The Handmaid’s Tale Season 5 has kicked off on Hulu, and in the first two episodes pick up essentially right where Season 4 left off. Fans will remember that the final episode of the previous season gave some pretty serious finality to at least one character, the fate of many others was left up in the air. Spoilers ahead for the first two episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale Season 5:
While June (Elizabeth Olsen) is in Canada dealing with the fallout from Commander Waterford’s death, her friend Janine (Madeline Brewer) — previously believed to be dead — is back under the watch of Aunt Lydia in Gilead. During an exclusive interview with Brewer, ahead of the two-episode season premiere, the actress noted that she thinks of Janine as being feline-esque with nine lives. “That’s very much my Janine,” she said. “That resonates very heavily. I think she’s a cat. I think that she’s a jungle cat.” Quoting Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Brewer added, “I think that Janine is a very powerful… ‘Though she be but little, she is fierce.’ That’s my Janine feeling.”
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Addressing all the trauma Janine has faced over the show’s now-five seasons, Brewer explained, “There are things that have happened to Janine over the course of the last, especially the last two seasons, that have really changed her.” She noted that this has led the character to be more of a guardian than we’ve seen from her in the past, saying, “And that she wouldn’t be who she is now, of course, in this fifth season, and take on the role that she does take on with Esther (Mckenna Grace), if it weren’t for her time spent with June. I think that she recognizes that there is a void without June there. I think she knows very well, very intimately that you cannot survive this without June, without a June. I think that she sees that she needs to be June to help these girls.”
Brewer continued, “I think it’s so true. She’s not hardened. She’s just, she’s grounded.” Brewer noted that Janine “used to be” the one who had her head in the clouds, “and she could, because June was the brave one. June was the grounded one. But now, she needs to be the grounded one.”
In the second episode of Season 5, Janine has a reunion with Naomi Putnam, whose home she had been previously assigned to as a handmaid. Here, she gave birth to child fathered by Naomi’s husband, Commander Putnam. Regarding Janine’s state of being in the moment, Brewer said, “She’s very at trepidatious around Naomi. It’s a constant state of… also, Naomi can be a little mercurial. And it’s just left up to Naomi’s whim whether or not she’s going to allow Janine to really interact with the baby.”
It is notable that in this scene Janine puts an intentional emphasis on asking her baby for a hug, which stands out amidst a story where non-consent is a staple of how Gilead functions. “I think she does have an element of consent,” Brewer explained, “but also because she does always have to make sure that she’s not doing something wrong, something punishable, something that will get her daughter taken away from her. Or her daughter’s already been taken away, but taken further away. Unable to see her.”
