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[starlightnymph]

flowers at kailzie gardens, scotland

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

[laulacky77]

Nick reaped what he sowed? We disagree.

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

reblog if you would never let ai write fanfics for you

[otp-after-dark]

Why I won't be watching The Testaments. And why the show lost the right to that story.

I've been quiet on THT since my 6x10 post. Intentionally. Because after watching that finale and going through the full rewatch I didn't have anything left to say that wasn't just grief dressed up as criticism.

But The Testaments is coming. And I keep seeing the trailers. And I keep seeing people getting excited. And I need to say something before THT fans convince themselves that a new season means a fresh start.

It doesn't.

Atwood's source material is extraordinary. The premise of what this story could be, told honestly, is one of the most compelling things television could do right now. I believe that. I have always believed that. That belief is exactly why what this production did with it is so unforgivable.

Because they had everything. The text. The thesis. The most radical love story in contemporary literary fiction handed to them in plain language. And across six seasons they made the same choice, quietly and consistently and with increasing confidence: to sand down every dangerous edge until what remained was palatable. Until desire became guilt. Until love became a phase. Until a woman's freedom could only be justified if it was immediately redirected into service.

I watched all six seasons. I documented them obsessively on this blog. I defended this show longer than I should have because the early seasons understood something true about what Atwood was doing, and I kept hoping that understanding would hold.

It didn't. And The Testaments won't fix it. You cannot course correct on a foundation this compromised.

So before it drops and this fandom fractures along the same predictable lines, I want to put on record exactly what they got wrong, why it matters, and why I'm not giving them another season of my attention.

Atwood wrote about a woman who survives captivity by refusing to go numb. Who wants, even when wanting is dangerous. Who loves, even when love is criminal. Who holds onto her interior life as the last thing Gilead cannot legislate. Desire, in her world, is not a flaw to be managed. It is the engine of selfhood. The proof that you are still alive inside a system designed to convince you otherwise.

The show decided that engine needed to be turned off.

reason one: they used Nick to do it, and they never understood who he was to begin with

Let's start with what the fandom gets wrong before we get to what the writers got wrong, because they are related.

Nick Blaine is not the brooding love interest. He is not the morally compromised foil. He is not the man June chose instead of Luke or in spite of Luke or because trauma rewired her attachment. He is not a coping mechanism or a complication or a gray area the show introduced to create tension. He is the argument. He is what Atwood was building toward when she wrote about particular love inside total systems. He is the character who proves, structurally and emotionally, that resistance does not require purity to be real.

The fandom never fully gave him that. The writers never gave him that. And it cost the entire story its spine.

Because Nick is not difficult to read. He is only difficult to accept. He stays in Gilead not because he is weak or complicit or seduced by power but because proximity is the only leverage available to him. He cannot blow up the system from the outside. He can only stay close enough to move pieces. To intervene before the worst outcomes land. To protect June, Nichole, and Hannah from inside the machine that is trying to destroy them. Every position he holds, every alliance he maintains, every compromise he makes is in service of keeping the particular people he loves alive long enough to matter.

That is not ambiguity. That is devotion under siege.

And the show spent years documenting it with extraordinary precision before deciding, somewhere in the back half, that it was easier to let him be misread than to defend him. Before deciding that June's future looked cleaner without the weight of what he actually was to her. Before deciding that a woman moving forward was more narratively useful than a woman reckoning honestly with what she lost.

So they made his choices murkier than the text supported. They let the audience's discomfort with his compromises stand in for moral judgment. They allowed the framing that he chose power over June to go unchallenged even though the show itself had spent seasons proving the opposite. And then they killed him in a way that denied both of them the reckoning they had earned.

June does not grieve Nick in the finale. She manages him. She is handed language designed to hold the truth at arm's length rather than name it. She performs composure where the story demanded collapse. And the show frames that performance as healing, as forward motion, as the mark of a woman who has grown past the fire into something steadier and more useful.

But grief does not work that way. And love as strong as death does not just quietly metabolize into mission.

What the finale actually shows, underneath the talking points and the forward momentum, is a woman in acute denial. Still tethered. Still organizing her entire existence around movement so she never has to stop long enough to feel the full weight of what she lost and what she failed to say out loud when it mattered.

Nick deserved to be understood. By the writers. By the fandom. By the story that spent six seasons using his devotion as fuel and then discarded him like he was incidental.

He was never incidental. He was the point.

And erasing him didn't clean up the story. It just left the wound open with nothing to name it.

reason two: they turned Nichole into a motivational prop, and now they've erased her entirely

In Atwood's canon, Nichole is not a reason to keep suffering. She is proof that something escaped. She grows up outside Gilead. She is raised beyond its language and its logic. She is the living evidence that forbidden love built something tyranny could not touch. The Testaments is explicit: it is not Hannah's prolonged captivity that brings Gilead down. It is Nichole's freedom. Her existence outside the system. The fact that desire, real and dangerous and unsanctioned, produced a future the regime could not control.

That is the architecture Atwood built. A child born not of doctrine but of choice under pressure. Of want that refused to be legislated. Nichole is not incidental to the story's thesis. She is its proof of concept. The bridge out of Gilead was built by two people who loved each other inside a system designed to make that love impossible, and it held.

The show dismantles that architecture quietly and completely.

By the finale, Nichole is no longer the evidence that the fight worked. She is the justification for why it can never end. She becomes the reason June must keep leaving, keep sacrificing, keep folding her own life into an abstract future that never fully arrives. The child born of love is reframed as the reason love must be renounced. And in order for that logic to hold, the show has to minimize, then erase, her father. Because if Nick remains central, if his devotion remains legible, then Nichole's existence keeps pointing back to what the show is trying to move away from: that desire, real and dangerous and specific, built something that outlasted the regime.

So they bury it. They fold Nichole into obligation. They turn the bridge into a burden. And they ask us to read that as growth rather than loss. It isn't growth. It is the story cannibalizing its own most radical idea and hoping we won't notice because the language of sacrifice sounds so much like the language of love.

And now, with The Testaments, they have completed the erasure.

Nichole will not appear in the series. Let that land for a moment. The child who is, in Atwood's own text, the living proof that Gilead failed. The character whose entire existence is the argument. The one person whose freedom is not metaphorical or symbolic or aspirational but actual and embodied and specific. Gone. Written out before the story even begins.

This is not a casting logistics issue. This is not a narrative restructuring. This is a choice that tells you everything about what this production believes the story is actually about. If Nichole is present, her father has to be reckoned with. Her origins have to be honored. The particular love that created her has to remain legible. And this production has spent years making clear it has no interest in doing any of that.

So they remove her.

They remove the proof. They remove the bridge. They remove the one character whose existence cannot be separated from the thesis Atwood was actually writing. And they move forward with a version of The Testaments that can center legacy, resistance, and sisterhood without ever having to answer the question Nichole's presence would force them to face: what did it mean that love built the future Gilead could not?

Atwood answered that question. Clearly. In the text.

This production is not interested in the answer. And removing Nichole is the most honest thing they have done in years, because it finally stops pretending otherwise.

reason three: they replaced Atwood's feminism with the thing Atwood was warning us about

Offred is not a hero.

She is not brave in the way stories reward. She is not selfless. She is not oriented toward the greater good. She is a woman trying to stay herself inside a system designed to hollow her out, and she does it the only way available to her: by continuing to want. By noticing the tulips. By remembering her name. By taking the particular man beside her seriously enough to let him matter. Atwood built her protagonist out of hunger and irony and moral impurity and the refusal to go numb. Offred survives not because she is righteous but because she remains specific. Because she keeps insisting, quietly and stubbornly, on the texture of her own interior life.

That is the feminism of The Handmaid's Tale. Not sacrifice. Not sisterhood as slogan. Not the performance of endurance. The insistence that a woman's inner life is worth preserving even when, especially when, no one is granting her permission to have one.

The show spent its final seasons building a different woman entirely.

A June who has learned the right lessons. Who has metabolized her grief into purpose. Who has graduated from wanting into leading. Who measures her own value in what she protects rather than what she feels. The show presents this as an arc. As earned wisdom. As the natural shape of a woman who has been through enough to finally understand what matters.

But Atwood never wrote that woman. She wrote against her.

Because that woman, the one who has disciplined her hunger into duty and her desire into legacy, is exactly what Gilead was trying to produce all along. Not through force, in the end, but through meaning. Through the slow reframing of a woman's worth as something that flows outward, toward children, toward nation, toward future generations, rather than inward toward the self. Gilead did not only want compliance. It wanted women who had internalized the logic so completely they no longer experienced it as constraint.

The finale gives us that woman and calls her free.

It is the most honest thing the show ever did, and the most damning. Because it reveals what the writers actually believe underneath all the iconography and the resistance rhetoric: that a good woman knows when to stop wanting for herself. That the highest expression of survival is service. That desire, uncontained and unrepentant, is something you grow out of rather than something you fight to keep.

Atwood knew. She wrote the warning. The adaptation became it.

reason four: him. not the idea of him. him.

There is a line in the novel that I have come back to more times than I can count. More than any scene, any image, any piece of iconography the show borrowed and flattened into aesthetic. It is the line that contains the entire thesis. The one the adaptation never understood and never tried to. And the shameful part is that it was right there. In the source material they claimed to revere. Available to them from day one. They had six seasons and every resource imaginable and they never once reached for it. Never built toward it.

"The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total."

Read that again.

Atwood is not writing about romance. She is not writing about longing as decoration or desire as subplot. She is writing about the political function of specificity. About what it means, inside a system designed to erase women's interiority, to love a particular person. Not love as ideology. Not love as duty or legacy or moral framework. Love as the irreducible, ungovernable fact of one specific man, beside you, real and complicated and present.

That is what Nick is.

Not a symbol. Not a coping mechanism. Not a trauma response or a phase or a chapter to be outgrown. He is the particular man. The one whose existence beside June proves she is still a person and not a vessel. The one whose love is difficult precisely because it is real, because it operates inside complicity and compromise and impossible conditions, and persists anyway. That difficulty is not a flaw in their story. It is the entire point of it.

Gilead runs on abstraction. On Love with a capital L, on Duty and God and Nation and Future Generations. On the erasure of the particular in favor of the total. It does not fear romance. It fears specificity. It fears a woman who looks at one man and says: him. Not the idea of him. Not what he represents. Him. Because that act of choosing, particular and stubborn and refusing to be redirected, is the one thing the system cannot absorb.

June and Nick are Atwood's thesis made flesh.

Every time June chooses Nick under impossible conditions, she is committing the most radical act the novel imagines. Not blowing up a building. Not leading a resistance. Looking at the particular man beside her and refusing to let Gilead turn that into something abstract. Refusing to let it become allegory. Refusing to let it be rewritten as weakness or distraction or moral failure.

And Nichole is what happens when that refusal holds.

She is not abstract. She is not a symbol of the resistance or a reason to keep fighting or a vessel for June's purpose. She is the particular child of a particular love that Gilead tried to make impossible and failed. That is her meaning. That is what the show erases when it turns her into a motivational prop. It strips her of her specificity. It makes her total instead of particular. It does exactly what Gilead does.

The show spent six seasons circling this truth and never quite landing on it. It kept reaching for the abstract: the resistance, the cause, the future, the children, the legacy. It kept pulling June toward Love with a capital L and away from the particular man beside her. And it called that maturity. It called that growth. It called that feminism.

Atwood called it Gilead.

And this is why The Testaments, this version of it, was always going to fail before a single frame was shot.

Because the ending Atwood wrote is not about resistance triumphing over tyranny. It is not about Hannah. It is not about legacy or sisterhood or the cause outlasting the regime. It is about love outlasting it.

Particular, difficult, ungovernable love. Nick underground. June disappeared into life. The two of them finding each other again not as symbols but as people. As the particular man and the particular woman who chose each other inside the worst possible conditions and kept choosing even after the system tried to make that choice meaningless.

That is the ending. That is the thesis. That is what Atwood spent the entire series building toward.

The Song of Solomon puts it plainly, and Atwood knew exactly what she was invoking when she structured her story around it.

LOVE IS AS STRONG AS DEATH.

Not stronger than death in the triumphant, cinematic sense. As strong. Equivalently powerful. Immovable in the same way. The thing that cannot be reasoned with or redirected or disciplined into something more useful.

That is what Nick and June are. That is what Nichole proves. That is the argument the show spent six seasons dismantling and that The Testaments, by removing Nichole entirely, finishes burying.

You cannot tell the ending of this story without her. You cannot tell it without him. You cannot tell it without the particular love that built the particular child that grew up outside the walls of the particular hell her parents survived together.

Remove any piece of that and you are not telling Atwood's story.

You are telling Gilead's version of it. The one where love is a phase. Where desire is a detour. Where what endures is not the particular but the total. Not the man beside you but the cause above you. Not the child of your body but the children of the future. Not love as strong as death but love as useful as policy.

The Testaments had one job. Tell the story of what survived.

They've shown us exactly who they are. I'm taking them at their word.

BOYCOTT THE TESTAMENTS.

[laulacky77]

[vampiricalxdata]

I thought I had made peace with the last season of the handmaid’s tale months ago but with all the tv happening this week (pjo, heated rivalry, fallout, stranger things,etc.), it keeps getting brought up as an example of poor character work and oh well I GUESS I’m upset again.

June and Nick deserved sooooo much more— together and separately.

And Serena Joy deserved soooooooooooo much less.

[boycottthetestaments]

Meet the Cast of Hulu’s Spinoff ‘The Testaments’ — Including ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Alums

Hulu is expanding The Handmaid's Tale universe with its The Testaments spinoff — but who makes up the cast? The Handmaid's Tale universe was

Bruce Miller finally said the quiet part out loud — and it’s astonishing how unintentionally revealing this quote is.

“Margaret writes these absolutely deliciously specific characters. We had to go away from that in Handmaid’s, and we’re going to have to go away from that in Testaments.”

So now it’s admitted, openly, that they went away from Atwood’s characters — and will continue doing so in The Testaments.

The same team that spent YEARS insisting they were honoring the source material…

The same writers who dismissed fan criticism as “misunderstanding the story”…

The same showrunner who swore Season 6 was “aligned” with Atwood…

Now suddenly reframes it as “we had to go away from that.”

This is exactly what many of us have been saying:

The disconnection wasn’t accidental. It was deliberate.

And the moment they’re in promo mode for the next project, the narrative shifts again.

Not accountability.

Not honesty.

Just a new justification dressed up as creative necessity.

It’s remarkable how they claim Atwood writes “deliciously specific” characters — while proudly admitting they ignored those specifics when it actually mattered. Especially when those choices gutted entire arcs, flattened motivations, and rewrote characters (Nick, June, Luke, Serena) into versions unrecognizable from the text.

This is why The Testaments feels like a continuation of the same problem, not a fix for it.

If the starting point is “we’re going away from Margaret’s characters… again,” then how is this a sequel to her story and not a sequel to their retcon?

And this is exactly why our campaign exists.

Not out of pettiness.

Not out of fandom drama.

But because the creative team keeps shifting their story after the fact to avoid accountability for the narrative damage they caused.

They told us for years they were faithful to Atwood.

Now they admit they weren’t.

And in April, they plan to do it again.

We saw it.

We documented it.

And we called them out for it.

BOYCOTT THE TESTAMENTS!!!

[otp-after-dark]

God, yes, this is exactly it. This is the closest we probably are ever going to get to an actual admission that they dismantled canon on purpose. Not a misunderstanding. Not “creative divergence.” A choice. And now they’re saying it out loud like it’s a fun little trivia fact instead of the structural collapse of an entire narrative.

The second he said “we had to go away from that,” the game was over. That’s the confession. That’s the mask slipping. Because you don’t “go away” from Atwood’s specificity without rewriting the soul of the story, and they did. They did it to Nick. They did it to June. They did it to Luke and Serena. They reshaped everyone to fit the ending they wanted, not the one the text earned.

And now they’re teeing up The Testaments with the exact same justification. Not course-correction. Not respect for canon. Just doubling down on the retcon.

Their own words prove everything fans have been screaming into the void. This is as close as we’re getting to them saying, “Yeah, we broke it.” And instead of accountability, they’re packaging it as a creative strategy.

Which is exactly why people are done. Exactly why the campaign exists. Exactly why April is going to be a line in the sand.

If they’re proudly announcing they’re abandoning Atwood’s characters again, then this isn’t her story anymore, it’s theirs. And fans are under no obligation to follow them into a sequel built on the bones of the canon they already gutted.

Boycott The Testaments. If they’re so eager to “go away” from Atwood’s characters, they can do it without our viewership holding their hand.

[boycottthetestaments]

[otp-after-dark]

THT Diagnosis of an Autopsy: 4x09 Progress. When love refuses to stay theoretical.

Progress is one of those titles the show loves to use ironically. On paper, everything is moving forward: June is in Canada, Gilead is at the negotiating table, Luke is “partnering” with her, Lawrence is back at the big-boy table, the Waterfords are maneuvering for influence. But emotionally? This episode is less about progress and more about exposure.

It’s the hour where the show finally stops pretending June’s story is just about survival and starts admitting it’s about who kept her alive. Where the marriage she’s supposed to repair collides with the love she can’t let go of. Where the polite fiction of “moving on” is ripped open by a single name said in a single voice:

June.

And everything after that is fallout.

Because Progress isn’t about politics. It’s about what happens when the person you’re supposed to build a life with is not the person your life has been built around for years.

Findings: When the mission and the heart stop pretending they’re separate.

The episode opens on the thing that has never changed: Hannah. June is still trying to get her daughter back; Luke is still clinging to the idea that they can do this from Canada, with meetings and strategy. It’s earnest, but it’s delusional. He still believes in systems. June knows better.

They go to Lawrence first, because of course they do: he’s the man who built the system and the man who knows exactly how little it cares about individual desires. He gives them nothing on Hannah, but he does give June a line that lands like diagnosis:

“Your love fucks people up. You’re a fountain of heartache and trouble… June, you’re free. Try to be grateful for that and move on.”

It’s meant as a jab, but it’s also uncomfortably true. Her love does fuck people up. It fucked up Nick’s life beyond recognition. It dragged Janine into rebellion. It shook Lawrence’s equilibrium. It reshaped Moira’s, Emily’s, Rita’s. And every time someone tells her to “move on,” what they mean is: make your heart smaller so we don’t have to deal with the fallout.

Back in Gilead, Janine is back under Lydia’s thumb at the Red Center.

Mrs. Keyes has been made a Handmaid. The Aunts pick at each other over “favoritism” while Janine serves dinner like she doesn’t exist. She sneaks food to Esther, warns her softly, tries to smuggle kindness into a system that metabolizes it into control. It’s a quiet counter-melody to June’s arc: the girls who never got out, still improvising forms of resistance that will never get news coverage.

Meanwhile, the Waterfords are doing what they do best: brand-building.

Fred talks “strategy,” Serena talks “platform,” Naomi Putnam appears like the ghost of Gilead Future, offering to raise Serena’s baby if they’re convicted and dangling the idea of returning to Gilead. When Putnam gives Fred his smarmy non-answer:

“We will continue to send you our thoughts and prayers.”

It’s the perfect encapsulation of the hollow faith that built this world in the first place. Power never truly abandons its own; it just repositions.

The scene where June learns what Tuello has done with the folder Nick gave her is a seismic cut that leads us into the season finale. She hands it over in good faith, believing it might finally be the thing that turns the system against Fred. Instead, she learns it’s being used to make a deal that will set him free.

“And then you used that to flip him?” “Sometimes you have to let one fish go to catch a lot of bigger fish.” “That man is a fucking rapist. I will kill you.”

She asks, disbelief turning rapidly into horror. What he’s really saying is: your trauma is negotiable. The man who raped you is negotiable. The love that risked everything to get you this intel is negotiable. All of it can be harnessed in service of a bigger game.

June’s face closes, and the rage that comes out of her is the cleanest thing in the room.

This is where the episode snaps back into focus. Because Nick’s devotion, June’s pain, Hannah’s existence. None of it is abstract. None of it is “fish.” They are not bargaining chips. They’re people.

Progress ends with June back in the place she’s strongest: refusing to accept political language as a substitute for justice.

But the real fault line of the episode isn’t Tuello, Lawrence, Janine, or the Waterfords.

It’s Luke suggesting June visit Nick and take Nichole with her. And this scene tells you everything you need to know about why this marriage can’t hold her anymore.

On the surface it looks practical. A father grasping for a lead on his daughter. But emotionally, the moment is strange. It has the energy of a man poking at a wound he refuses to examine. He knows she loves Nick; she admitted it on the cassette tape. He knows she didn’t leave Gilead because of him. Or at least suspects. He knows the distance between them hasn’t closed since she arrived in Canada.

And yet he’s never asked.

He never wants to know more than the sanitized version. Their entire dynamic is sidestepping the truth. No interrogation. No real conversation. Just a constant low-grade flinch.

“So you think Nick would help?” “I think he would do anything for me and for Nichole”

Luke already knows the answer. June’s response is not a confession. It’s a fact she refuses to dilute. Luke pushes further.

“You’d probably be better to meet him in person… right?” “You want me to meet up with Nick.”

He frames it like logistics, but it feels like a dare. Or maybe it’s guilt masquerading as strategy. Whatever it is, June hears the subtext instantly. And the way she says it carries all the unsaid history between them.

Then Luke says the line that curdles on rewatch.

“How’s he going to say no to you if you bring him his daughter?”

It’s manipulative in a way Luke doesn’t even understand he’s being. He’s willing to leverage Nick’s love without ever acknowledging what that love actually means. He’s pushing June toward a truth he has spent months pretending isn’t in the room with them. It’s the emotional equivalent of lighting a match and insisting he didn’t know the curtains were flammable.

What makes the scene so revealing isn’t malice. Luke isn’t cruel. It’s the avoidance baked into every interaction. The unwillingness to face the reality that June’s heart is split across two worlds, and his instinct is to manage it instead of talk about it.

They aren’t partners here. They’re two people circling a truth neither of them knows how to say. Nick isn’t the problem. He’s the reason June never died. And Luke’s entire strategy is to pretend that isn’t true.

That’s why the conversation feels so off. That’s why it lands with such emotional dissonance. And that’s why, by the time June sees Nick, the contrast is impossible to ignore.

Cut of the Episode: The family reunion. When love stops being subtext and becomes canon.

I could write a dissertation about this scene, and honestly, I pretty much did, because 4x09 gives us one of the most beautifully acted, emotionally ruinous moments in the entire show. It’s the kind of scene that makes you sit back and whisper, oh. This is the story. This is the moment the series accidentally told the truth too clearly to ever walk it back.

It’s not just a reunion.

It’s the clearest articulation of what Nick and June actually are, stripped of Gilead’s rituals and Canada’s denial. Two people whose love was never theoretical, never tidy, never escapable. A fault line that runs under the entire series.

The build is deceptively simple.

Nick’s voice comes first.

“June.”

Soft. Disbelieving. Like her name is the only prayer he’s ever said that still feels real. She closes her eyes when she hears it, like the sound itself goes straight into her bloodstream. This is not how she reacts to Luke. It never has been.

Seeing him, she’s lighter in a way we haven’t seen since Gilead. She smiles in a way that looks like pre-war June and post-war June overlapping for half a second. All the stiffness of her life in Canada falls away. There’s no performance here. No obligation. Just recognition.

And then he sees Nichole.

That rare, unguarded Nick Blaine smile breaks over his face, and it’s devastating. He doesn’t allow himself joy. His whole body has been about control and containment from day one. But his daughter cracks him open.

Inside, the weight of why they’re there settles over everything. June barely has to ask before he produces the folder. His folder. The file he’s been quietly building on Hannah, at huge personal risk, with no guarantee it would ever reach her.

“You did all this for me?”

She looks honestly stunned. Because most men in June’s orbit only help when there’s something in it for them: power, redemption, narrative control. Nick isn’t like that. He isn’t making a deal. He isn’t asking for anything. He just did it.

Max plays his reaction like he didn’t expect to get caught loving her this openly. The little shrug. The downward glance. The vulnerability he only ever lets her see. To Nick, this isn’t a grand gesture. It’s obvious. Of course he did this for her. What else would he do?

Then the line that guts the universe:

“I should’ve run away with you when I had the chance.”

It’s not thrown away like a fantasy. It’s delivered like a confession he’s been carrying in his bones for years. That’s Hawaii. That’s the kitchen and the bed and the sun and the boring, ordinary, beautiful life they never got. It’s the admission that all his strategy, all his sacrifice, all his compromises have never quieted the part of him that just wanted to be with her.

For June, it lands as both balm and wound. It’s everything she’s always known and everything she can’t have.

He kisses her because he can’t not. It’s not calculated. It’s not about what comes next. It’s instinct. The gravitational pull that has been dragging them together since she knocked on his door in Season 1.

The kiss is all of it at once: love, relief, grief, regret, want, goodbye. He kisses her like he’s trying to memorize her. The way he rests his forehead against hers after, eyes closed, just breathing. That’s the most naked we ever see him.

No mask. No Eye. No Commander. Just a man holding the epicenter of his world and knowing he has to let go.

And here’s where the scene becomes almost impossible to watch without bawling. Not just because of what’s happening, but because of how brilliantly Moss and Minghella play it.

Their chemistry isn’t loud or flashy; it’s cellular. It’s bone-deep. It’s the kind of connection you feel through micro-expressions and breath, the kind of chemistry you can’t fake because it doesn’t come from plotting or choreography. Every time they share a frame, the temperature of the show changes. But especially, in season 4.

The camera softens, the rhythm slows, the dialogue drops into a lower register. It’s like their scenes exist in a different frequency than the rest of the series. And the performances in 4x09 make it physically painful to think about the mess Seasons 5 and 6 force on them. Because here, in this moment, the show still remembers what it built. What it promised. What it spent years cultivating: that these two don’t just love each other. They live in each other.

The kiss is instinct, but it’s also inevitability. There’s no universe where Nick sees June across a room and doesn’t move toward her like gravity. Minghella plays it with this quiet, hungry ache. Like a man who hasn’t allowed himself to want anything in years suddenly remembering he still has a pulse. Moss meets him with the same force, but softer, like she’s letting herself be held for the first time since she crossed that border.

This is where the acting becomes devastating: Nick closes his eyes not to avoid emotion, but to feel it fully. June leans in not for comfort, but for recognition. Two performances perfectly synced in a moment that’s almost silent. Because silence has always been their language.

You can see him memorizing her. You can see her letting him. And you can feel, in your own chest, the heartbreak of knowing this is the closest they’ll ever get to the life they should have had.

This is not melodrama. This is not fan service. This is the show, for one of the last few shining episodes, telling the truth about these two people: They were always the love story.

And the chemistry here. The ease, the longing, the softness, the ache, is so thick it almost becomes a mourning ritual. You watch it and you grieve what the writers will later sabotage. You grieve the story that should have been. You grieve the performances that understood the assignment even when the writing forgot it.

Because in 4x09, Nick and June aren’t just acting in love.

They’re acting in truth. And the truth is undeniable.

And then, for one impossible, ordinary minute, they’re a family.

Not the tragic, ripped-apart version the show keeps forcing on them.

A real family. A mother, a father, a daughter.

They talk about Nichole being stubborn. The way June says it with that tiny smile, the one Nick always pulls out of her without trying. They laugh softly, like people who have done this before and could do it forever if the universe would give them a single inch of grace.

And Nick reaches into his pocket and hands Nichole a little gift. A simple thing. A dad thing. Nothing covert. Nothing strategic. Just a father giving his child something to hold so she’ll know he’s real.

It’s the most honest moment of fatherhood he’s ever been allowed, and the show films it like sacred ground: quiet, reverent, achingly normal.

June watches him with that look. The one she saves only for him. Soft. Unarmored. Like she’s remembering, in real time, the life they could have had if the world weren’t designed to punish them for loving each other.

They don’t get a montage. They don’t get a kitchen. They don’t get holidays, birthdays, mornings, messes. They get seconds. Seconds that feel like a whole life flashing by a window.

And somehow that’s worse. Because this isn’t a fantasy. This isn’t hope or symbolism. This isn’t a hallucination or a dream sequence or a wish. It’s real. It happened. They were a family. Just for a heartbeat. And it’s enough to ruin you, because you realize it ruined them, too.

That’s why this moment lives rent-free in the bloodstream of the entire show. Because it wasn’t grand. It wasn’t epic. It was ordinary.

And that, for Nick and June, is the rarest miracle of all.

They meet in the narrow passageway like they always do. In places where the world narrows to just the two of them. A sliver of space. A pocket carved out of war. A doorway between realities.

And the way they stand there tells the whole story.

They don’t rush. They don’t kiss. They don’t cling.

They fold into each other quietly, forehead to forehead, breath to breath, bodies leaning in with the kind of intimacy people only fall into when their souls already recognize each other. The rest of the world is frozen white behind them, but in that shadowed alcove everything is warm, close, unbearably alive.

Nothing about it is performative. Nothing about it is hesitant. It’s pure instinct. Two people finding each other in the dark the way they always have.

And the tragedy of the moment is baked into how gentle it is.

Because this isn’t the fire of 4x10. It’s not the frantic desperation of reunions past. It’s not lust or vengeance or survival. It’s love in its quietest form: I see you. I know you. This is the last place we’re safe.

They don’t talk about the future because they don’t have one. They don’t talk about the past because it hurts too much. They don’t talk about goodbye because it’s already happening.

What they do share is presence. Deliberate, soft, surrendered presence. The kind of closeness you only allow with the person who has seen you at your most ruined and still leaned in.

When June rests her forehead against his, it isn’t a goodbye. It’s a remember me. When Nick closes his eyes, it isn’t weakness. It’s I don’t know how to let you go.

Their hands, their breath, their silence. It’s all suspended in that tiny cold corridor, a moment held so carefully it feels like it might shatter if anyone speaks too loudly.

And the camera lingers. It knows what it’s capturing. It knows this is the last clean moment between them before the story breaks them apart again.

This is the version of Nick and June the show is too afraid to write out loud: two people whose bodies tell the truth even when the script refuses to.

A family in a doorway. Stronger than the world ending around them. Gone too quickly. But real. So painfully real you can feel the ghost of it long after the scene cuts away.

On the drive home, June breaks.

She cries. She smiles. She looks wrecked and reborn all at once like touching him woke up a part of her she’d forced into hibernation just to survive Canada.

She misses him before she’s even out of the parking lot.

And the cruelest part is this:

She’s not just missing Nick. She’s missing the self she becomes with him. The self who’s alive, certain, brave, wanted, understood. The self who doesn’t have to shrink, perform, or pretend. The self who knows exactly who she loves and exactly where her home really is.

Scorecard

Creative Vitality: 💉💉💉💉💉 From Lawrence’s cutting diagnosis to the reunion to the final confrontation with Tuello, every major beat lands with intent. The Nick/June scene is a series high.

Feminist Integrity: ❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥 The episode is brutally clear about Fred’s crimes, the hollowness of “thoughts and prayers,” and the cost of centering systems over survivors. It’s not perfect, but it remembers who the villain is.

Narrative Coherence: 🧩🧩🧩🧩 The cross-cutting between Canada, Gilead, and the Waterfords holds together well, all orbiting the question of what “progress” actually means and who pays for it.

Emotional Pulse: 🫀🫀🫀🫀🫀 The reunion alone is a five-heart event. Add June’s breakdown in the car, Janine’s quiet resilience, and June’s explosion at Tuello, and the episode becomes one long, controlled arrhythmia.

Performances & Symbolism: 🎭🎭🎭🎭🎭 Moss is electric. Minghella obliterates with minimal dialogue and maximum interiority. Dowd and Whitford continue to haunt in every shared frame. The folder as love made tangible, the gift for Nichole as resistance. That’s the symbolism that works.

Prognosis: Love as regression, or love as the only honest metric?

This episode blows up the idea that June’s love for Nick is something she should “get over” to be healthy. The narrative tries to sell us on the fantasy that moving on emotionally is the same thing as moving on morally. This episode quietly argues the opposite.

Because look at what actually happens when she sees him: the numbness lifts. The dissociation cracks. She is more herself—soft, sharp, alive—with Nick in that one meeting than she’s been in all her scenes with Luke in Canada combined.

Her love for Nick isn’t some adolescent distraction from the mission. It is the context of the mission. He’s the one who helped her survive long enough to still have a mission at all. He’s still the one risking everything to help her reach Hannah. His devotion keeps manifesting as action, not just sentiment.

At the same time, the episode is brutally honest about the cost of that love. Lawrence isn’t wrong when he says her love “fucks people up.” Nick is trapped in Gilead, cut off from the life he could have had, defined by a woman he can’t have and a system he can’t fully escape. June’s love is a lifeline and a wound. For both of them.

Progress doesn’t resolve that tension. It sits in it. That’s what makes it one of the last truly great hours of this show. It admits that: You can be married to one person and still be in love with another. You can build a life in one country and still belong emotionally to another. You can chase justice and still be driven by the person who held you in the dark.

The tragedy of later seasons is that they try to flatten this into a choice. Team Luke or Team Nick. Domesticity or obsession. Healing or rage. Progress remembers that for June, it’s never been either/or. Her heart is a fault line, not a triangle.

By the end of 4x09, she’s more herself than she’s been since stepping into Canada. She’s seen Nick. She’s raged at Tuello. She’s remembered what justice actually feels like.

Progress, in the end, isn’t about the system inching forward. It’s about June realigning to her own internal compass. And that compass still points to two things: Hannah. And the man who keeps trying to help her reach her.

Image Credit: @trademarkblue

[quotespile]

“Those who can’t hope can still wish.”

— Marilynne Robinson, Jack

[tivaswiftie99]

We really made it you guys🥹

[doomedtolovingyou]

NCIS 10x21 (2013) vs NCIS: Tony & Ziva 1x10 (2025)

[graciehart]

THE X-FILES Fight the Future (1998) / 7.02 — "The Sixth Extinction II: Amor Fati"

[just-b-yourself]

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love delights not in evil but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things. Believe all things. Endures all things. Love never fails.

#Found this in my drafts. I wasn’t sure about posting it, but… 🫶

[just-b-yourself]

The Handmaid’s Tale ended almost six months ago now, and like many of you, it was honestly the biggest TV disappointment I’ve ever felt. And yet… the echo of June and Nick’s love is still very much alive in me. I’m not going to get into the whole character assassination of June and Nick here (there are hundreds of posts about that on my blog already, and plenty of people far more eloquent than me have covered it across the platform). Nor am I going to talk about how so many of us ended up hating — or at least no longer liking — June in those later seasons (not to mention the actress, who I know is… controversial to say the least).

I rewatched the show recently (for the thousandth time, probably 😅), and it made me want to make another June/Nick video. Am I a masochist? Maybe just a little 😅. I know there are already tons of insanely talented editors who’ve made beautiful videos about them, and you might be tired of J/N edits or just not in the mood for another one — but if their love still resonates with you, feel free to check mine out. And if you feel like dropping a little comment, it would genuinely mean a lot to me.

Thank you in advance 🫶.

[letsbelonelytogetherr]

— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

[mournfulroses]

Nikolay Punin, from a diary entry featured in The Diaries of Nikolay Punin: 1904 - 1953

[boycottthetestaments]

Nichole Without Nick and June Isn’t The Testaments

In Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, Nichole (raised as Daisy) matters because of who she is. She’s not just another young woman swept into Gilead’s resistance — she’s the daughter of two rebels, June Osborne and Nick Blaine. Her existence is resistance. Her bloodline is rebellion. That’s why her journey to liberate her sister Agnes carries such weight: it’s not random chance, it’s the culmination of everything her parents risked and fought for.

But in the show? They’ve already stripped her of that connection. Nichole isn’t Nick and June’s child anymore — she’s just a plot device floating in the story, severed from the legacy that gave her meaning.

And that matters. Without Nick and June, Nichole isn’t the child of rebellion. She isn’t the symbol of survival against impossible odds. She’s just another character — interchangeable, forgettable, hollow.

This is how trust is lost. The show already alienated loyalists of The Handmaid’s Tale novel by flattening characters, reframing themes, and distorting Atwood’s vision. Now they’re doing the same with The Testaments before it even begins.

It’s not just disrespectful to fans. It’s disrespectful to Margaret Atwood.

Nichole without Nick and June isn’t The Testaments. And if this is the foundation for a franchise, they’re already building on rubble.