Note: This story contains spoilers from “The Handmaid’s Tale” Season 6, Episode 10.
The sun has set on Gilead. For now.
After six seasons, Hulu’s critically acclaimed series “The Handmaid’s Tale” has reached its endpoint, which is really more of a pause until the story picks up again in spinoff series “The Testaments.” And that’s what it felt like as June Osborne (Elisabeth Moss, who also acts as an executive producer and frequent director on the show) narrated the eponymous final episode, summing up the surviving characters’ next steps.
Not an end. Just a breather.
Obviously, with a spinoff in the works, it was never an option to end “The Handmaid’s Tale” with the fall of Gilead. The finale was always going to be open-ended, allowing for Gilead to come back bigger and badder than ever in “The Testaments.” And while it’s a foregone conclusion that the spinoff will build on the original, “The Testaments” has an opportunity to do something “The Handmaid’s Tale” never did: learn from history, rather than keeping its characters in a vacuum.
In the series finale of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” June leaves one daughter behind to continue searching for the other, while her husband Luke (O-T Fagbenle) heads out with resistance group Mayday to continue disrupting Gilead’s plans. Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd, who will reprise her role in “The Testaments”) remains in Gilead, her loyalty hanging by a thread, and the surviving former handmaids, including Janine (Madeline Brewer), Moira (Samira Wiley) and Emily (Alexis Bledel), along with former Martha Rita (Amanda Brugel), are all trying to move on with their lives and find meaning again, however they can. And of course, June’s former lover Nick (Max Minghella), his father-in-law Commander Wharton (Josh Charles) and Gilead’s chief-architect-turned-Mayday-asset Commander Lawrence (Bradley Whitford) had their fates sealed at the end of the penultimate episode, when Lawrence smuggled a bomb onto a plane carrying all of Boston’s highest ranking officials.
It is only Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski), June’s former captor and now tenuous frenemy, who receives what could be considered an ambiguous ending; although she was instrumental to the success of the plan that enables the United States to reclaim Boston, her previous actions in Gilead have left her without anywhere to call home. Gilead now views her as an enemy, and no other country trusts her enough to issue her a passport. In her final scene, she boards a train to parts unknown, headed to a refugee camp and an uncertain future for both her and her infant son.
In Margaret Atwood’s 1986 dystopian novel upon which Hulu’s series is based, we last see protagonist Offred (a moniker reclaimed by June in the concluding moments of the finale) loaded into the back of a van, not knowing whether she’s headed toward freedom or execution — notably, how Season 1 ended all the way back in 2017.
In the series, it is Serena who gets a version of that ending. Before she leaves, Serena’s final exchange with June sees the former finally apologize for the years of abuse and torment she inflicted upon June and her family, and the latter grant forgiveness.
It’s a sweet and moving exchange. But it’s missing something important.
Atwood penned “The Handmaid’s Tale” while living in West Berlin in 1984, drawing from real-world history as inspiration. Similar to other dystopian writers whose work turned out to be dismayingly prescient (including George Orwell before her and Octavia E. Butler after), Atwood looked at the patterns of the past to extrapolate the future. And although she drew on histories from around the world, the United States supplied all the building blocks necessary to construct Gilead, in the shape of the patriarchal Puritans of 17th century New England, and the brutal treatment of enslaved Black women by Bible-thumping, prosperous white men during the first few centuries of America’s existence.
Yet throughout its run, “The Handmaid’s Tale” refused to meaningfully engage with either history or current events, which arguably dulled its effectiveness as the cautionary tale it was intended to be. The annals of American history are filled with stories of rape and stolen children, torture and public executions, patriarchy disguised as protectiveness, and Bible verses weilded like bullets to oppress the innocent and shore up power for the privileged. But rather than build on that history, “The Handmaid’s Tale” chose to mostly ignore it, casting a diverse group of actors rather than sticking to the book’s all-white cast (in Atwood’s version, it is implied that all people of color were sent to labor camps), then never allowing that diversity to impact the story it was telling, or acknowledge the fact that Gilead was far from the first time in American history that women were enslaved, tortured and forced to breed with their captors only to have their children taken from them, their motherhood denied. It was merely the first time for white women.
In the novel, Offred spends her final moments in captivity contemplating whether to attempt escape or revenge, or to simply end her life. Ultimately, the decision is taken out of her hands, and as she is carted away by the Eyes — who may or may not be Mayday operatives — she realizes that if she is to have any hope for her future, she must rely on the coordinated efforts and resistance of others. It is only through collective action, following in the footsteps of those who have come before, that systemic change is truly possible.
The June of the show, though, has always been convinced of her own significance, weighing her personal interactions more heavily than anything she doesn’t experience herself; case in point, she consistently overlooked the fact that Nick spent the entire time she knew him ascending the ranks of Gilead’s power players. Because he was good to her, she thought that made him good, regardless of the warnings of others. She was shocked when he betrayed her secrets, and shocked again when he decided to board the Commanders’ plane to D.C. It somehow never occurred to her that perhaps the reason he kept moving up in Gilead was because he wanted to. It never crossed her mind that complicity in an unjust system is itself unjust.
Similarly, Serena and June’s final exchange was only about the two of them. Not Gilead or Mayday, or the countless people still trapped in an unjust system. While Offred ends the book with her agency stripped away, June ends the show reclaiming hers. Neither woman seems to pay much thought to the structures that still need to change, focusing only on their own feelings.
In the novel “The Testaments,” which picks up 15 years after the events of the first book (the series will jump ahead four to five years mirroring the show’s timeline), we learn that Gilead still exists, albeit in a different form. It turns out that overthrowing an oppressive totalitarian regime is the collective work of generations, not individuals.
After all, the legacy of American oppression and resistance dates much further back than the inception of Gilead, its roots stretching back to the dawn of the country. The present is always in conversation with the past, whether or not we choose to acknowledge it. With “The Testaments,” the creatives behind “The Handmaid’s Tale” have a second chance to acknowledge that their task may not be to compose a brand new story, but to add onto a very old and ongoing one. And hopefully this time around, the people of Gilead will listen to what the past has to say.
“The Handmaid’s Tale” is now streaming on Hulu.
