Gilead struggles to return to normal while June rebels in the most ordinary of ways in The Handmaid’s Tale season 2, episode 7.

It’s a sign of how impossibly grim The Handmaid’s Tale is that episode 7 — which begins with a mass funeral — is actually something of an upper. By the end of another painful hour, things feel… almost hopeful. Almost normal.

The women of Gilead are taking control.

Yes, the episode, titled “After,” is preoccupied with murdered women. (Even more than usual for The Handmaid’s Tale.) There are the victims of Ofglen’s suicide bomb, the murder of two innocent Marthas, the sad and mysterious death of Moira’s fiancee Odette. Everywhere you look, women have had their choices and their lives taken from them, violently.

But it is of this very same blood-drenched soil that new potential begins to sprout. Gilead tries to bleed its women dry, but they are, quite literally, the vital fluid of its function. The wounds inflicted by Ofglen are not staunched by zealous men in uniform. Instead, it is Serena and June who — for wildly contrasting reasons — pick up the gory baton and begin to set matters back, as Serena says, to “normal.”

“Normal,” of course, is exactly what Gilead tries and fails to achieve throughout the episode; The Handmaid’s Tale season 2, episode 7 plays almost like a demonstration of basic physics. With critical pieces out of commission (like Commander Waterford) or removed entirely (like Commander Price), Gilead teeters on a fine point, desperate to regain its brutal equilibrium. The system, now represented by the zealous Commander Cushing, rushes to staunch the bleeding and re-establish order with more violence, more surveillance… and a retreat into increasingly rigid ritual.

The Handmaids’ funeral is a perfect example. This performance is elaborate even for Gilead, choreographed mourning in a careful dance complete with inverted costumes. As perfect and sure as June and her fellow Handmaids are in their movements, the whole thing reeks of insecurity, of rituals replacing the Commanders’ actual power. The same can be said for a much uglier performance later in the episode — the retrieval of fertile women like Emily and Jeanine from the Colonies. Does Gilead really need to restock its Handmaids that badly, or is it dipping into the store of unrepentant sinners so that the men in charge can feel normal again?

Conversely, the question of normalcy and active women also rises in Canada, with Moira and Luke taking opposite stances on the subject. Luke has resigned himself to the new normal, in which his wife is a sexual slave in a dangerous kingdom. The news that Handmaids have been killed in the Red Center bombing seems not to phase him; alive or dead, June is not okay, and Luke seems to have run out of the energy for anxiety.

Moira however, as season 2 of The Handmaid’s Tale has previously demonstrated, is anything but comfortable in the new Canadian normal. Her impotent worry for June turns her down another futile road, paging through binders of unidentified American corpses until she finds her murdered girlfriend.

It’s a story that might feel gratuitously tragic (especially as it is coupled with the memory of her surrogate pregnancy) except for the fact that it fits beautifully into the themes of “After.” The birth of Moira’s son is not the goading factor here; rather, it is the loss of ordinary life (and the loss of life) compels these women to action like it does not move their male counterparts.

But at least Luke empathizes with Moira, and supports her in her pain. Back in Gilead, the men are (for better and worse) considerably less helpful. Commander Fred rouses from his coma just enough to continue creeping on June’s progressing pregnancy (bleeeech) while the ascendent Cushing wages holy war on anyone or anything who remotely compromises the ideals of Gilead.

The state’s bared teeth and claws make an impact, as the murdered Marthas would attest, but their power is brittle. It takes surprisingly little effort on June’s part to nudge Serena into covert action (probably because, whether or not she’ll admit it to herself, Serena has been waiting for just such an opportunity.) With Nick’s helpful complicity, Serena neatly arranges for Commander Cushing’s downfall, and enlists Offred in returning their lives to her own version of normal.

In Gilead though, normal is a function of rebellion, whether or not Serena knows this. June does; her major act of defiance in The Handmaid’s Tale season 2, episode 7 restores the most basic and subtle signifiers of the Handmaids’ humanity. She tells Emily her real name, and triggers a cascade of Handmaids engaging joyfully in the utterly mundane ritual of introduction.

It’s a powerful moment with roots throughout the episode — the recitation of the fallen Handmaids’ Gilead names is echoed with their real names back in Canada, Moira searches pages of nameless bodies, lost in the memory of learning Odette’s name — but ultimately the impromptu ritual is most significant in its almost invisible audacity.

Almost invisible; Nick’s wife Eden notices, to as yet unknown effect. And the branding of Gilead has not evaporated, no matter how eagerly June begins to write, or how authoritatively Serena takes her place behind Fred’s desk. The pen with which June begins her new (and old) work is, not accidentally, red — the awful normal of Gilead still holds some power… at least for now.