All the Handmaids and the Wives attend a celebration. Janine's baby has arrived. Offred reflects on the birth of her daughter, Hannah. The Commander requests a meeting with June.
Tropes featured in "Birth Day" include:
- Condescending Compassion: The Wives offering Offred a cookie. Once she is away from them, she spits it out, despite it being the first sweet thing she's tasted in a very long time.
- Ironic Nursery Tune: A devastated Janine sings to Angela, the same lullaby she sang to her son, Caleb.
- Meaningful Name: The baby is named Angela.
- Pet the Dog: Offred has no love for Janine, but stops to tell her she's doing great.
- Subverted when the Wives treat Offred like a trained puppy by offering her cookies and commenting how sweet she is. Then call her a whore as she walks away.
- To accentuate the communal anxiety of a birth in Gilead, Aunt Lydia is sincerely compassionate and tender to Janine, a direct contrast to her usual brutal demeanor, though it's all part of the usual choreography and scripting of Gilead.
- Mood Whiplash: Offred is actually happy near the end of the episode, having something to tell Ofglen and having her love of words reawoken during the strange connection she made with the Commander over the Scrabble game. It comes crashing down when the Handmaid waiting at the gate is not Ofglen. Well, she is Ofglen, just a different one.
- Precision F-Strike: The last line in the episode is Offred's mental reaction the new Ofglen.
- Screaming Birth: Janine has one. The Wife in charge...fakes one. It's as surreal as it sounds.
- Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: The Commander and his Handmaid are not supposed to be alone together.
- Wham Line: "I am Ofglen."
