On Nick Blaine, Narrative Betrayal, and the Engineered Silence of a Fandom
This essay was originally posted on the private Osblaine subreddit. I'm posting it here in advance of the upcoming (final) AbovetheGarage podcast meta episode so it's accessible for anyone who wants to read the essay in full.
Spoilers for THT & lots of fan rage below the cut.
Sorry for the essay, but I feel so beside myself and gaslit by the whiplash of this experience that I needed to unload somewhere, and while it feels futile to even try to explain all of my thoughts at this stage, I feel compelled to share where I've landed. I'm so unbelievably down over this, guys. Gutted, as I know all of you are.
Nick Blaine wasnât just killed, he was sacrificed on the altar of The Lessonâ˘. An out-of-nowhere, contextually empty erasure of characterization, meaning, motivation, and continuity, all to teach the audience The Lesson⢠we never asked for or needed to hear.
Nick wasnât given a resolution. He wasnât honored. He wasnât even mourned! Not by the showrunners, writers, cast members, or other charactersâand most painfully, not by the woman who we know loved him so deeply. Instead he was reduced to a message delivery device about evil MAGA Nazi incels or whatever buzzword is currently very popular on Twitter, in the most contrived and unearned narrative fashion possible. Once this utility was fulfilled for the whims of sycophants like Chang/Tuchman/Miller/Moss/Fagbenle et al these people just threw Nick in the trash where they claim he apparently always belonged.
And the worst part is that the show expects us to applaud. It expects us to look at Joseph "Pick three women June the rest die of radiation poisoning" Lawrence, and Serena Joy "But I never thought they'd take MY finger or MY child" Waterford with enormous pride and empathy and understanding. Don't even get me started on Lydia...I have PhD dissertations about that fascinating and deluded narcissist in my comment history, too.
To be clear, I love all these characters flaws and all, they engross me, and it's intriguing watching their dynamics unfold in this often hideous, violent sandbox. But in the end their arguably unnecessary redemptive arcs are heaped with praise and encouragement and the writers bait us with how terribly complicated and brave they are, while substantially less problematic Nick isn't offered the same consideration or forgiveness or grace (and now perhaps never will be) according to that very same moral framework. June herself generally gets a pass as the protagonist, even though she has long been a flagrant thematic and ethical mirror for all the considerable deficiencies we see in the antagonists. So who decides a character's worthiness for redemption or value then, and how? It is simply all SO INCONSISTENT. The framework gives everyone else the space to breathe, err and exist. Whereas for Nick, the framework is solely punitive. Why? Why is this?
Nick's actual unforgivable crimes: folding under Wharton's wall threats three episodes from the finale after YEARS of repeatedly saving June + Nichole's lives and helping them escape, being a lifeline for finding out Hannah's whereabouts, gathering intel for the American intelligence agencies, smuggling contraband to the Jezebels and also to Luke over the border, delivering Fred on a platter so June and the other handmaids could rip him apart, executing other wicked Commanders for their violence against vulnerable women....just a sample of his awful deeds. Keeping in mind that all of thirteen and a half minutes ago in the show's timeline he risked it all and was forced to murder two teenaged boys in broad daylight during a highly scrutinized diplomatic event, to save June's fucking idiot husband.
I'm so utterly baffled that I don't even know how to unpack the stupidity of the choices these writers have made. We are all such brain-dead slop consumers that a recent magazine interview had Chang confirming Nick's many atrocities, none of which are ever shown on screen or even alluded to in the dialog but which she assures us DEFINITELY happened, A LOT (trust me bro). This little blurb is apparently sufficient evidence for the narrative to unceremoniously dispose of Nick, his legacy, and all he meant to us. Have you ever heard of a TV show whose narrative coherence literally requires supplemental reading materials? It's fine. Just eat the slop you fucking morons. Eat it and like it.
This isnât tragedy, this is didacticism. This is when a writer's room decides that making a point is more important than telling a good story. When characters stop being human and start being metaphors. When you trade nuance for shock, ambiguity for ideology, and call it brave.
Nick Blaine meant something to me. I saw myself in him. I saw my own passivity in himâI also saw my capacity for great bravery and connection in him. He was kind, vulnerable, morally gray, emotionally grounded, deeply tethered to June and thus to me, the viewer, experiencing her world. He was human. His gentleness, his love for June and Nichole was such a vital counterpoint to the monstrous cruelty of Gilead. But rather than explore that complexity and offer him the obvious arc his character had earned, the show retconned him literally at the finish line, flattened him, eliminated all of his human dimensions. At the end I actually laughedâhorribly, in grotesque & amazed outrageâlike these writers were saying to me, Hey idiot, he was the real baddie all along, believe us that he deserved this, we're the experts. And thought I would just gleefully swallow this and lap it the fuck up. I'm not exaggerating: I legitimately don't think any of them watched the show in its entirety before they sat down to write this season.
Narrative cohesion and character continuity was clearly not their focus, why? Because message-driven media no longer trusts its audience to feel anything honestly. It has to teach us. To scold us. And if a character has to die in an embarrassingly hamfisted way so we can 'learn' something about the cost of love, or the futility of hope, or that there's actually NO GOOD MEN ANYWHERE unless they are played by Bradley Whitford, or the strength of a woman alone and any romance be damned, then so be it. Our fault. We watched it wrong. Silly females with our silly hopes and love stories and delusions.
This is not storytelling. This is narrative punishment, and poorly disguised moral performance art. I half expected the episode to be dedicated to All The Antifascists Out There On The Right Side of History Like Us when the end credits rolled. Story? Nah. Preachy lesson for dumbass audience who can't think for themselves? Hell yeah. Nick exits stage left as a convenient device for the showrunners to serve up as a pawn in their thematic chess game, designed wholly to teach the audience The Lessonâ˘. He was the sacrificial lamb for their bizarre in-script anti-Nazi rhetoric (so overt it was cringe-inducing, and included for whom? all those Nazis gleefully tuning in to THT every week?) This conclusion is the final heart monitor flatlining after a long meandering decline of the show's earlier great writing.
It's not edgy or profound to gut a characterâs arc for shock value. Youâre not feminist or radical for flattening moral complexity into black-and-white symbols. It's an absolute mess of lazy, trite metaphors for THE CURRENT TIMES, this story is IMPORTANT and RELEVANT! And Hi, writers? We also live in the world???? God, it's so patronizing. It's so condescending. I'm so exhausted from this cheap process of demoralization.
And I looked around for the outrage and confusion and anger that should have echoed across the fandom and instead I saw silence. Sanitized comment sections. Applause from brand-friendly fan accounts with lots of emojis and lots of "OMG LAWRENCE PUTTING HIS HAND TO HIS CHEST đ !!!!!" The algorithm drowning dissent like itâs inconvenient noise. Entire social media posts being deleted out of nowhere.
This isnât fandom, and hasn't been an organic one since streaming took over the market, or even before. Itâs narrative control via PR management and we are all witnessing manufactured consent in real time. I'm not trying to be dramatic or cynical, it's just the truth. This is how it works now. Delivering twisty shock content drives up engagement on platforms, and tracking that engagement data is an enormous factor when OTT platforms are considering each season-to-season renewal. But man is it still disheartening and mundane to see it happening after so many years of stupidly giving a shit.
The emotional response to this episode should have been explosive fury and instead we get this eerie illusion of consensus, because anything that challenges The Lesson⢠and inversely How Good They The Holy Virtuous Writers Are As People For Teaching It To Us Deluded Plebs gets buried or deleted. They want you and I to feel alone in our bewilderment, and to doubt our own perceptions of the show we've been watching and analyzing for an eon straightâit makes them feel better about the god-awful job they have done in the hopes they win some meaningless self-congratulatory accolades at the Emmys. And if you dare to feel betrayed or express that, youâre told youâre missing the point and somehow have been for an entire decade along with the majority of the fanbase with two eyes and a functioning brain in their skulls. It's so absurd it's almost satire. Someday it will be satire I think. But this is how it is right now, and I'm telling you, it's entirely on purpose.
To the writers, showrunners, social media managers + Hulu press interns:
I see exactly what you did, and what you are currently doing to manage the fallout.
You killed a beloved character not for plot or for truth or to honestly serve the story's natural conclusion, but for theater and for social media engagement. For a moral takeaway. For prestige TV applause. And worseâfor the proud, smug, holier-than-thou sniffles of liberal feminists who require all media to pander to the current political 'thing' rather than just telling a good goddamn story. Congrats, the whole IP has been permanently ruined by this type of short-sighted shallow garbage and will never recover its early reputation. This could have been a timeless piece of television with some hiccups; now it will forever remain a preachy manipulative product of one particular era. An ode to our fragile cultural psyche and its associated political catchphrases and ego interference. It's limp and it's finished, like GOT was at the end. No one will care or remember or rewatch this trauma-porn soap opera when all its nuance and ambiguity and soft edges have been snuffed out in the most incomprehensible way. THT will be forgotten, like every other show before it that has gone on too long only to totally blow it in the last inning. The Testaments is probably dead in the water too, and will be canceled lightning fast without a doubt if this tripe is any indication of this team's ability to go meaningfully off-book. It gets proven over and over and over again with zero room for doubt that audiences don't like to be lectured and morally grandstanded to, but here we are yet again.
In conclusion, this absolute swill is what happens when writers try to write at the audience rather than for the characters.
Nick Blaine somehow became the worst villain amongst these brutal, sadistic people, all the social architects, economists, rapists, abusers, traffickers, slave-owners, murderers. Not because he was actually always that way 'off-screen' of course, but because the people who were compelled time and again to watch his complex character evolve and grow had to be taught The Lessonâ˘. Nick Nazi, Nick Complicit, Nick Evil Forever, Nick Dies A Coward, durrrrr. Just stop. Stop caring! Just eat our slop. They turned a living, breathing character (who we loved and puzzled over for years and paid their bills to spend time with) into a morality lecture to tell you how goddamn dumb you are, they replaced his arc with a sermon and then expected us to clap.
But Iâm not clapping. Iâm grieving. Because it's all just such an awful, incredible waste.
I'm grieving the time and energy I've wasted on a product that the creators stopped caring about and lost interest in understanding. Iâm grieving a character who mattered more than this, and a profoundly loving relationship that moved my heart amidst all of that darkness, and a story that once knew how to hold pain with complexity instead of turning it into hollow, curated shock.
They didnât write an ending, they wrote a manipulative virtue signal to make fools out of all of us who actually dared to give a shit. I won't pretend that it's important art with something to say, and I will never again give them the benefit of my dollars, attention or engagement.
