Ever since we met June Osborne in season one of The Handmaid’s Tale, Hulu’s unrelentingly dark adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, hers has been a life of unbroken tragedy. Her daughters were abducted. Her husband was missing and maybe even dead. She spent years in sex slavery before making a gruelling escape to Canada.
How cathartic it was, then, to see her finally exact revenge during season four’s brutal denouement. June chases Commander Fred Waterford into the woods, where she and a group of refugee handmaids tear her former captor to pieces. June bites his face and severs his finger, which she later posts to his wife. In the series’ grisly vernacular, this is what victory looks like.
