![]() ![]() He insists their relationship is too dangerous, saying, “You could end up on the wall,” where criminals’ corpses hang. I don’t know who you are.” She demands to know if his life-tending the Commander’s house and occasionally trying to get one of his handmaids pregnant-is enough. “I don’t know anything about you, you know,” Offred says. After driving Offred and the Commander to a brothel called Jezebels, it appears that Nick has suddenly decided that his and Offred’s relationship is too dangerous. Offred, for whom the relationship had become a lifeline of sorts, presses him to give her a reason. After engaging in an illicit affair with Offred for a while, Nick breaks it off. Which brings us to, perhaps, the most revealing moment of the episode. Everyone behaves with practiced formality-from the Commanders, all the way down to their terrorized handmaids. The character reminded Minghella of some of his friends who hail from the East Coast-people who are incredibly kindhearted but will also “throw a punch in a heartbeat.” People like Nick have shorter fuses, Minghella said, than people like him-“a conservative and very boring British person.” But in the hushed powder-keg that is Gilead, such tempers must be concealed. Indeed, as viewers can clearly see from this installment-especially from the heated exchange between Nick and Offred toward the end-Nick, like pretty much everyone else, is complicated. So you’re working with this sort of quite muted physicality and lexicon to try to demonstrate quite a lot.” he’s not a verbose person he’s not a gesticulator. I think it’s a performance that is very kind of restricting. “The Nick we see in our contemporary narrative is, again, extremely militant and reserved. But how, exactly, does one become an Eye? Answers to that and other questions about Nick are what viewers start to uncover through the flashbacks-all of which culminate, in Episode 8, in one of Nick’s most emotionally revealing moments yet. That makes sense, since he’s also one of the Eyes-spies who keep watch over everyone, including the powerful male Commanders, to make sure no one is misbehaving. He’s a trusted servant in the Waterford house-one whose thoughts are inscrutable, given his stolid demeanor. This might be why it was a little jarring when, at the beginning of Episode 8, viewers found themselves launched into a flashback into Nick’s past. Sure, there are men in this world, but this is a story primarily concerned with women-and how they interact with the dystopian world they call home. Perhaps one of the most quietly pleasing aspects of The Handmaid’s Tale is just how long viewers can watch before running into a story told from the male perspective. This post contains spoilers for The Handmaid’s Tale Episode 8, “Jezebels.” ![]()
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