As A Mom, I Can’t Accept A Redemption Arc For Serena Joy On The Handmaid’s Tale

It had been nearly three years between new episodes when the sixth and final season of The Handmaid’s Tale started airing on April 8, and it seems like a glaring understatement to say a lot has happened in the world in those three years. Specifically, in the last six months or so, a lot of what’s happened in the U.S. has drawn inevitable comparisons to Gilead. It’s here, at this turbulent moment in time, when we once again meet Serena Joy — only now, we may be asked to look at her through a forgiving lens for the sometimes-massive role she has played in the misfortune of so many other women and mothers.

She’s been an active participant in their pain. And even in her more passive moments, she’s been complicit. Which brings us to a question that is blurring the lines between life and fiction, screen and real world: Is Serena Joy beyond redemption? Does she deserve a pass?

At the end of last season, we saw June run into Serena on the refugee train headed to Alaska. This season starts with June and Serena tiptoeing around each other on the train. If you tilt your head and squint, you might even believe they’re just two mom friends, helping each other weather the worries and inconveniences of traveling with kids: Can you watch the baby while I nap? Where’s the food cart? Does anyone have a diaper?

In focus, it’s clear that June is conflicted — when others on the train realize who Serena really is, though, they are not at all conflicted. It’s clear that when some of the people who’ve been hurt by Serena’s behaviors and the broader policies she has supported discover her identity, they are not ready to forgive and forget. Letting her go in grace isn’t an option.

Who could really blame them?

But June and Serena have a history. It’s an ugly, brutal history filled with hurt. It’s also a history filled with… not love, but understanding maybe? That doesn’t feel like the right word, yet we definitely get the sense that the reason June steps in to save Serena is because Serena is a mom, too. And her infant son, Noah, could get hurt in the melee.

Motherhood is a tether that binds people together in weird ways. To the point of fraying, it stretches our capacity for empathy. Once you become a mother to a child, some part of you becomes protective of all children and, by proxy, their moms too. Or at least that’s how it feels for some of us.

Here’s where I get stuck, though, both in watching the new season of The Handmaid’s Tale and in real life.

When I hear that someone realizes they’ve made a mistake, supported the wrong people, taken part in harmful rhetoric, and they’re now on the receiving end of some of the pain they were instrumental in causing other people, my default response is empathy. I sense that familiar ball of emotion well up in my chest, and at least momentarily, I feel bad for them.

Serena seems like she’s really trying with June. She comes off as remorseful. But is that remorse genuinely over what she’s done and the pain she’s caused, or is it because that pain now affects her?

It’s a question many of us are asking ourselves every day now.

Then there’s the fact that Serena ends up at New Bethlehem, using baby Noah practically as a marketing ploy to bring other mothers and women back to Gilead. Granted, it’s supposedly a “newer, gentler” Gilead — but have we learned nothing? We can’t trust Gilead. Ever. It’s rotten to the core, no matter how much you polish its outside and call it fresh.

In the words of Maya Angelou, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.” This is true for Gilead, and it’s true for people like Serena Joy. When she was suffering and scared, when she was affected by the darkness of Gilead, she acted remorseful. She spoke to June as though they were all of a sudden the same.

Then, she took the first opportunity to return to Gilead and benefit from it. I think we all know someone (or many people, unfortunately) in real life who would do the same because they never really let go of that part of themselves that condoned the bad stuff in the first place — they just didn’t like feeling like they were on the other side of it.

Even though my natural inclination as a mom is to feel empathy, at this point, I don’t feel bad for Serena Joy: I just feel pissed. I can’t imagine campaigning for a place or a person or an ideology built on the oppression of women and girls.

Would I have acted the same way that June did on the train? Probably. Because there was a baby involved, and that baby certainly shouldn’t die for the sins of his mother. But unless Serena Joy surprises us all and burns Gilead down from the inside, I’m not buying an ounce of her newly progressive changed woman bullsh*t.