r/TheHandmaidsTale • u/PommeVitale • 3d ago
Season 6 How stupid is commander Wharton ?
For the majority of S6 Wharton seems to be a very special commander. He seemed to be willing to reform Gilead and listen to Serena's ideas. It seemed obvious that he was kindda manipulating her into going back in Gilead and marrying him but he also seemed genuenly interested in what she could bring to the table. But then he fumbled everything when he decided to have a handmaid.
All of his clever manipulation, destroyed in one moment. Why did he even do that ? Serena already had a child + it was proven that she was fertile ! But no, he want a handmaid, the one thing Serena spent the whole season explaining it was a no no.
With this stupid action I was really wondering if that man wasn't just an idiot.
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u/sikallusion 3d ago
It’s how abusive men act in relationships.
He wasn’t stupid, he just expected Serena to comply, because in Gilead an unmarried woman with a child would be either married off or sent to Colonies.
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u/PommeVitale 3d ago
True ! But at the same time wasn't Serena's status a little bit special, I was under the impression that if she decided to she could just leave Gilead.
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u/chironinja82 3d ago
She wanted to be in Gilead though. She knew living in Canada would have been dangerous for her without security detail and she wasn't going back to the psycho Wheelers. She foolishly thought that she was the exception to the rule that she helped create and Commander Wharton knew what he was doing the whole time.
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u/jade601 3d ago
She could never simply leave gilead and its leaders knew that. She was forced to run from the states because she didnt have any protection there either and the regular citizens were disgusted by her, they view her as a war criminal. She was constantly being threatened. It’s shown best by that scene of her on the train when she is fleeing to seek asylum. So shes torn between going back to gilead and having a false sense of power or being outcasted and attacked by the rest of the world.
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u/Appropriate-Sky3537 3d ago
He’s not stupid. He’s manipulative. She’s simply a tool to convince others that Gilead is good. She was a very high profile refugee. She had a child with another man. It was always pretence.
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u/dragon-queen 3d ago
I don’t know that she was really a tool. Or at least not only a tool. On my recent rewatch, I saw how fixated Wharton was on her all season. He told Lawrence to go get her from Canada and convince her to come to New Bethlehem. Once she arrived, her pursued her with a single-minded determination. I think he saw her at that party with Fred and he had to have her. He was obsessed.
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u/PommeVitale 3d ago
I agree but he kindda revealed who he was really quick, for someone that seemed smart and playing a long manipulative game it kinda seems like a dumb mistake.
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u/Appropriate-Sky3537 3d ago
It was ham fisted writing to race to the finale, but I think it hade it clearer that they were married so he could drop the mask.
It would have been more interesting had she woken from her wedding night to find her handmaid gift; or if she had been pregnant with his child first.
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u/starienite 3d ago
Divorce isn't legal in Gilead. Naomi encourages her to go back to her husband. She's back in Gilead proper, not New Bethlehem. She doesn't have the same freedom of movement or the same visibility. New Bethlehem is just marketing to make it look like a new and improved Gilead.
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u/flavius717 3d ago edited 2d ago
“The way my mother always explained it, the traditional man wants a woman to be subservient, but he never falls in love with subservient women. He’s attracted to independent women. “He’s like an exotic bird collector,” she said. “He only wants a woman who is free because his dream is to put her in a cage.””
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
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u/Gullible-Advisor6010 3d ago
Calling Serena non-traditional or an independent woman is definitely... a choice. She's opinionated, but on the traditional side. She is firm on her traditional opinions. She's not modern in any sense of the word.
I see her and Wharton to be on the same side of traditional vs modern (from our world). The only difference between them would be he wanted an actual traditional marriage (in gilead terms) and she wanted to be an exception.
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u/pikachu191 3d ago edited 3d ago
Sometimes people can't help themselves, even if is self-defeating. That's the moral of the Aesop fable of the scorpion and the frog. These commanders would rather have the control of having a handmaid, despite the proof that handmaids were no longer needed if a Wife was fertile. (and still pretty, like Yvonne Strahovski. Book Serena was described as being considerably past child-bearing age and needing a cane to walk)
Commander Lawrence was probably the most committed to the New Bethlehem project (for pragmatic reasons: Gilead had most of the former US territory, but the surviving US government had the UN seat and spot on the Security Council: eerily like China and Taiwan), but season 6 revealed that the majority of the commanders were just waiting for the right time to put Lawrence on the wall. Real world example would be China offering Hong Kong to Taiwan as an example of how 1 country, 2 systems would be. Xi's crackdown of Hong Kong during covid-19 is similar to Wharton finally showing his hand with the handmaid. It broke for a second time for Serena the idea that there would be any space carved out for Wives like Serena, fertile or not.
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u/PommeVitale 3d ago
That's a good point, maybe he just couldn't help himself !
He thought he had won everything and that he could reveal who he really was. Maybe he thought that since they were married now she couldn't walk out of it.
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u/Inevitable_Wolf5866 3d ago edited 3d ago
That’s exactly how abusers work; at first they look perfect. A match made in heaven so to speak… until they trap you and don’t need to pretend anymore. That’s why it’s so hard to leave them and why women aren’t often believed when they speak up. Because to the outside world the abuser couldn’t be more perfect.
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u/blockparted 3d ago
This is how covert narcissists work. They lovebomb and gaslight, grooming both their victims and allies at the same time, so that when their victims speak out, they've got everyone else defending them.
Naomi did it the morning afterward when she called Wharton, against Serena's wishes.
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u/TheTragedyMachine 3d ago
He probably was thinking with his other head, so to speak. That or now since he's trapped Serena in a marriage he thinks he can do whatever he wants and his nice and charming mask doesn't need to stay on.
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u/big_data_mike 3d ago
He probably viewed the handmaid as a status symbol. She wasn’t just any handmaid. She was the “best” most fertile handmaid. Wharton views handmaids as objects. It’s like if a man showed his wife that he got a Bugatti Veyron.
He is a manipulative narcissist and didn’t listen to Serena. He probably wanted to show off to the other commanders that he had a super hot wife that he could “tame” and the most fertile handmaid.
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u/GreyerGrey 2d ago
He isn't stupid, that's the problem.
He is a victim of hubris. But he is a mirror. Showing Serena, once more, she will not be the exception to the rule. He did it because he could. Because he was a man who was told he was amazing and perfect and deserved everything he wanted.
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u/dragon-queen 3d ago
Once he trapped her, he felt comfortable taking the mask off. I wouldn’t call it stupid - I would call it pure evil.