'The Handmaid's Tale' Plot Review: 'A Woman's Place' Opens the Series to Other World
"A Woman's Place" was "The Handmaid's Tale's" sixth episode, and a number of reports are commenting that it had unusually introduced the world outside the dystopian United States of America and let viewers learn more about other characters.
The highlight of "A Woman's Place" was the arrival of a Mexican delegation at Commander Fred Waterford's (Joseph Fiennes) house. Fred and his wife, Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski), were aiming to establish an international relationship with their guests.
With that, they have to convince the Mexican delegates that the Gilead culture was the way to go. To do so, they ordered the Handmaids to line up in the hall and specifically told Fred's handmaid, Offred (Elisabeth Moss), to speak in favor of the Gilead government.
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Handmaids were the remaining fertile women in the franchise's fictional United States of America. They were rounded up and assigned to men in the ruling class to be raped under the blanket of pre-creation. Like other Handmaids, Offred had a life before becoming a subjugated woman in the show's version of new world order. She used to go by the name June Osborne.
With much disgust, Offred had to tell the foreign visitors that she found happiness under the new government run by the totalitarian, religious fundamentalists. However, just as the guests were leaving, she decided to seek help from the Mexican ambassador who had to turn her down, considering the dire condition of the neighboring country.
Reviews said that so far, the episode "A Woman's Place" was one part of the TV adaptation that took a slightly different direction from its source material — the same title 1985 novel written by Margaret Atwood.
However, "A Woman's Place" was also praised for potentially raising the quality and positive future of the TV series adaptation, and one of the contributing factors to that was by merely getting other nations and non-Gilead governments into the story.
It also opened up great opportunities to explore other plots and twists, especially since this episode had shown a good amount of Serena's past. She used to be a speaker and a writer — a feisty activist who campaigned for the establishment of their current societal order. Ironically, now, she was bound to be a woman in silence and under the control of her husband and other men.
That aspect lets viewers learn more about Serena's internal struggles. Meanwhile, the episode also provided an exciting twist as Offred learned her husband, Luke, (O.T. Fagbenle), was alive.
