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It had to be the handmaids to take down Boston.

On top of that list was Aunt Lydia, the ruthless zealot in charge of the handmaids, played so powerfully by Ann Dowd.

Reactionary centrism and false balance have created their own fantasyland: Rather than preserving and building on what’s best in our civic tradition, as their practitioners imagine, they’ve become witless handmaids in its ongoing destruction.

Atwood’s 1985 novel about a futuristic patriarchal society where the robed handmaids are forced to bear children for leaders, has reemerged in recent years as a cultural touchstone thanks to the popular TV series.

But the season's seventh episode was the first time the program portrayed a handmaid dying in childbirth.