‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Season 3, Episode 4: How Those Shocking Aunt Lydia/Janine Scenes Show the Depths of Gilead’s Torture

The Handmaid’s Tale has always been known for its disturbing imagery. After all, it’s a show about life inside a dystopian regime. Women are kept as sex slaves, and exercising free speech can be a capitol office. But The Handmaid’s Tale Season 3, Episode 4, “God Bless the Child,” shines a light on the most perverse form of torture we’ve maybe seen in Gilead yet: the actual emotional connections that have been forged between captor and abuser.

In “God Bless the Child,” we see something we’ve never witnessed before: a softer side of Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd). She’s been struggling to maintain her physical and emotional strength in the wake of Emily’s attack last season, and now, she is finding comfort from an unexpected source, Janine (Madeline Brewer). Back in The Handmaid’s Tale Season 1, Aunt Lydia was Janine’s most stalwart tormenter. She punished the girl and even took out an eye. Now, Janine is not only fond of Aunt Lydia, but takes a moment to offer her much-needed comfort.

“It’s so lovely,” Ann Dowd told Decider during a recent press day. “[Madeline Brewer] played it so beautifully, I just adore her.”

Dowd quickly put on the persona of Aunt Lydia herself to explain the character’s thought process: “It was comforting, as though my niece came and knew that I was suffering, that I was feeling overwhelmed. And it’s never something that was ever spoken of. But she helped me and she’s precious. And she’s who I thought she was, and I feel I have something to do with that. She went through a terrible shock in the beginning, maybe it was a little too much to remove the eye but she was headed down a very wrong path. And now look at her. You’ve got to watch her carefully, cause she’s not stable. But she’s a good person.”

Brewer saw it as slightly more complex. “It gave Aunt Lydia a little bit of a moment to let her guard down. I think Janine was ready to ask the question that she asks. Not quite yet, it snowballed a little bit later. She obviously requests to stay with the Putnams.”

The Putnams, of course, are Janine’s first family. She bore a healthy daughter for the family while carrying on a passionate affair with her Commander. Her rebellious impulses cost Janine an eye, and later sent her to the Colonies. Later, Aunt Lydia brings her — and Emily — back to Gilead, creating a strange kinship between the two.

“I think that Janine feels for [Aunt Lydia],” Brewer told Decider. “They have a relationship that we don’t have anywhere else in Gilead. It’s so complex, it’s so dysfunctional but also really beautiful and tender. That was a beautiful moment to play because it’s Janine pushing the envelope a little bit.”

Of course, this sweet moment is soon undone by Janine’s impetuousness and Aunt Lydia’s temper. After getting to hold her own daughter, Janine ferociously begs to go back to the Putnams.

“Something happens to Janine that has gotten her into trouble, which is she follows her first instinct. She does not weigh the pros and cons of things, she doesn’t have a very measured approach. She’s just like, ‘I feel this and I need this and I want this,'” Brewer said, explaining Janine’s rationale in begging to be let back in the Putnam household.

“It’s a very natural feeling, this is my daughter I need to be near her. It’s truly a visceral need. I think in that moment nothing else matters. She sees Charlotte, and it’s just tunnel vision, nothing else in the world possibly matters, and I have to do anything I can to get back into her life and be near her always,” Brewer said. “Instead of being raped on a monthly basis by this other guy, I can come back and be your handmaid and give you another baby and we can be a family and we can be a unit, because that is how I survive here…Even if it’s completely insane to anyone else, to Janine that is how it works.”

While Janine attempts to plead her case to the Putnams, Aunt Lydia loses control. She winds up beating Janine in a horrific show of weakness that winds up making her look worse.

“She’s frightened for the first time in her life. She’s reactive, which in the past she prided herself on, ‘No no, do not act out of emotion. Act out of a considered thought of the best way you can move forward.’ She loses that ability,” Dowd said.

“I think the crying is about losing control. And beating half to death a child I love. And to have lost the ability to step back,” Dowd added. “And it’s very difficult.”

Still, Aunt Lydia and Janine aren’t the only Handmaid’s Tale characters working through their complicated relationships. Stockholm Syndrome appears to be running rampant in Gilead. We’re not saying June (Elisabeth Moss) has succumbed to some sort of sentimental feelings for her Commanders, but Martha Rita (Amanda Brugel) obviously has developed a bond with Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski). She not only made Serena her very own prosthetic finger glove, but has been fiercely protective of her mistress.

“I think that there is an element of Stockholm Syndrome going on with her,” Brugel told Decider. “Serena’s been the only constant woman in her life. If you think about being thrust into that position — I don’t have my child anymore. I don’t have a family anymore — so for better or for worse, Serena is her family.”

“I think Serena’s taken the role of her mother, and the roles have flipped and the power dynamics have flipped,” Brugal said of Rita’s evolving role in The Handmaid’s Tale Season 3. “I think she also sees the potential of Serena sort of being an ally. And [she] is slowly massaging that and helping [Serena] realize her strength outside of the Commander. So I love the unlikely union that has formed between the two. Especially for female viewers to watch and realize that women together, no matter how different you are, together you’re stronger.”

Even though Gilead was designed to suppress the natural relationships that keep people emotionally involved with one another, these viral family units are cropping up everywhere. We don’t just see it in Gilead, but in Canada’s Little America, where refugees are building new makeshift family units. Now that Emily (Alexis Bledel) has arrived there with Baby Nichole, June’s husband Luke (O-T Fagbenle) and Moira (Samira Wiley) have become the child’s de facto parents.

“I feel like we have created a family onscreen and offscreen,” Wiley told Decider. “It’s crazy because of the circumstances, but it’s also beautiful to see what can come out of trauma. This beautiful family is made because of this trauma. And that duality, holding space for both of those things, is an interesting thing.”

Ultimately, these complicated relationships are all about one thing: survival. These characters are clinging to one another because it’s all they can do in order to get through another day. Even the characters who may seem the weakest, and the meekest, are persevering thanks to these connections.

Brewer said, “[Janine]’s a fighter ultimately, she always has been. Looks can be deceiving. She’s very small and meek in some moments. But she is ultimately a strong-willed woman.”

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