Luke cannot be a refugee status determination (RSD) caseworker, which is what that guy who gave her all the stuff is. It's a conflict of interest as UNHCR doesn't like people from the same country having any say in other countrymen's RSD.

Look at some of the refugees' stories in Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, Zaatari camp in Jordan, Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, the Jungle (Calais) in France, or some of the migrant camps in Egypt and Libya. Rape, theft and mysterious deaths are commonplace. A lot of NGO programming is not centered around how to get over what…

Health care is a UNHCR requirement: all refugees are entitled to healthcare. Canada would be bound by international law to provide health care through its system, whereas developing countries rely on NGOs to do it (International Rescue Committee, the Red Cross movement, International Medical Corps, Doctors without…

Oh, I'm both happy for Samira Wiley and scared for Moira. Happy because there's going to be some interesting stuff that happens with the refugee camps in Canada, and scared because Moira's hell has just started. Yes, Canada may give out free medical care and a pre-paid cell phone, but the $470 lasts her for at least…

Well, it depends on how closely she holds her beliefs. I think she'll take it out on others at least for a little while, but she'll slowly realize what sort of power she has. She is the type of person who has the influence and connections to seriously undermine the regime.

I felt it was implied that Rita's son was in the US Army. Otherwise, she would have said, "He was a Guardian/Angel who died at the Battle of Chicago" (or wherever).

This is in response to several comments I have seen: I don't think the show has been completely blind to problems facing women of color. People of color seem to be excluded entirely from the Sons of Jacob, but handmaids could be women of color. I think that they haven't gotten around to it yet. Also, I do think that…

I think we're thinking of different things: she stroked his ego after he dismissed her when he was pissed off after the Mexico delegation, she kissed him when he asked her to. She could have just left or somehow refused in either situation (June did refuse when he asked Moira and June to hookup), but she was hoping to…

I think it has to go the "Orange is the New Black" route: first, you follow the lead and then it branches out to the other characters more comprehensively starting in season 2 once you find sympathy for each of the characters. I find myself sympathetic to every female character (even Lydia and Serena Joy) and many…

You'll see bad parenting (and not necessarily only from Janine), but nothing like what you're imagining.

I don't think the Commander is all that commanding. He likes being in charge, but he doesn't know how to order someone around or intimidate people to talk back to him. He relies on his station to do that for him.

They probably only use sanitary napkins. In South Asia (a misogynistic part of the world, if there ever was one), many men don't like unmarried daughters to use tampons because they think tampons ruin the evidence of virginity and women will derive some sort of pleasure from their tampon.

It seems that they're building the Commander and Luke to be, at least in part, parallels of each other. Both cheated on their wives to get close to Offred. Offred indulged both of them. Both are not commanding personalities and do not have much of a backbone. Both asked this question.

In the book, the Commander was in market research, so he couldn't have been a complete dummy with marketing. Further, we're getting vantage points that Book Offred's point of view would not have captured.

One other thing - is Serena Joy driving the Offreds to suicide out of jealousy? She must know that mirrors like the one in her music box are illegal for Handmaids to own, and she seems cruel enough given her treatment of Offred after the pregnancy scare.

Nick's virtue is that he isn't special or nuanced, because those are the people that the Sons of Jacob would have to recruit in order to succeed in creating Gilead.

"I hate that Francesca ends up in a men’s dress shirt, because women wearing men’s dress shirts after sex in film and television is a major pet peeve of mine. Does anyone actually do this in real life?! Maybe Master Of None is trying to make fun of that trope, but that’s not what I got from it. I think it just played…

On a small scale: Maybe, I'm not being clear for that first example - in that example of the Russian countryside fighting back, those who lived one province over did not know about the revolts.

The Soviets, Khmer Rouge, and Maoist China DID string people up for their the citizens to see after they had consolidated power but before they got sophisticated. The Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War period (1918-1924) were especially guilty of this, and entire provinces of Russia did fight back. Coincidentally…

It made complete sense to me that June and Luke wouldn't even know. During the Stalinist purges and during the Nazi roundup of dissidents and those they considered undesirable, people and towns would just disappear. Sometimes the authorities would say it was for "re-education" or "for their protection," sometimes they…