Warning: Contains SPOILERS for The Handmaid's Tale season 4, episode 10, "The Wilderness."
Fred Waterford is killed in The Handmaid's Tale season 4 finale, and next to his body is the return of a familiar phrase: "Nolite te bastardes carborundorum." Fred's death was the endpoint for one of The Handmaid's Tale's biggest seasons yet, which saw June Osborne finally escape Gilead and make it to Canada. The makeup of the show has been irrevocably by these events, but the finale still found time to call back to its roots and the key messaging underpinning it all.
Since the end of The Handmaid's Tale season 1 caught up with the books (with the exception of its far-future-set epilogue), then the Hulu shows has been straying further away from Margaret Atwood's story and building up its own tale. However, the show remains bound to the books in terms of the themes it explores and it continues June's story in a way that Atwood herself has supported. It's also expected that The Handmaid's Tale will eventually link to The Testaments, the author's sequel novel, but before that it links back to the book in the season 4 finale, thanks to its use of "nolite te bastardes carborundorum."
The phrase first appeared in Atwood's 1985 book, although it isn't an actual Latin phrase. Instead, "nolite te bastardes carborundorum" is a riff on the mock-Latin saying "illegitimi non carborundum," which is generally translated as "don't let the bastards grind you down." In that case, "illegitimi" is "illegitimate," or "bastard," and "carborundorum" is based an English grinding abrasive rather than Latin, though it sounds Latin enough to work. For Atwood's variation, which the author told Time was "a joke in our Latin classes," then the word "nolite" means "don't" and "te" is "you," while "bastardes" is simply "bastard" given a Latin suffix, as per Classics Professor Michael Fontaine [via Vanity Fair]. The actual phrase Nil desperandum, or never despair, is a relatively close Latin match, with both "illegitimi non carborundum" and even more so "nolite te bastardes carborundorum" essentially working as mock-Latin puns.
It's easy to see just how the phrase applies in The Handmaid's Tale, with Gilead very much taking on the role of the "bastardes." The message first appears in a closet in Offred's room, scratched by another Handmaid - the Offred before June - prior to her taking her own life. It serves as a form of support and empowerment for June, encouraging her to persevere no matter what they throw at her, and it's undeniably something she has always carried with her given how much she's survived. Its appearances in the show have been limited but powerful - it gave its name to season 1, episode 4, where its origins and meaning were explained, and June scrawled it on her bedroom wall at the end of season 2. But its use in the season 4 finale is its biggest yet.
In The Handmaid's Tale season 4, episode 10, the phrase appears as graffiti on the wall where Fred Waterford now hangs. It's a reminder of that core message, but with an ironic twist: Fred had previously revealed to June that he and his friends came up with the phrase at school as a joke, thinking themselves terribly clever. So as June and Fred's story comes full circle with her killing him and biting out his tongue, after being chased through the woods - echoing her own capture and how she was silenced and abused - then so too does the use of "nolite te bastardes carborundorum" loop all the way back round too, coming back to bite Fred. They're not just not letting the bastards grind them down - the Handmaids are fighting back.