THT Diagnosis of an Autopsy: 3x08 Unfit. I hurt her. And I enjoyed it.
Unfit opens with the sound of breath returning. June’s voiceover back from the dead. And for a moment, it feels like the show might find its conscience again. But the voice we get isn’t resistance. It’s rot. The empathy that once made June dangerous has curdled into satisfaction. She’s not just surviving Gilead anymore. She’s starting to sound like it.
This is the episode where The Handmaid’s Tale stares straight into its own hypocrisy. The voice that used to name pain now narrates cruelty. The woman who used to turn compassion into rebellion begins to weaponize it like power. And the irony is biblical: the minute June gets her voice back, she forgets what it was for.
In parallel, Aunt Lydia finally gets her origin story. A tragic, lonely glimpse of a woman whose righteousness was born from humiliation. It should humanize her, and it does, briefly. But it also reminds us how easily empathy becomes control when shame is left to ferment.
By the time the baby dies, by the time Offmathew breaks, by the time the gun goes off, you realize: everyone here has become a mirror of Gilead. It’s not “under His eye” anymore. It’s under each other’s.
Findings: Compassion turning carnivorous, righteousness turning predatory, the story metabolizing what it once condemned.
The sickness of Gilead finally seeps into the bloodstream of its survivors, and what used to be moral reckoning becomes moral rot. June’s voice returns, but it’s not the one that once whispered resistance. It’s the echo of a woman who’s learned to speak the language of her captors.
We open with a birth and a body count. June names Frances’s death the way the state names its victims: clinical, detached, almost bureaucratic. The rhythm is pure Atwood. Tight, observational, but the empathy is gone. It’s not grief. It’s inventory. A tone so dispassionate it becomes the episode’s thesis: when you survive too long in a machine built on cruelty, you start to adopt its precision.
“Frances was Hannah’s Martha. In the time before, Frances was a sales manager for a theatrical supply company. Frances tutored kids after school. Frances was saving up for a trip to the Galapagos. Frances loved my daughter. Frances is dead. And Hannah is gone. Because of her.”
June’s campaign against Ofmatthew is the most disturbing act of leadership the show has ever written for her. She’s not orchestrating resistance. She’s orchestrating exile.
The freeze-out, the glares, the silence. It’s schoolyard cruelty rebranded as justice. Even Janine, the moral child of the series, sees what’s happening: June isn’t leading the handmaids; she’s performing Gilead in miniature. She’s punishing instead of protecting. It’s the first time she becomes indistinguishable from the system she wants to destroy.
What makes Unfit so unnerving is that it mirrors the very logic it’s critiquing. The show wants to condemn June’s cruelty, but it can’t resist aestheticizing it, giving her the same slow-motion, choral treatment it once reserved for resistance. The audience is caught between revulsion and awe, just like June. That’s the trap.
Lydia’s backstory arrives as counterpoint. The only part of the episode that still remembers what heartbreak feels like. It’s a portrait of repression so ordinary it’s tragic. The holiday dinner, the karaoke, the tentative kiss. All the small humiliations that calcify into righteousness. Lydia’s betrayal of the young mother isn’t monstrous. It’s bureaucratic.
The cruelty of paperwork. Her declaration lands like scripture rewritten as policy:
“The child is vulnerable to a corrupting influence.”
This is how zealotry begins: one wounded ego disguised as moral clarity.
And that’s what connects Lydia and June. Both women trying to control what once hurt them. Lydia through doctrine, June through domination. They are mirrors across the ideological aisle, both mistaking pain for power.
When the baby is born dead, June’s relief isn’t a breakdown of empathy. It’s proof of infection. The system has taught her to see survival as a zero-sum game. If someone else suffers, she gets to breathe. It’s the psychology of captivity, not villainy, but it’s a terrifying transformation nonetheless.
Her scenes with Lawrence briefly reintroduce friction that feels alive again. June prods at his conscience; he pokes at her performance. He calls out the satisfaction in her moral righteousness and he’s right. She’s begun to savor it. The show frames their dynamic as philosophical sparring, but what’s really happening is confession: two people cataloging their own complicity in different languages.
Then comes the final voiceover, and it lands like an autopsy:
“I hurt her. And I enjoyed it. The wives and aunts, too, grieving over Ofandy’s dead child. And Lawrence. They all deserve to suffer. It’s an acquired taste, seeing others in pain. Like that smoky scotch Luke got as a gift once. I grew to like that. I finally know how Ofglen thought. What made her put on that bomb vest. And I know how Emily felt right before she stuck a knife in Lydia’s back.”
It’s not a villain’s line. It’s a survivor’s admission. The syntax is Atwood. Tight, unblinking, but the sentiment is something darker. The empathy that once made her human has metastasized into appetite. She’s no longer resisting Gilead. She’s metabolizing it.
The grocery store massacre is the logical endpoint of all that repression.
And that’s the quiet horror of Unfit: everyone in it believes they’re still righteous. June. Lydia. Even the system itself. But righteousness, stripped of love, just becomes ritual. And ritual without compassion is indistinguishable from cruelty.
By the end, you can feel the rot setting in. The story that once pulsed with empathy has started to harden. The handmaids don’t look like rebels anymore. They look like believers. And June, once the conscience of the narrative, now feels like its symptom.
Cut of the Episode: I hurt her. And I enjoyed it. (Not a villain’s line. A survivor’s admission. The empathy that once made her human has metastasized into appetite. She’s no longer resisting Gilead. She’s metabolizing it.)
Fluorescent light, humming refrigeration, ritualized obedience. It should feel like any other errand of survival. But Unfit turns the grocery store into a church of repression, and when it explodes, it’s not chaos. It’s prophecy.
For weeks, Offmathew has been collapsing in slow motion. The perfect Gilead citizen cracking under the weight of perfection itself. The sound design even mimics prayer: low, constant, a drone of submission. When she finally screams, it’s not rebellion; it’s release. A woman so over-disciplined she mistakes murder for agency.
And June stands there, watching. Not in horror, not even in shock. Just stillness. The same kind she once used as armor. The same kind Nick used as survival. Except here, it’s empty. This isn’t restraint as resistance anymore, it’s paralysis as posture.
The camera lingers on her face like a confession booth that won’t close. Every other woman in the room is reacting, ducking, running, crying, and June is frozen, her eyes registering something closer to curiosity than fear. It’s the moment she becomes the audience’s mirror: how much cruelty can you witness before you stop calling it cruelty?
Offmathew’s outburst isn’t random; it’s the sum of every moral contradiction this world enforces. A woman ordered to be pious, then punished for obeying too well. A mother whose grief has no sanctioned outlet, so it detonates in public. The gunfire is incidental. What matters is the contagion. The way every face in that store suddenly looks capable of the same thing.
Lydia’s scream finally pierces through the silence, but it’s not moral outrage. It’s heartbreak. She’s watching her own ideology devour its child. That’s what makes this sequence so horrifying. It’s not the bullets; it’s the symmetry. Every victim here is also a participant.
And June’s expression, cold, still, unrepentant, is the cruelest shot of all. She doesn’t intervene. She doesn’t comfort. She doesn’t pray. For a second, she’s Gilead incarnate: detached, methodical, observant.
When the screen cuts to black, it’s not closure. It’s infection completing its cycle. Compassion, the last uncorrupted instinct in this world, has finally gone quiet.
This is what it looks like when a revolution loses its soul, when empathy becomes exhaustion, and exhaustion becomes the only thing left alive.
Scorecard
Creative Vitality: 💉💉💉 Technically tight but emotionally untethered. The writing still carries Atwood’s rhythm, but not her restraint.
Feminist Integrity: ❤️🔥❤️🔥 The Lydia flashbacks reach for empathy. The main plot weaponizes it. A rare inversion of the show’s own gospel.
Narrative Coherence: 🧩🧩🧩 Conceptually ambitious, morally unstable. The pieces fit, but the purpose frays.
Emotional Pulse: 🫀🫀 Voice returns, but it’s hollow. A haunting echo of the character who once believed love could still save her.
Performances & Symbolism: 🎭🎭🎭🎭 Dowd finds the woman behind the zealot. Moss performs apathy like a symptom. The grocery store becomes an altar to emotional decay.
Prognosis: Empathy dying, ideology taking over. The revolution septic. The show calcifying where it once bled.
Unfit is where The Handmaid’s Tale stops asking what Gilead does to people and starts showing what it leaves behind. The infection isn’t in the ideology anymore. It’s in the survivors. June’s return to narration should feel like a resurrection; instead, it sounds like an autopsy. Every word she speaks carries the residue of cruelty she swore she’d never absorb.
Lydia’s origin story tries to offer balance. A glimpse of how loneliness curdles into doctrine, but instead it mirrors June’s descent. Both women act out of pain and call it purpose. Both believe suffering refines them. And both prove how easily moral conviction turns into self-justification once empathy is gone.
Nick’s absence is more than narrative. It’s emotional architecture removed. His quiet presence once kept the show honest, grounding June’s fury in something human, reminding her (and us) that love wasn’t the opposite of strength. Without that counterweight, the story caves inward, mistaking moral clarity for moral correctness.
By the time the credits roll, no one’s innocent. Not June, not Lydia, not even the viewer. The camera keeps us complicit, watching, diagnosing, numbed by repetition. The revolution has gone septic.
Because when empathy dies, ideology takes over. And Unfit is the hour where The Handmaid’s Tale stops bleeding and starts calcifying.