those are sort of beyond my expertise. One of the World Wars it was definitely a huge factor. 

Brigid: The Second one and the Third I believe. But who can keep track?

Evdokia: Certainly not us. Because that is beyond the scope of this podcast. 

Brigid: In terms of what is within the scope of this podcast, how do we feel about Janine?

Nasim: Oh my goodness poor Janine. 

Evdokia: But she got to have her daughter back! She got one of her children at least. 

Brigid: I was quite surprised by that honestly. Because not only did this woman, she became Mrs. Lawrence but I’ve honestly forgotten her first name, anyway, she was an incredibly self-interested person. And she did want that little girl. She maybe didn’t want to be a parent in the way that we understand parenting today, but I understand the standards of the time were different and that even outside of Gilead she wouldn’t have been seen as like, the worst. 

Nasim: That’s accurate. 

Brigid: So not only that, but we’ve seen what she thinks of Janine. She thought of her as this stupid fallen woman who couldn’t be trusted with a child. So seeing her make the decision to essentially do the right thing and give back this child that she’d kidnapped—I don’t know I was really surprised. 

Evdokia: Is that something we have any historical basis for?

Nasim: I’m so glad you asked.

Evdokia: I thought you would be.

Nasim: We do. Some wives, especially right before the big purges, we did see them smuggling children out. It’s possible they were worried that if their husbands were killed, then maybe the families would be killed with them. As far as we know that’s not what happened, their wives and children were just reassigned to a different Commander.

Evdokia: Reassigned. Like employees.

Nasim: Basically.

Brigid: That doesn’t surprise me. Seeing as how everyone had a role and that role was basically your job and also your God-given destiny which just so happened to also be a political hierarchy that you weren’t allowed to argue with. 

Nasim: Yes and the Republic didn’t really consider the interiority of wives or children as important. 

Evdokia: Which we see a lot in historical cultures. That wasn’t unique to Gilead, just maybe it was uniquely bad and regressive for comparable cultures at the time. 

Nasim: I would agree with that. But anyway, we do have one example of a wife who helped to smuggle out her daughter, and that child was reported as being reunited with a parent who had also escaped. The reporting was anonymized because the child was a minor and they didn’t want anything identifying to be in the periodicals at the time, and then later when Canada started the initial diplomatic relationship with Gilead the Americans in exile destroyed a lot of their documentation so that Canada couldn’t then go in and try to force them to send people back as part of a trade agreement. 

Brigid: Would that have been a trade agreement? Because my understanding was that Gilead was not at all self-sufficient and that it actually needed imports more than anything, they didn’t do a lot of exporting because of all the waste that destroyed the areas where people used to, I don’t know, grow food and things.

Nasim: That’s true. What was really happening, and this wasn’t the reported reason but historians have come to understand this as government records have been unsealed during the land-back and reparation process, the Canadian government was willing to repatriate people to Gilead once the general public’s sympathy and frankly patience for refugees was through. The rest of the world was exerting a lot of social pressure on Canada to keep people, because it was understood that the Republic of Gilead was horrifying, and it was part of the agreements from the mid-20th century that people seeking asylum would be treated with deference. But Canada simply didn’t want to do it—they saw it as shouldering a burden and a drain on their resources. And the international community was very willing to sanction Gilead, but they weren’t offering up anything tangible to help. 

Evdokia: Wow.

Brigid: Thank goodness nothing like that ever happens today!

Evdokia: Oh goodness, too soon.

Nasim: I’m sorry.

Evdokia: Me too. Oof. 

Brigid: But so, okay, so there were cases of the wives doing this. That’s, I’m really happy to hear that. 

Evdokia: Do we—I’m sorry I didn’t think of this until now, but why do we think they cast Moira in such an anachronistic way? And there were other Handmaids too that wouldn’t have met Gilead’s racial definition, right?

Naism: I mean, their commitment to historical accuracy is sort of nebulous at best. 

Brigid: Do you think it was just random?

Nasim: It was probably an attempt to make sure that all of the actors looked really different because they were all going to be wearing the same thing. 

Evdokia: Yeah, I’d believe that.

Brigid: They did all have pretty distinct personalities. Which I imagine as a performer was really difficult to do when it’s not just your costume, but your behaviors that are incredibly confined. But they were all really memorable. I was happy to see Emily again, too.

Evdokia: Yes. I wish there had been, I don’t know. We got to see her get closure with the Aunt that turned her in and caused her to be mutilated. But after that she sort of disappeared. It seems like she was reconnecting with her family and caring for her son. 

Nasim: It would have been lovely to see that.

Evdokia: It would have. Though I suppose that’s similar to the film adaptation of Revival that came out a few years ago. 

Brigid: Is that the one based on the memoir? 

Nasim: It’s based on the son’s memoir about his mother who had escaped Gilead, yes. I haven’t seen it yet though.

Evdokia: It was good. Sad. There’s a lot about their story where you just, you can never really know what was going on with her, because there’s so much left unsaid, and their relationship in a lot of ways exists in the spaces between what they’re not saying—it was all rather poetic. 

Brigid: I feel as if I should see that.

Evdokia: Yes, I think you’d like it a lot. 

Brigid: Good, good. Well, I’d say I’m so busy, but we’re going to be on hiatus soon?

Evdokia: Yes, that’s a good segue I think. We’re going to take a break for a while. 

Nasim: I may have a few things to share about other historical materials, but that won’t be a full episode, it will probably just be me infodumping about things I wish the showrunners had thought about before making this show. 

Evdokia: Yes, so look forward to that, dear listeners.

Brigid: I will be looking forward to that.

Evdokia: But beyond that we’re really truly going to be taking a break. We’ll probably come back for The Testaments adaptation, but that’s going to be a while. Gosh, I’m getting a bit emotional actually. Is there anything else either of you want to add?

Nasim: Just… thank you all for your patience with me as I eviscerated everything to do with this series.

Brigid: No that was lovely. 

Nasim: Aw.

Brigid: I will also say, big thank you to our listeners who shared resources and access to primary sources and to so many other things that really helped us make this show what it is and helped me to really understand Gilead. I do think that we should all take a trip to the Gilead theme park just to do like a, I don’t know a really silly episode. We’ve kept saying we will and then we never do.

Nasim: I absolutely will but you’re going to have to be patient with me.

Brigid: My understanding is that they put a lot of effort into accuracy and education.

Nasim: Oh not that, just that my leg means I can’t walk very fast.

Brigid: Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry I completely forgot.

Nasim: Another thing to dislike about Gilead, they did not build accessible environments! 

Brigid: I, for one, am shocked. But Evdokia, you were saying goodbye and making us sad.

Evdokia: It’s just for now. We will be back, if only because the three of us are always talking about this and none of us can resist sharing it with other people. 

Nasim: That is extremely true of me, yes. 

Evdokia: Well then, if that’s all, blessed be the fruit.

Nasim & Brigid: And may the lord keep the bastards from grinding you down.