It’s telling, almost bleakly predictable, how many readers/viewers bend over backwards to redeem Nick in The Handmaid’s Tale. The irony is thick: in a story centred on diminishing women’s rights and bodily autonomy, there’s this impulse to extend compassion to a man who, by design, helped build the world that made those violations possible. A few decent gestures and suddenly he’s a romantic lead, a “good guy” lost in a bad system. For the love everything, please be serious.
What this really reveals is one of the novel/show’s quieter lessons: the danger of male-centred women and pick-me behavior. Women who align themselves with oppressive systems, believing that proximity to power will protect them, often end up reinforcing the very structures that harm them. They think they’re the exception. They think they’ll be spared. And when they’re not, the damage is already done, not just to themselves but to others who counted on their resistance or even crossed paths with them.
Nick isn’t a rebel. He’s a functionary. A cog. A man who chose survival countless times through allegiance and only offered help when it was convenient or emotionally safe. That’s not heroism. It’s self-preservation dressed up in a softer light. And people begging for his forgiveness ignore the bigger truth: that it doesn’t matter if he “cared” when he still upheld the system that killed, raped, and dehumanized women.
But my biggest issue here is this: The desire to exonerate Nick is a symptom of something deeper and more troubling: the refusal to let go of patriarchal frameworks, even in dystopia. It’s the hope that if just one man can be kind, maybe the system isn’t that bad. But it is that bad. And clinging to a few scattered good deeds doesn’t absolve anyone of participating in its violence.
