So, I’m thinking Janine isn’t taking to life in the Colonies all that well. Sure, she isn’t depressed and angry about it like Emily, but she sure is cheerful for someone working herself to death in a toxic field. That’s probably because she’s cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.
But what about the pregnant Offred? She’s back in “obey at all costs” mode from the looks of things after Awful Aunt Lydia told her that other people died because of June. You know, Offred’s real name. She’s burning the letters she was supposed to pass along for the resistance, she’s not saying much to Nick, and she’s obeying Serena Joy to the letter in a way that Serena Joy doesn’t want because she’s actually trying to start conversations with the Handmaid for the good of the unborn baby.
By the by, Aunts are allowed to read and write. Other women? Nope.
But with both Nick and Rita noticing Offred isn’t quite right, what can anyone do? Nick suggests to Serena getting Offred to a psychiatrist. Serena’s response to that is to arrange for Nick to get married in one of those really romantic mass religious ceremonies where Nick is matched with a veiled woman he’s never met before. Sure, she’s pretty and all under the veil, but this can’t be what he wanted and new wife Eden sure is naive about, oh, everything.
But then Nick finds Offred passed out in the bushes one night in a rainstorm.
Why?
She was bleeding pretty badly down there and hadn’t told anybody.
Once in the hospital, still pregnant, she does promise the unborn child that both of them are getting the hell out of this hellhole of a country.
So, yeah, she’s still not as broken as she appeared to be.
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