Serena Joy Waterford: One of Modern TV’s most complex female characters
In a TV landscape full of moustache-twirling bad guys and femme fatales with tragic backstories, The Handmaid’s Tale serves up something infinitely more complicated: Serena Joy Waterford. A woman who is both a victim and an architect of her own oppression. A villain you despise—then pity—then maybe, just maybe, root for. She’s a slow-burn character study in cognitive dissonance, repression, and rage, and honestly? She might be one of the most interesting villains modern television has given us. As we dive headlong into the show’s final season, let’s unpick this incredible character.
Serena isn’t your typical antagonist. She’s not evil for evil’s sake. She’s a true believer. And that’s way more dangerous.
Before Gilead, Serena was a powerful figure in the movement that helped bring the regime to life. She wrote books. Delivered speeches. Helped design the very laws that would later strip women of their autonomy. And then—bam. The ink dries, the coup succeeds, and suddenly she’s no longer a policymaker. She’s a “wife.” Which, in Gilead, is just a pretty way of saying: woman with no power, plenty of embroidery, and a front-row seat to a world she can’t participate in anymore.
It’s deliciously ironic. Serena, who literally wrote part of the law that banned women from reading, now has to play dumb and domestic while her husband pontificates about scripture and statecraft. You can see her seething under that perfect blonde hairdo. She’s brilliant, educated, and drowning in a system that rewards her male peers with autonomy and backroom brothels while she gets finger-cutting and forced silence. Fred Waterford hits it on the head when he says, “Better never means better for everyone.” In Gilead, “better” means freedom for men and shackles—sometimes literal ones—for women.
But what makes Serena fascinating isn’t just that she’s trapped in her own creation. It’s how she reacts to it. She oscillates between complicit enforcer and reluctant prisoner. One moment she’s sipping tea and saying all the right things with a tight smile. The next, she’s smashing objects or slapping June across the face. Fred is the calm, smiling mask of the household—but Serena is its clenched jaw and barely-contained fury. Her rage is always bubbling just beneath the surface, and when it erupts, it’s both terrifying and deeply human.
What’s even more compelling is that Serena has moments of startling clarity. She knows Gilead is a nightmare. She helped build it, but she didn’t expect it to treat her like a second-class citizen. And in her own twisted way, she suffers. She sacrifices. She lets June escape with baby Nichole—the child Serena longed for more than anything—because on some level, she understands. This place isn’t safe for children, and certainly not for girls.
As the series evolves, so does Serena. She betrays Fred. She gets imprisoned. She discovers she’s pregnant—naturally, no less, which sends shockwaves through a world where fertility is currency. She tries to reconnect with June. (Poorly. Selfishly. But still.) And when she’s given a chance to kill June, she doesn’t. She turns her weapon on a man instead.
The biggest gut punch? After Fred’s death, Serena winds up in a Gilead-lite household where she’s suddenly on the receiving end of the same patronising treatment she dished out for years. It’s poetic. It’s brutal. It’s deserved. And it might just be the beginning of her redemption.
In the Season 5 finale, Serena escapes with her baby. She boards a train—and who should be there but June. The woman she tormented. The woman she betrayed. And the woman who, inexplicably, helps her. It’s a full-circle moment, one that dangles the possibility of change in front of us like a forbidden apple. It leaves us desperate for a completion of Serena’s arc in the final season. She’s not a character who deserves happiness, or absolution. But she deserves a conclusion, a chance to right some wrongs.
Serena Joy Waterford is not a hero. She’s not a feminist icon. But she is a masterclass in character complexity. She’s rage and repression. Love and cruelty. Faith and fear. A woman undone by her own vision—and maybe, finally, starting to reckon with what she’s done.
In the world of Gilead, no one gets out clean. But if there’s one thing Serena’s story proves, it’s that even the sharpest architects can be trapped in the houses they build.
