commander lawrence deserved better
just finished rewatching THT and listen! i know he helped build gilead. i know he has blood on his hands and that doesn’t just disappear because he eventually started doing the right thing. but that’s exactly why i think he’s one of the best written characters in the entire show. he isn’t redeemed because the writers tell us he is he’s redeemed because we slowly watch him remember that people arent numbers. beneath all his sarcasm and superiority was a man who just loved his wife and watching eleanor slowly crumble under a world HE helped create kinda felt like a punishment he could never escape.
one of my favourite scenes is when he gives naomi the book for angela. it’s such a small thing but it says everything about who he’s become. earlier in the show he toys with june by asking her to fetch him books she isn’t even allowed to read and later he’s handing over a book simply because children deserve stories. and it feels enormous because it’s lawrence finally choosing humanity over ideology. the same man who once hid behind cleverness starts using his intelligence to protect people instead.
his relationship with june is one of my favourites in the series because it never becomes comfy for either of them. she hates him and challenges him (honestly she has every right to!!) but over time they develop this strange understanding of each other. june never lets him forget what he’s done and lawrence never asks her to. instead they become reluctant allies who are constantly pushing each other to be better. neither of them can fully forgive the other but they still choose to keep fighting together.
and that’s why his ending really hit for me (unlike nick who totally deserved it imo). he dies trying to leave gilead better than he found it not because he expected forgiveness but because i think he’d finally accepted that redemption isn’t something you’re given but something you spend the rest of your life working towards. he knew history would probably remember him as one of gilead’s architects and not one of the people who helped dismantle it. but he kept going anyway. for a man who started the story treating people like pieces on a chessboard, ending it by sacrificing himself for people he’d grown to love felt like the most fitting and heartbreaking ending he could have had!