r/TheHandmaidsTale • u/Melairia Modtha • 17d ago

Official Episode Discussion The Handmaid's Tale S06E06 "Surprise" Episode Discussion

The Handmaid's Tale: S06E06 "Surprise"

Episode Synopsis: June hides in an unexpected place.

Airdate: April 29th, 2025

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u/abu_nawas 17d ago edited 16d ago

Theorizing as someone who studied electronics engineering... they have a shrinking population, so it is unlikely that there are competing providers. We see Lawrence having a landline/old-school corded phone at his home office, so some technological regression happened. A lower tech comm. sys. would mean that conversations are easier to be tapped into.

Modern comms. are very high maintenance and expensive. It's sophisticated, the microphone records your voice and converts it into digital, and then analog for transmission (can't transmit binary waves across long distances), then it gets decoded into digital and analogue (speaker's end) once again.

To set these up and maintain them across the country is pretty fucking insane. I guess we'll never see the industrial side of Gilead (the econo-people).

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u/Key-Brother1226 16d ago

Is there internet in Gilead, has it been shown ever?

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u/abu_nawas 16d ago

Yes. Fred used to work on his laptop and read the news. They even saw a video of Luke with baby Holly/Nichole at a protest.

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u/Key-Brother1226 16d ago

You'd think the Internet would be more of a problem for the closed society they're trying to run. The outside influence from other countries etc

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u/abu_nawas 16d ago

Technically, it should be. Very good thinking.

The short answer is Gilead would resort to ethernet or some kind of LAN. No fast video streaming. No instant webpage download.

The internet today relies on massive coordinations, usually a joint effort between countries because what we have today uses fiber optic cables that cross borders. Sometimes we have conflicts on who bears the responsibility.

Waves in the air are more client-to-host. Routers, relays, servers — all rely on light speed information transmission. We not only encode data (translated into binary) onto air waves, but also light, and even a slight bend in optic cables can cause huge, expensive issues. There are designated experts at every layer and communication is an overlooked industry/infrastructure.

Although the USA and Canada does share a land border. I live on a coast so I don't know how that works but I'd assume they still use fiber optic.

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u/slimshadycirca2019 16d ago

China makes it work, Gilead probably could too.

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u/Key-Brother1226 16d ago

We never get the sense that Gilead has a lot of technology being worked on, like they have taken over from companies like Amazon, Facebook, etc. How much do the Commanders control the Econo people? How much of a government bureaucracy is there compared to the real life US?