Did the man rape anyone? Did he, in some small way, deserve this brutal death at the hands of women who had become, at the blow of a whistle, momentary agents of violence? In Gilead, of course, those are the wrong questions to ask: Justice, here, is vertically integrated. And the point of the ceremony, anyway, is not the man but the women who carry out the execution. The Salvagings—the ceremonies’ name, my colleague Sophie Gilbert has noted, suggests both salvation and savagery, notions of heaven mingled with notions of trash—offer a rare moment of freedom for the handmaids who carry them out. Within them, after all, what you do is up to you. For women who have been systematically stripped of their autonomy, it’s a potent promise.

But the Salvagings, as with so much else in the Republic of Gilead, are ceremonies at odds with themselves. The state-sponsored maulings may give the handmaids a brief outlet for their anger and a brief reminder of what power feels like; the rituals also, however, further enslave them. This is the cruel cunning of the ceremony, one that serves the cruel cunning of the state: The Salvaging involves the handmaids, intimately and violently, in the regime’s political project. It insists that the women are active participants in Gilead’s execution of justice. What you do is up to you.

* * *

What makes someone complicit—in a crime, in a moment of violence, in a slow-moving atrocity? Failing to speak? Failing to act? Allowing complacency to take over, until complacency is no longer an option? The Handmaid’s Tale, like the book that inspired it, is on top of so much else a nuanced exploration of all that. Its dystopia exists in the first place, we soon come to learn, because the people of the “before,” as the show’s characters tend to euphemize it, slowly allowed its horrors to come into being through the sum of small complacencies. “It isn’t my decision,” a feckless manager tells his staff as agents of Gilead invade their office, forcing the man to fire his female employees. He is explaining himself—and attempting to exonerate himself. “I didn’t have a choice,” the man insists. “I have to let you go. I have to let you all go.”

It is through that concession that June, one of the man’s employees, eventually becomes Offred—that she loses her own name to the one that understands her only as the possession-of-Fred. (Offred is, as every other name given to the handmaids of Gilead, a patronymic.) The boss is right: He really didn’t, in that moment, have much of a choice. They had guns, and he did not. And yet, the show suggests, he might have had a choice, had he acted earlier. Everyone might have had one. There had been warnings, after all, of what might come, a series of omens people seem to have ignored: a barista in a coffee shop dismissing June and her best friend, Moira, as “sluts”; the woman who would become Aunt Lydia shooting a disgusted glance at the two friends as they run in sports bras and tank tops. But no one resisted, it appears, when the warnings were only warnings. No one thought to speak up, until their power to speak had been taken away. First, they came for the women.