Warning: contains spoilers for The Handmaid’s Tale season six episode eight “Exodus”. It wasn’t a red wedding; it was more subtle than that – subtler than bloodhungry fans were probably hoping. Who else was waiting for the Handmaids to unleash screaming frenzy in that chic ballroom and set upon the commanders in an anime-style storm of blades, blood and bared teeth? ‘Is it now?’ I kept asking myself as the careful, quiet wedding scenes stretched on. ‘Is it now?’ Now never came. Instead of a cloud of noise and violence, we saw individual Handmaids silently peel away from their platoon and steal towards a sleeping commander in his own home. Rather than witness Calhoun and co. vomit up a waterfall of guts onto the dancefloor as their eyeballs burst red after eating a slice of Rita’s cake, they all simply went to sleep, like the inhabitants of fairyland under a spell. The commander massacre was quiet, controlled and efficient. Even the putting down of prize pig Bell was muted. No expressive relish was taken in his death, just the assassin-cool exchange: “June Osborne?”, “Nice to meet you” and a knife to the eye. June may as well have been handing Bell a discount leaflet outside a supermarket for all the emotion she betrayed. The meaning was clear: this was work, not fun, and it was carried out with the meticulous professionalism of a perfectly choreographed army. Had my wish for a wedding melee been granted, of course, June and Moira’s soldiers wouldn’t currently be running to freedom, they’d be slumped limply in the bucket of an industrial digger as their bodies were tipped into a mass grave after being gunned down like the women at the Penthouse. This was the better plan.  It was a better episode too from director Daina Reid and writer Yahlin Chang, than the one I’d originally hoped to see – less visceral but no less rousing, and built around two pivotal character moments that have been a long time in the coming. Aunt Lydia finally stopped barking bible verses and accepted her place on the wrong side of history. And after all that pursed lip equivocation about her derailed social experiment, Serena finally got it right: there’s no such thing as a good man who’s also a Gilead commander. The existence of one precludes the other. Now she’s right back where she started the season, on the run with a babe-in-arms.  Lydia’s capitulation was the headline act, and acted like a dream by Ann Dowd. June appealed to her faith, Janine appealed to her unsettling maternal obsession with her “special girl”, and between them, they got the job done. Every suppressed twitch of Lydia’s eye over the years at an act of cruelty or abuse from a commander to her girls added up to her finally acknowledging that Gilead was not God’s way. She’s always seen herself as the Handmaids’ saviour rather than their prison guard. Now, by not standing in the way of their escape, she can almost justify being called both. “Exodus” was minutely focused as a story. The phone call received by Commander Bell aside, there was no sense of the wider attack on Gilead or whether Luke’s bombs had detonated and Mark’s troops had driven over the border. It was almost all contained inside that royal-scale wedding. (A quiet word on taste, Serena: even Harry and Meghan would have balked at wheeling in a cake so oversized that most of this show’s cast could have jumped out of it doing the can-can.) Serena did not hold back on the staging. Chandeliers, thrones, pennants… Queen of Gilead was about right. She certainly addressed her subjects with royal condescension. Like a school counsellor sitting backwards on a chair, Serena was trying so hard yet getting it so wrong. Her address to the Handmaids wasn’t just a moment of high-tension while June tried to hide among the crowd, it was almost a cringe-comedy scene out of The Office. She self-importantly assumed that Lawrence was jumpy because he feared the loss of her invaluable collaboration post-marriage. In reality, Lawrence’s nerves were our own. Forced to sit nicely through the ceremony, dinner and speeches, he was waiting for revolution.   And revolution came, in this show’s controlled, symmetrical, Kubrickian signature style. With powerful writing and stylish imagery, the Boston Handmaids have revolted and it feels like the beginning of the end for Gilead. That final monologue from June as the women ran out of the Red Center and into the snow could easily have closed out this whole series, but for the fact that we have two episodes still to go, and Hannah still to find. The Handmaid’s Tale season six streams on Tuesdays on Hulu in the US and airs on Saturdays on Channel 4 in the UK. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox!