TL;DR: After years of heartbreak, hypocrisy, and more than a few pacing sins, The Handmaid’s Tale finally pulls off something close to emotional catharsis in its penultimate hour. “Execution” might retread some old mistakes, but it lands with fire, guts, and one magnificent explosion of redemption. Lawrence goes out with a bang. Literally. June survives again (shocker), but this time, the show earns it.

Love in the Time of Gilead

Let me confess something upfront: I haven’t always been kind to The Handmaid’s Tale in recent years. At some point after season three, I started feeling like I was watching an extremely traumatic loop. Pain. Escape. Recapture. Speech. Repeat. The show started to resemble an artfully shot hamster wheel. And yet, I kept coming back. Not just out of habit, or even hope, but because something still pulsed underneath all the misery: a refusal to let us forget that humanity, however buried, was still there.

Season 6’s ninth episode, ominously titled “Execution,” finally justifies the suffering. It’s brutal, yes. Cynical at times. But there’s clarity here—a real, red-blooded sense of consequence.

We begin on the scaffold, with June and the other women once again paraded before Gilead’s altars of cruelty. My eyes rolled so hard I thought they might sprain: again with the cuffs, again with the death-by-male-decree. But then the moment pivots. June isn’t just waiting to be saved. She knows something’s going to change. And it does.

Enter Joseph Lawrence: Economist. Deadpan king. Inventor of dystopia. And, in this episode, one hell of a tragic hero.

Lawrence’s Last Stand

Joseph Lawrence has always been my favorite monster in the Gilead cabinet. Equal parts Hannibal Lecter and burnt-out college professor, he’s a man whose moral ambiguity was once a thrill and later a frustration. Would he finally pick a side? Would he do anything?

He does. Oh, he does.

In a moment that feels equal parts Bond movie and Greek tragedy, Lawrence boards a plane with Commander Wharton and the rest of the Gilead brass, knowing full well it’s a suicide mission. His Mayday-bomb rigged the flight for detonation—and as the plane ascends, so does the tension. And then: detonation. Flames in the sky. The arrogant men are dust, and Lawrence earns a redemption I didn’t think the show had the guts to give.

What makes it work isn’t the explosion. It’s that quiet second before, when he puts a hand on his chest in a goodbye gesture to June. It’s the Little Princess book he gives to Angela. It’s that last look of peace.

They made a martyr out of the man who built Gilead. Somehow, it works.

Nick’s Final Failure

Now contrast that with Nick Blaine. Ah, Nick. The show’s most beautifully lit wet cardboard. For seasons, we were fed this idea that Nick was a conflicted, tortured soul, caught between loyalty and love. This season did more work to dig into his flaws, but in the end, he dies as he lived: passively. Forgettable.

His death aboard the bombed plane barely registers emotionally. June may care, but I don’t. Nick’s arc ends not with a redemption, but with a sigh. He made choices. He backed out when it mattered. And that’s the price.

Goodbye, Nick. Don’t let the fuselage hit you on the way down.

Love as Resistance

The theme of the episode is love, but not the Pinterest kind. This is love as resistance. Love as the sword. June preaches it to Wharton. She pleads it with Serena. Even Lydia, she of the righteous rod and terrifying bonnets, seems moved by it.

June’s not just some atheist freedom fighter. She quotes scripture like a woman who believes. That’s been one of the smartest thematic choices this series has ever made: making June a believer. She isn’t fighting against faith, but against its weaponization. That distinction lets the show sidestep lazy culture war debates and zero in on something more poignant: compassion, forgiveness, rebellion born from empathy.

The episode opens with a Taylor Swift lyric: “I rose up from the dead, I do it all the time.” A cheap gimmick? Maybe. But it fits. June’s entire arc has been resurrection. But this time, it feels like she rose with purpose.

Lydia, Serena, and the Shape of the Future

Ann Dowd’s Lydia has always been a conundrum—a sadist, a zealot, and sometimes, heartbreakingly, a believer in her own twisted logic. But in these last few episodes, we’ve seen cracks. When June is led away, Lydia doesn’t crow. She prays.

Serena, too, is shifting. Once Gilead’s most glamorous fascist, she’s now doubly widowed and slowly crawling toward redemption. Like Lawrence, she sacrifices. Like June, she chooses love.

That these women may play pivotal roles in The Testaments is no spoiler anymore. It’s a promise. And if this episode is anything to go by, we may actually want to see what comes next.

Final Thoughts: The Fire Before the Silence

This episode is peak Handmaid’s Tale: beautifully shot, symbolically rich, occasionally frustrating, and deeply moving. It still drags its feet in places. It still protects its protagonists a little too much. But for once, the slow burn ends in a blaze.

We’re told that love is the antidote to Gilead. Not weapons. Not politics. Love. That’s the real execution in this episode: the killing of the idea that cruelty ever wins in the end.

I didn’t expect to feel this way, but by the end of “Execution,” I was grieving. I was hopeful. I was, dare I say, satisfied.

A smart, emotional, and finally courageous episode that reminds us why The Handmaid’s Tale mattered in the first place. The finale has a hard act to follow.