The series finale of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale aired last night, finally putting the Elisabeth Moss-fronted adaptation of Maragret Atwood’s novel out of its misery after six seasons. When the show first started in 2017, it felt chillingly appropriate for the horrors of the first Trump administration; the finale felt appropriate not to the second Trump administration, but to our current age of franchises.
(Spoilers for The Handmaid’s Tale finale and previous seasons.)
I’ll sum up how we got to the finale by quoting from what I wrote in our newsletter in mid-April:
…over the seasons, especially as the show moved away from its setting of Gilead, I think it lost what made it powerful. In my mind, one of the biggest problems is that, despite being set in a world with such clear power structures and such high stakes, there are few consequences for any of its main characters. Protagonist June does more and more rebellious and ostentatious acts, but nothing ever happens to her; she is somehow immune to Gilead's power in ways that became less about her own resolve or resourcefulness and more, it felt, about the show needing to just not kill off Elisabeth Moss' character. This made the show grow repetitive and toothless.
While earlier seasons felt like they deftly showcased Gilead’s might and the ways people were able to claim their power in its cracks, by the end of the series June was traipsing back and forth across the border with impunity. Gilead felt like it lost its threat, even for the people who still lived there. In the finale, this lack of consequences extends to other characters: Janine is captured by Gilead in the previous episode, but we worry about her fate for about 20 minutes before she’s released. The long-running conflict between Janine and Naomi, who has Janine’s daughter, is hastily resolved by Naomi just giving Janine the child back, with no time spent on what happens to Naomi now that she’s two times a widow in a failing empire. Aunt Lydia, who was facing death after denouncing Gilead in the previous episode, is somehow not just fine but back in power.
There are plenty of plotlines for the finale to wrap up, but instead it eats up much of its hour runtime with flashbacks to June’s pre-Gilead life with daughter Hannah and with a mortifying fantasy sequence where June and all the women she’s met sing karaoke together. It then has to rush through its actual story, giving us passionless conversations between June and the people in her life. June forgives Serena Joy, drawing on a heavy-handed religiosity that got hammered into season six (“maybe the good guys can also have religion” is an idea I would definitely be here for, but the show mostly employs it for zingers in conversation rather than exploring the idea with any depth.). June and Luke break up, sort of maybe. June’s mother and her daughter arrive from Alaska (on… busses? Through a warzone?) only for June to immediately leave again, in pursuit of Hannah who has conveniently been moved from Colorado to DC.
All this feels like setup for the TV adaptation of The Testaments, Atwood’s 2019 sequel. That show’s creators say it takes place 15 years after The Handmaid’s Tale, but its narrative centers around life in an oppressive, post-June Gilead that still has teeth, putting it in conflict with the timeline The Handmaid’s Tale pursued once it ran out of book to adapt. It needs the door to be left open on several of The Handmaid’s Tale’s characters–Aunt Lydia, June and Nick’s daughter Nicole, Luke and June’s daughter Hannah–, some of whom have to be older but still under Gilead’s thumb. So The Handmaid’s Tale has to leave some of its biggest questions unresolved, something I would have found acceptable if the show had leaned into subtlety in the rest of its plotting. But the show got so uncomfortable with ambiguity over the seasons that the finale just felt like its creators trying to have things both ways, slamming the book closed on some stories while leaving others open.
The worst thing I think The Testaments adaption could do is bring June back into it (the creators have been vague on if she’ll appear.). So much of what I feel went wrong with The Handmaid’s Tale was its focus on making June more and more powerful– I lost it this season when June, the most famous woman in the world, managed to go unrecognized in Gilead while disguised as a handmaid, the outfit everyone recognizes her in. For me, the most interesting part of the show was Gilead itself, what it believed and how it functioned, how different people would find meaning in its oppressive structures and their different relationships to it. Returning the focus to Gilead is a good move for The Testaments, not just because I am a sucker for any media about weird religions, but because that’s where The Handmaid’s Tale’s strongest tensions and most interesting stories came from. But June as a character should have died seasons ago (she almost does in the penultimate episode of season six, but only for about five minutes before we’re done with that!); the show’s handling of her has dragged the whole series down. And while we badly do not need more The Handmaid’s Tale–the show got itself into this mess by refusing to end, running out of things to do but nevertheless persisting–if we must, the best thing it can do is tell stories without June in the mix.
If this is the end of June’s story, it ends in the most embarrassing way possible. Throughout the finale, characters tell June she should write a book. For the show’s narrative, this makes no sense: Surely her escape from Gilead was a global news story; the world knows what happened to her when she testified at the Waterfords’ Canadian trial in season four; and even the argument that she needs to tell the stories of the other handmaids is unnecessary given all the letters that Mayday snuck to Luke in season two, which caused an international incident. Mentions of a book feel like the most unsubtle reminder that The Handmaid’s Tale was a book in the first place, and that tale itself was a manuscript smuggled out of Gilead. But of course June has no need for smuggling and illicit written words at this point, making the existence of such a book even more powerless. Like so much of the show, there is nothing a book by June needs to do, nothing for it to say that hasn’t already been said.
The first time the idea of June writing a book came up, I texted a friend who was slightly ahead of me in the episode that if the show ended with June signing copies of The Handmaid’s Tale at some bookstore full of women I would fully lose my mind. Luckily, it doesn’t do that, instead ending with June in her burnt-out room in the Waterfords’ home, dictating the voiceover that began the series. This was clearly meant to be some kind of triumphant full circle moment, but it fell flat for me given how far the show has moved from the Waterfords’ house and how fully June has since vanquished them. Like the destroyed house itself, there’s nothing left here for any of the show’s characters, no catharsis or emotion left to wring out. Even the ostensibly rebellious act of writing a book other women in Gilead might read has no power given that women were allowed to read in the liberal enclave of New Bethlehem (What was life like there? What happened to it?), making a book's existence in an unchanged Gilead a minor fact of its history. I can already imagine a plotline in The Testaments where women pass a copy of June’s book around, but given everything she’s done in The Handmaid’s Tale, such a thing would land more like sharing a news story than some triumph of the human spirit.
I feel a bit for The Handmaid’s Tale’s creators and the many corners they wrote themselves into; I’m not sure how I would have extricated myself in a way that would please audiences and whatever demands Hulu made on the production. The best way for the show to end would have been for it to end, except it isn’t. Despite spending a whole blog railing against the show, I know I won’t be able to keep myself from watching The Testaments whenever it ultimately airs. Here’s hoping the show’s creators use it to learn from The Handmaid's Tale's fumbles.
