The Handmaid’s Tale Season 4 Episode 1: June Loses The Truth On Her Side

Full spoilers for The Handmaid’s Tale Season 4 premiere, Episode 1, “Pigs.”

The Handmaid’s Tale Season 4 premiere, “Pigs,” is about the moment June starts losing the truth on her side.

That does not mean Gilead is right. Let’s not get silly. Gilead is still a nightmare factory built on ritualized rape, stolen children, religious fascism, and enough patriarchal nonsense to make Aunt Lydia look at a flowchart and say, “Maybe we could simplify this.”

But “Pigs” is not asking whether Gilead deserves punishment.

Of course it does.

The harder question is whether June is still serving justice — or whether justice has become the story she tells herself so revenge can feel holy.

That is where this Season 4 premiere gets interesting. June is injured, hidden, protected, and surrounded by women who trust her. She has survived the Season 3 finale. She has become a resistance symbol. She has the moral glow of Angel’s Flight still hanging around her like a halo.

And then she puts a knife in a child’s hand and tells her to make her proud.

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What Happens In The Handmaid’s Tale Season 4 Episode 1, “Pigs”?

In “Pigs,” June survives the gunshot wound from the Season 3 finale and is taken to a Mayday safe house at the Keyes farm. The other Handmaids are there with her, temporarily hidden from Gilead and trying to figure out what comes next.

The farm is not exactly peaceful. It belongs to Commander Keyes and his young wife, Esther Keyes, a teenage girl trapped inside one of Gilead’s most quietly horrifying arrangements. Esther is angry, unstable, traumatized, and difficult to read. She is helping June and the Handmaids, but she also brings a volatile energy into the house.

Meanwhile, Commander Lawrence survives his own judgment in Gilead, Canada deals with the political consequences of Angel’s Flight, and the larger question of whether Gilead might retaliate against Canada starts moving in the background.

But the emotional center of “Pigs” is June and Esther.

After learning what Esther has endured, June decides that one of the men connected to her abuse deserves to die. The man’s crimes are monstrous. Esther’s rage is understandable. June’s anger is understandable. The desire to see him punished makes perfect emotional sense.

But the way June gets there is the problem.

She does not just punish him. She turns Esther into the weapon.

Why Pigs Is About Justice And Revenge

One of my favorite guilty pleasures as a film and TV critic is watching other critics talk about film, especially Ryan George and his “Pitch Meetings.” They are funny, well thought out, and usually call out the quirky oddities that make a movie or show work, or completely fall apart.

I mention that because it is all I kept thinking about while watching “Pigs.” I could practically see Bruce Miller walking into Hulu’s offices to pitch Season 4.

June is hurt, but she escapes Gilead and tries to take it down from the outside.

Does that sound familiar?

It should, because that is basically how last season started.

But this time, instead of June doing the killing herself, she has a nearly prepubescent teenager do the killing for her.

Wow, wow, wow.

Does that mean the episode is bad? No. I actually like The Handmaid’s Tale. As always, it is beautifully shot, well acted, and filled with patient, unsettling sequences that most shows would kill to have. But “Pigs” also puts the show’s biggest moral tension right on the table.

June wants justice.

June also wants revenge.

And the episode asks whether those two things are still separable for her.

June Used To Have The Truth On Her Side

There is an incredible scene in Battlestar Galactica, in the episode “Blood on the Scales,” when Felix Gaeta realizes the mutiny he believed was righteous has curdled into something monstrous.

Gaeta and Tom Zarek try to overthrow William Adama and Laura Roslin because they believe the fleet is being led in the wrong direction. Their plan is flawed, but Gaeta thinks there is truth in the cause. Then Zarek murders the representatives from each ship to consolidate power.

Afterward, Gaeta screams at him: “We had the truth on our side.”

That is the line I kept coming back to with June.

For most of The Handmaid’s Tale, June has had the truth on her side. Even when she made reckless choices, even when people around her got hurt, even when the plot bent itself into a pretzel to keep her alive, there was still a foundational truth underneath her rebellion.

She was trying to survive.

She was trying to save Hannah.

She was trying to protect Nichole.

She was trying to get children out of Gilead.

But in “Pigs,” that truth starts to slip. June is no longer only fighting for escape, rescue, or protection. She is starting to fight because she wants Gilead to hurt.

And that is not the same thing.

Who Is Mrs. Keyes In The Handmaid’s Tale?

Mrs. Esther Keyes is one of the most important new characters in the Season 4 premiere. She is a teenage wife living at the farm where June and the Handmaids are hiding after Angel’s Flight.

She is also a warning sign.

Esther is young, furious, traumatized, and trapped inside a role Gilead forced on her. Bringing her into the story gives the Handmaids temporary shelter, but it also gives the episode instability. They may be safe for the moment, but Esther is not calm. She is not healed. She is not simply a sweet child victim waiting to be rescued.

She is a person Gilead has damaged.

That makes her sympathetic. It also makes her dangerous.

By the end of the episode, June makes Esther culpable in the same violence June has been carrying. She asks her to kill one of the men who abused her. June frames it as righteous. She frames it as Mayday. She frames it as the girls fighting back.

But the question remains:

Is June helping Esther reclaim power, or is June using Esther’s pain to feed her own need for vengeance?

Is Commander Keyes Good Or Bad?

Commander Keyes is not good. Let’s clear that up right away.

The episode frames him and the men around him as part of Gilead’s abusive power structure. They are connected to Esther’s suffering. The crimes are awful. The anger directed toward them is completely understandable.

That is why the scene works emotionally. We are not being asked to sympathize with the abuser. We are being asked to sit with the discomfort of punishment.

I think we as viewers want the Eye executed. We can even convince ourselves that Esther being the executioner feels appropriate because of what she has suffered. As Esther notes, “wives have bad things too,” and we believe her because we have seen what happens to women inside Gilead, even women who technically have status.

But just because we want justice to be served does not mean it should be served this way.

That is the nerve “Pigs” keeps pressing.

June Starts Sounding Like Aunt Lydia

The most chilling moment in “Pigs” comes when June puts the knife in Esther’s hands and says, “We are Mayday. We don’t hide. We fight, and in this place, we all fight.”

That is already unsettling.

Then June whispers, “Make me proud.”

Oof.

That is the line that turns the whole scene. June is not simply giving Esther permission to act. She is blessing the violence. She is turning the murder into initiation. She is taking a child who has been abused by Gilead and giving her a new ritual of obedience under the banner of resistance.

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And what makes it worse is how familiar the language feels.

June tells the girls that this man betrayed his country, that he is a traitor, that he raped a child, and that the punishment for those crimes is death. Again, the facts may be true. The crimes may be monstrous. But the structure of the moment feels disturbingly close to Aunt Lydia.

Does this not feel reminiscent of Lydia forcing the Handmaids to stone one of their own?

If that did not feel right then, why should June’s version feel right now?

Yes, the targets are different. Yes, the moral context is different. Yes, Gilead’s crimes are real. But the mechanism is starting to rhyme: gather the girls, declare the crime, name the punishment, turn violence into group participation, and call it righteousness.

That is not nothing.

That is the show telling us June is walking into very dangerous territory.

June’s Fight Is Becoming Something Darker

June is on a fascinating character journey defined by fear, anger, hatred, and self-loathing.

From the moment we met her, she has been subjected to terrible conditions. Gilead has gaslit her, tortured her, abused her, and stripped her life down to survival. Of course we understand why she wants Gilead to bleed.

Honestly, we want it too.

That is what makes this uncomfortable.

The issue June faces now is that her motives are no longer necessarily about escaping to freedom, saving Hannah, protecting Nichole, or getting children to safety. Her motivation is becoming simpler and more terrifying.

She wants to inflict pain on Gilead.

That desire opens a lot of dark doors, and one of those doors is asking Esther Keyes to kill for her.

There was always a certain level of truth on June’s side, regardless of the means she used to achieve her endgame. But now she empowers a young woman to murder another man in the name of revenge. Is that just? Is that something for us to root for? Does that make June just as bad as Aunt Lydia?

I do not think the answer is simple.

But I do think “Pigs” wants us to feel the question.

Commander Lawrence And The Premiere’s Best Subversion

One of the strongest pieces of “Pigs” is the Commander Lawrence sequence.

I felt legitimate tension as Lawrence walked toward what seemed like a torture chamber. Nick has already relayed the bad results of Lawrence’s off-screen trial, and the episode lets us sit in Lawrence’s uncertainty. We do not know exactly what is going to happen to him. He does not know either.

Then the show reveals the opposite of what we expect.

He is getting a shave.

That is good subversion. We did not need to see the trial or every political detail around it. What matters is Lawrence’s perspective of the trial, what it means to him, and his ultimate fate. We are just as clueless as he is, and that tension is unsettling.

The scene is a reminder that The Handmaid’s Tale can still be extremely effective when it slows down and lets character perspective drive the experience.

Gilead, Canada, And The Fallout From Angel’s Flight

The other unsettling thread is the macro tension between Gilead and Canada.

Will there be an invasion because the children were sent to Canada and those good ol’ Canucks are not giving them back? What does that mean for the characters we have been following in New America?

Those people escaped Gilead’s reach, but there is also a sense that not much is happening there except people talking about June’s actions inside Gilead. So introducing a larger international conflict is an interesting turn.

The challenge is that the Canada material often feels less urgent than the Gilead material. June is bleeding, hiding, manipulating, and escalating. Canada is dealing with the consequences from a distance.

That contrast can work, but only if the show makes the consequences feel as personal as the violence.

That is the lane Season 4 needs to keep exploring: not just what June does, but what June’s choices do to everyone else.

The Plot Armor Problem Is Still Here

This is where the fatal flaw of The Handmaid’s Tale starts to shine through the veneer of beautifully shot and patient sequences.

The show had its best chance to tell a brave, bold story when it could have killed June in the Season 3 finale. Instead, The Handmaid’s Tale planted its flag firmly in June territory. As such, nothing can really happen to her.

Sure, June can get shot. She can deliver a baby on her own. She can be tortured. She can suffer. But she cannot die.

The show is too invested in June’s story to create real tension around her fate.

So when “Pigs” begins with a Mayday safe house, am I surprised? No. The show needs June to live, and it needs a place for her to heal. So the narrativium provides a safe house that just so happens to be close by, has a clueless Commander, and includes a wife who hates her existence.

When June is suffering during the healing process, or when the episode casts doubt on Esther’s allegiance, I know nothing of real consequence will happen to June directly. The show has to introduce new characters, new settings, and new dramatic choices that affect June tangentially instead.

That is why Esther kills the Eye.

She provides the dramatic tension June’s plot armor cannot.

Why Pigs Matters For Season 4

Essentially, Bruce Miller has run out of ways to keep June from either escaping Gilead completely or being stuck in total captivity, so the show keeps recycling the narrative.

Do not be surprised when June is inevitably caught again because of Esther Keyes, or when Nick somehow finds a way to bring her back in to keep her alive, just as he helped Commander Lawrence. At which point, June will have to escape again and take out a bunch of Eyes along the way.

Again, does this mean The Handmaid’s Tale is a bad show?

No.

It is just stuck in a cycle because it has to keep the story moving while keeping June surrounded with enough plot armor to make Jon Snow blush. Until that plot armor is ripped off, expect to keep seeing the same stuff with different faces and circumstances.

But “Pigs” still matters because it gives Season 4 its central moral question:

What happens when June’s fight against Gilead starts using Gilead’s logic?

That is the story worth following.

Because June used to have the truth on her side.

In “Pigs,” that truth starts to slip.