Hey, 'out of the country' doesn't mean 'in another country.' We can sink him in the Marianas Trench like Megatron.

I grew up on a sheep farm, so I know what the tags are! I just thought Alma might have been referring to the tags themselves (a system of marking, cataloguing and possibly even physically tracking women capable of becoming pregnant) rather than the people to whom they're attached.

Christ. I can't imagine trying to work for as long as he did after something like that happened. I hope he, his wife and the rest of their loved ones find the support and healing they need.

Can I get that at Starbucks?

Only because they also discovered consequences.

In the first edition of the book. I think Aunts being able to read has sort of dropped in and out of subsequent printings.

Even in that small interaction between Serena Joy and Lydia, you can feel the push-pull of two women who've been awarded a pittance of power trying to avoid ceding what little control they have to the other. At the expense the handmaids, of course.

Alma! Thank you. It feels important to call the handmaids by their real names, but I don't always catch them.

I read that Atlantic piece by Alex Tizon yesterday right before watching this episode, so all I could think of when we learned the truth about Castillo's visit was the likely experience of a handmaid unlucky enough to be "traded" to a foreign country: Still in sexual slavery, with all the abuse that implies, and now…

You can get the book for free off Amazon right now if you have a Kindle or the Kindle app on your phone! That's how I'm rereading it.

When the other handmaid starting talking about 'red tags' being the only thing Gilead had to export, I thought she meant other countries were considering beginning handmaid programs of their own and wanted Gilead's guidance on how to do it. Literally exporting the actual handmaids is a strange decision. June's posting…

Not for medical advice, just for congratulations.

The Wives are definitely subject to social restrictions — they're not allowed to read, write or own property in their own right, either, and their existences must be pretty sad unless they have children to look after. (At the start of the book, June talks about how their gardens and handmade crafts are replacements…

Seriously. The things he's so benevolently "giving" June are the things men like him stole from her in the first place. It's like starving someone and then wanting them to love you for tossing a scrap in their direction.

Oh, gotcha! I read the interview but must have skimmed over that portion.

My (pretty gruesome) thought about Emily was that she might just keep coming and going, slowly losing more pieces of herself to the Eyes but not being killed because it'd squander her gift of "fruitfulness," for a while. But it'd also be believable if this is her last appearance or if she ends up like she does in the…

For some reason, seeing glimpses of humanity in characters like Serena Joy and Waterford really only makes me hate them more. These are people with the capacity to recognize the harm they do to other human beings in pursuit of their 'better world' and the hypocrisy of their position in it: Even the man with all the…

I may not have been looking closely enough because I was cooking while I had this episode on — how do they access San Junipero?

I loved this episode, but I spent a lot of it thinking about the video game SOMA, which has a sort of similar ending: the protagonist’s consciousness is uploaded into a virtual paradise, and everything is peachy — except it isn’t really, because the thing uploaded into the Heaven simulator isn’t his consciousness but…

Nightcrawler's a fantastic movie, though, so they didn't come out of that one too badly.