‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Recap, Episode 7: Guess Who’s Back?

Oh, you were surprised that Luke (O-T Fagbenle) lived? Everyone was surprised that Luke lived. No one, including June (Elisabeth Moss), heard those bullet shots and thought that her nice hipster husband who liked to cook had somehow taken down a bunch of government officials in a hail of bullets.
And indeed, he did not. But he did escape Gilead, and this episode shows how much his escape, like those of so many refugees, hinged upon good Samaritans and sheer luck.
The episode opens to see Luke shot and June carries Hannah into the woods. Luke is immediately bundled into a van, but the van slides on the ice, and crashes. Luke, his wound still throbbing, grabs the policeman’s jacket, and some bottles of drugs before limping away. Soon after he collapses in the abandoned bar of a town where “gender traitor” is spray painted onto windows.
It’s clear this was not the way it was supposed to go. But even if it had gone perfectly, escaping Gilead seemed to be no small feat. Luke recalls the beginning of his exodus with June. They discuss whether they should have left earlier, but Luke was waiting for their visas to arrive.

A man whose June’s mother gave a vasectomy to is willing to help drive them out of the city. To their surprise he crushes their phones (tracking devices) and tells them to get rid of their backpacks. “People carry backpacks on the street all the time, it doesn’t necessarily make it look like we’re leaving!” Luke protests. “You want to take that chance?” the man asks. June, Luke, and Hannah are informed that they need to hide in the trunk.
As the exit the city a patrol man checks the trunk in a terrifying moment, but then announces that there’s nothing in there. “I took his sister to the prom back in the day,” their driver explains, “believe you me, he owes me a fucking favor.”
They’re dropped off at remote lodge near the Canadian border. The driver gives Luke a gun and tells him that he’ll be back soon to take him over the border after he gets them Canadian passports. Luke explains that he’s got visas, and is told that those “don’t mean shit anymore. That’s over.”
Back in the “present day,” Luke is found by a group of rebels. Luke hastily explains that he’s not a guardian, he just took his jacket. He tells them he’s been shot and is trying to get back to his wife and daughter. They take him into the bus they’re traveling in and supply him with an antibiotic drip to stop his wound from turning septic. The group is comprised of a nun, a gay man, an army brat, and a fertile woman they rescued.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. Luke recalls that things went wrong the moment a neighbor saw them out by the lake while waiting for their driver’s return. Initially, it seems that the neighbor might turn them in. But then, he shows up at their house and tells them that he’s heard about them on the scanner. The patrol is looking for them. Moreover, their driver has been killed and hung up from a street lamp in town. The neighbor says that he knows people who can meet them at the border with passports if they can get that far. They thank him. “No worries,” he replies, “This is pretty fucked up.” It’s such a normal way to describe a situation so abnormal that people are being hung up on street lamps.

Their driver wasn’t the only one to meet that fate. Zoe, the leader of the rebel group, takes Luke to a church when he says he wants to go back to Boston to try to find June and Hannah. Inside the church, dozens of people have been hung from the rafters. “There’s one of these in every town,” says Zoe, “This is what they do to people who fight back.”
Luke elects to join them as they cross over to Canada. When they get to the border, he gives the driver everything he has for passage — the pills and his wedding ring. But they’re a little too late, and one of the Guardians shows up and shoots Zoe.

Luke, however, makes it over the border. We see as much when the title reveals it’s three years later. He’s now living in the section of Toronto called “Little America.” He’s called into the embassy. As he goes, he passes by wall after wall of pictures of people’s lost loved ones. It’s particularly stirring because it’s a sight that would be familiar to many current day refugees.
He meets with a woman there, and begins trying to tell her that he suspects the Handmaid retraining centers are in high schools. She cuts him off and asks if his wife’s name is June Osbourne. She explains that they have a letter from her, delivered by one of their Mexican informants. June’s letter got to him. It reads, “I love you. So much. Save Hannah.” Luke kisses it as he sees it.
In this world, a piece of communication from someone you love feels like the most remarkable miracle.

Jennifer Wright is the author of It Ended Badly: 13 of the Worst Break-Ups in History and Get Well Soon: The Worst Plagues in History.

Stream The Handmaid's Tale, Episode 7, "The Other Side" on Hulu