This post contains spoilers for The Handmaid’s Tale Season 2, Episode 10.

One has to imagine that writing for The Handmaid’s Tale requires a high threshold for harrowing material. The Hulu drama depicts a world in which sexual servitude is the norm—a world that increasingly bears a surreal resemblance to our own, as the United States’ diplomatic ties with Canada disintegrate and our government begins routinely separating immigrant children from their parents. But even the most stalwart creatives have limits. According to writer-producer Yahlin Chang, after her colleagues watched this week’s episode—which she wrote—they turned to her and exclaimed, “You’re a monster!”

From the moment it premiered in 2017, The Handmaid’s Tale has had a deep resonance. The show’s creators presumed that their adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian 1985 novel would debut shortly after Hillary Clinton was elected to the presidency—and that their limited series would serve as a cautionary tale about what might have been. Donald Trump’s election upended that notion, transforming the series into an upsetting vision of an all-too-possible future. Handmaid dresses became a rhetorical symbol, worn to marches and sit-ins at Congress. By the end of last year, the drama enjoyed a well-deserved reputation as “important” television, with an Emmy haul to match.

Its audience remains riveted; in May, the show was renewed for a third season after its second-season premiere drew twice as many viewers as Season 1’s. Still, some critics have wondered whether the series goes too far—whether its uncanny, occasionally prophetic mirror image of our own world provides enough meaning to justify sitting through all that misery and violence. Chang, for the record, has heard those criticisms—and has one response to those with doubts: “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.”

“Yes, you’ll have a dark episode—but we’re telling a story,” Chang said in an interview this week. “It’s like a long novel with lots of chapters. You don’t get those huge feelings of triumph and uplift if you don’t have some sort of real honest, how-bad-the-world-gets-to-you moments.”

This week, the world got pretty bad for Offred, née June (Elisabeth Moss). After going into false labor and asking to be relocated to the district where her daughter, Hannah, lives, June found herself at the center of one of the series’s most viscerally disturbing scenes yet: a violent rape in which her Commander, Fred Waterford (Joseph Fiennes), and his wife, Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski) held her down, ravaging her body as they so routinely had in the past—but this time without any veneer of ceremony or duty. Later on, June finally got to see Hannah (Jordana Blake), only to find that her daughter had become a scared, stolid shadow of the happy girl she once knew. Their reunion and their all-too-abrupt goodbye were, in many ways, even more difficult to watch than the rape. Then came the hour’s final blow: Nick (Max Minghella), who had taken June to meet her daughter in secret, was apprehended by Gilead authorities, leaving June stranded at the house and very pregnant as the snow continued to fall.

There is, according to Chang, a straightforward message to take away from this series and all its horrible events: “It’s really wrong to rip children away from their mothers, and it’s really wrong to rape people,” she said. “With this particular episode, I think, those are two messages I would like to hammer home.” She later expanded on that notion with one more pillar, inspired by June’s remarkable resilience and continued devotion to Hannah: “That loves survives is an amazing thing . . . In a gooey way, it’s like love is the most powerful force in the universe, and love survives. And that’s an incredible message. I’m going to add that as my third thing I want people to take away: It’s wrong to rape, wrong to rip kids from their mothers, and that love survives.”