Warning: contains spoilers for The Handmaid’s Tale season 6 episode 2 “Exile”. Emotionally, The Handmaid’s Tale rarely misses, but structurally, it isn’t always what you’d call elegant. “Exile” didn’t so much progress the plot as reverse it. In the season five finale, June and Serena boarded a train to the future, but now they’re both back in the past with June once again running Mayday missions and Serena once again swishing around Gilead/New Bethlehem high on her own supply.  Similarly, Nick’s decision to finally relent and spy for the US? Scratch that, he’s changed his mind and is going to be good from now on for the sake of his kid. Can June persuade him back into the fight? Well, she did every other time this exact thing has happened.  Fans are used to The Handmaid’s Tale going around in circles, so “Exile” leaves us with a familiar feeling. At least its screeching-brake 360 turns are for a good cause. Luke and Moira’s characters have been sorely lacking something to do for years now, so this heroic guerrilla mission into No-Man’s Land is welcome – even if it sent June on a thousand-mile detour to drop Nichole off with a suitable babysitter.  June and Holly’s scenes together were the episode high points, thanks to Cherry Jones being a rare co-star not eclipsed by sharing a screen with Elisabeth Moss in what is surely the role of her lifetime. Jones did a lot with a little. The elliptical way she told Holly’s survival story was as affecting for what she didn’t say as for what she did. Not wanting to burden her daughter with gruesome details, Holly turned away from June and glossed over what must have been seven years of torture. She let out her anger, but not her suffering, and protected them both by halting before saying Hannah’s name. Initially, they were careful with each other, tentative rather than familiar.  That all changed after the “Two Months Later” time jump (this being the last ever season, clunky moments like that caption must be necessary to shake everything into the right position). The carefulness dropped away and the old mother-daughter dynamic reasserted itself as past resentments bubbled up. The fight gave Holly the line of the episode when she summed up June and Nick’s love story with the simple but effective, “My daughter fucked a Nazi.”  You can see why she’d think that. We know Nick as the man so in love with June that he punched out his Gilead superior and agreed to become a spy when her life was endangered; Holly just knows him as the enemy. Not privy to the five-and-a-bit seasons of drama we’ve seen, Holly also didn’t know that her once politically disengaged book editor kid was now a freedom fighting badass who’d collected several Commander scalps. It was almost funny when June told Holly that she didn’t know the things she’d done – a teenage ‘you wouldn’t understand, mom,’ eye-roll moment but in an extraordinary context.  Fathers, not mothers, were the focus in the rest of the episode. Commander Wharton paternally told Nick to “make good choices” – presumably having wind of his son-in-law’s resistance activities seeing as he’s devoting so much time to warning him against them. By throwing into the fire the SIM for that US-issue burner phone, Nick showed that he either took Wharton’s advice, or his latent threats, seriously. He’s chucking his lot in with New Bethlehem and choosing his future over his past.   Serena chose to do the same, after spending the episode recharging her holy powers and emerging with her piety health bar at full strength. In the aptly named idyllic faith-led community of Canaan, Serena remembered her late father. Unlike her mother Pamela (who is, I suppose, still out there somewhere?), Serena’s dad seemed kind and supportive. A pastor who shepherded souls towards God, it wasn’t just green fingers Serena inherited from him, but also a talent for pulpitry. Yvonne Strahovski was magnificent in Serena’s grace-saying scene, and really sold the intoxicating high of a messiah complex. Quoting Jeremiah 29:14 to equate herself with biblical exiles, she was buzzing on God. Everything is finally coming up Serena, who’s been called to heal the world (to her, there could be no clearer divine blessing than June pushing her off that train straight into the path of a church). This time, Serena gets to try to launch a new country in pastel shades with the scent of the New England coastline in her nose rather than the stink of hanging corpses on a city wall. Blessed day, indeed. Let’s see just how long Gilead’s commanders allow her to stand in her power. The Handmaid’s Tale season six streams on Tuesdays on Hulu in the US. It will air on Channel 4 in the UK at a later date. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox!