First, June can’t get into the garage, despite fiercely kicking at the door the way an action star might. In its own way, the exasperation of the moment is oddly relatable. And that’s not to mention the animal - is that a goddamn dire wolf? - that appears, baring its teeth at June and threatening to pounce. But there’s so much tension to every minute and so much, if you’ll excuse the pun, riding on June finding the keys and zooming out of the garage, that it’s as anxiety-producing as her earlier near-escape. The pace of this episode - nearly the entire first half is taken up with June’s search through the house and attempt to ride free - could have felt slow, especially compared to action-packed earlier episodes. Left alone in snowy rural Massachusetts, 39 weeks pregnant, having just survived a savage rape and having her firstborn daughter ripped from her arms yet again, June’s already had a day worse than any you can imagine. “I keep on going with this limping and mutilated story,” she offers towards the end, “because I want you to hear it.” The suffering of women, for so long classified as hysteria, or nerves, or vapors, or else simply ignored, is now too rampant and unremitting for June to keep even a single detail to herself. “I’m sorry there’s so much pain in this story,” she explains in a voiceover that sounds much closer to the novel’s narrative voice (in which, spoiler alert, June has left audiotapes explaining her story that are studied by a college class much farther in the future) than her television persona. The showrunners must have anticipated some of the criticism about just how brutally Handmaid’s Tale has treated June.

No hope of escaping Gilead before her daughter came into the world. No hand to hold, no epidural, no medical care of any kind, no electricity. June, however well June’s delivery story doesn’t need exaggerating, just as many of you beautiful commenters predicted it wouldn’t.

It’s an occasion so momentous - physically, emotionally, spiritually, psychologically - that we need to anoint it with an extra dose of significance to make sense of it all. Perhaps it’s the trauma of the event that makes us amplify the details: It certainly feels like you’re in labor for an ungodly amount of time. Long hours of labor are stretched just a little farther than probability allows (we all know that woman who claims to have labored for 50 hours, despite the fact that no OB/GYN in the country would allow that to happen for fear of skyrocketing insurance premiums). An unscheduled C-section turns into an “emergency C-section,” despite the fact that the patient was calmly wheeled into the operating room and the doctor performed a perfunctory bit of routine surgery. Occasionally you’ll notice a tendency among some moms to exaggerate, or at least dramatize, their labor and delivery stories.

The office season 2 episode 11