Warning: contains spoilers for The Handmaid’s Tale series finale. Finale? More like DVD Extra. The cast of a once-unmissable show reunited one last time for a series of watery-eyed goodbyes and I love yous. 55 minutes of June trundling around a recently liberated Boston remembering things and having feelings? The Handmaid’s Tale hasn’t delivered a more inessential episode since the ‘What Luke Did” flashback in season one. You know what’s to blame: therapy. It’s taught us concepts like ‘processing trauma’ and ‘closure’ – both useful in their context but ruinous when mistaken for storytelling. Real lives may benefit from being lived with wisdom, growth and acceptance, but fictional ones can afford more chaos. Characters don’t all need to bow out of their story with instructive understanding; some should be allowed to kick their way out pulling a grenade pin between their teeth.  The Handmaid’s Tale made its name as protest art with iconic imagery, a killer soundtrack and attitude to spare. It could have sent June thundering into the flames, but instead, she got this weepy valedictory tour.  A beautifully acted weepy valedictory tour, one should say. The cast of The Handmaid’s Tale never let you down, but on rare occasions like this one, they’re let down by writing that cares more about completing its characters’ emotions worksheets than about entertaining an audience. Don’t mistake me, I’m pleased that June had all of those repetitive reunions – with Serena, with Emily, with Luke, with baby Holly, with her mother, with Lydia, with Serena again… I just don’t feel like I needed to witness ‘em. How about some story instead? Why not let us see, say, Hannah in wartime? Why not is because that’s all being saved, along with Aunt Lydia’s next steps, for sequel The Testaments, a continuation that this episode dutifully set up without managing to raise much anticipation for. The series finale wasn’t about looking forward, it was all about looking back. Hence the surprise return of Alexis Bledel’s Emily, who showed up magically at June’s side with a callback to the start of their tentative friendship in season one. Emily was just one of a rollcall of faces from the past. Those also came in the form of cameos from departed friends Alma, Brianna, and Janine’s right eye, as June fantasised about the karaoke night that might have been.  The episode’s closing moments, in which June revisited the Waterford house burnt out by Serena in season three, were another callback. June took up the same window seat position as she had in episode one and delivered the same opening lines to the Margaret Atwood novel that started all this. Except, now those lines were the opening lines to June’s memoir, bringing the show metatextually full circle.  Nothing in the finale mattered so much as its heavily insisted-upon message, which was all about parents fighting to create a better world to keep their children safe. June readied herself to leave little Holly again, bolstered by Emily’s assurance that it didn’t mean she was abandoning her family. Luke planned to reach Hannah by liberating one state from Gilead at a time. Naomi Lawrence returned little Charlotte to her mother to keep her out of a warzone. Even Mark Tuello was conjured up an off-screen son to motivate his military moves. By the time Holly Sr had declaimed over not being able to keep June safe, and Serena had promised to dedicate herself solely to the raising of her precious baby Noah, it was hard not to feel a little Gilead propaganda going on in terms of children being the only reason that anybody does anything. I don’t recall that being the point Margaret Atwood was making back in 1985. Nor was the finale’s ultra-serious, highly emotive tone always the way of things in The Handmaid’s Tale. June’s irreverence, not to mention her excellent way with an expletive, is part of what’s made her an attractive lead character over the years. Next to Gilead’s mannered prayer-card conversational style, she’s been a breath of fresh air. In this finale though, June’s wryness was replaced with her telling Serena to “go in grace” like she was issuing a papal blessing, and telling little Holly all about how much mommies love their babies. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! There were flashes of beauty among the sap. The shot of June walking back along the bridge as Boston’s lights turned on was terrific both in idea and execution. Janine getting Charlotte back was a genuine – if unexplored – surprise. “The Wall” being co-opted by revolutionary graffiti and women reclaiming their own names was gorgeous. Overall though, this was a repetitive and surplus hour that used its screentime to remind us of things that didn’t really require a reminder. June misses Hannah. June once loved Nick. Serena feels bad. The children are our future. We know. You already told us.  The Handmaid’s Tale season six is streaming now on Hulu in the US, and airing weekly on Channel 4 in the UK. 

Warning: contains spoilers for The Handmaid’s Tale season 6 episode 9 “Execution”.  The wages of sin is death? You got that right, Wharton. In “Execution”, the wages of the commanders’ sins were a glittering firework of a death thanks to Joseph Lawrence – economist, loving father, freedom fighter and part-time James Bond.  Talk about laying low the arrogance of the terrible (“Guess you decided to join the winners,” crowed Nick, just before they were all blasted into bitesize BBQ chunks). Amid calls for cigars, Lawrence and his Mayday bomb laid the whole plane approximately 30,000 feet lower than planned, ensuring that his epitaph would read more than: Designed Gilead, Good at Sarcasm. Lawrence’s poignant sacrifice was the best part of this penultimate episode. Nobody could ever think that noose would really tighten around June’s neck this close to the end, making that scaffold scene much more perfunctory than its histrionic tone suggested. Ann Dowd’s Aunt Lydia already has a job lined up in sequel series The Testaments, which effectively took the rope from around her neck too even before Mayday struck. Moira, Janine… They were all bound to get out of it somehow – a sentiment that’s has been this show’s curse for seasons now.  Every arrest, every blocked escape route, every cage, we’ve been able to calmly wait through instead of holding our breath in terror that this could be the moment we lose someone important. We never do because The Handmaid’s Tale is too protective of its main characters – a crazy thing to type considering what this story has put them all through. What were the words to the Taylor Swift song that soundtracked this week’s opening scenes? “I rose up from the dead. I do it all the time.” That could have been this show’s theme song. It’s certainly June’s. Finally, though, finally, we’ve lost somebody. Two somebodies. Joseph Lawrence and Nick Blaine aren’t coming back for the sequel, and the work done in this final season to explain their inner workings paid off handsomely.  Unlike June, I shed no tears for Nick, who made his choice and now has to live – or rather not live – with it. After his Jezebels betrayal and the “Forget it, Rita, it’s Chinatown” moment that followed, we understood that Nick was no heroic double agent, but a lost kid who’d sold out his ideals for survival. Well, look how well that ended up. June may have silently howled as he climbed those steps into the jet, but I was mentally ushering him up them with a cheery ‘byeee’.  Lawrence, however, hurt. There hasn’t been enough screentime developing his redemption-through-love-of-a-child arc this season, but what little we’ve seen has been effective. Joseph thawing over little Angela – whose future he must have been picturing when he chose to follow Wharton and co. onto that plane – has been a beautiful final path for a complex character. The grouchy, wry loner melting under the full-beam affection of a child is a storytelling classic for a reason, and here it gave us that wonderful goodbye scene with his copy of The Little Princess. Even Naomi seemed human for a millisecond as she took on board Lawrence’s plea to ignore one of Gilead’s ugly edicts and to teach their kidnapped child to read.  By the time that Lawrence, blindsided by the early arrival of the other commanders, made his brave choice and paused momentarily to put his hand on his chest in a goodbye gesture to June, I was feeling well fed. After years of asking where this brilliant, evil mind stood morally, Lawrence’s ending put him firmly on the “one of us” side.  The doubly widowed Serena’s place there is fixed too, according to June. Like Lawrence, Serena gave up the commanders to right her past wrongs, but more importantly, she did it for this episode’s theme of love. That’s what June exhorted Wharton to choose instead of revenge. That’s the plea June made to Serena about the world they both wanted for their children. Those were the words June, Janine and Moira exchanged as their leader was led away yet again in cuffs. (7 minutes 45 seconds, by the way – the amount of time between June and the Handmaids running triumphantly towards their freedom at the end of last episode, and them cowering at gunpoint under a bridge in this. This show is an abusive relationship.)  Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! Setting up love as Gilead’s opposite is an unbeatable argument, as June found in her appeals to Serena, Wharton and last episode, to Aunt Lydia. What really sold those appeals though, and particularly to those audiences, was June’s Christianity. Making her character a theist has been a masterstroke on the part of this story’s creators, because it broadens the argument base. June, who can quote scripture with the best of them, can’t be dismissed as ignorant and godless. Her belief negates any accusation from the religious right that this show’s messages are anti-faith. They’re not. They’re anti-oppression, pro-love, and, in the right circumstances, all for taking out the bastards who grind us down. The Handmaid’s Tale concludes with “The Handmaid’s Tale” on Tuesday May 27 on Hulu. Season six airs on Channel 4 in the UK. 

Warning: contains spoilers for The Handmaid’s Tale season six episode eight “Exodus”. In the early days of The Handmaid’s Tale, the pre-Gilead flashback episodes were eagerly awaited. Who was June Osborne before she was captured and enslaved? Who had Commander and Mrs Waterford been before they played a part in the coup that destroyed America? It took three seasons before we saw one of the show’s most anticipated flashbacks – that of Aunt Lydia. Before Gilead, had its cruel enforcer been a prison warden? An army captain? A police officer? Nothing so authoritarian: Lydia Clements was an elementary school teacher with a background working in family law. She’d been married, we learned, but it hadn’t worked out and now she lived alone and relied on her faith for comfort and self-esteem. In flashback, we saw Lydia befriend Noelle, the single mother of one of her pupils, and allow herself to be pushed into the dating world at her young friend’s encouragement. Humiliated by a romantic rejection from a colleague, Lydia lashed out and reported Noelle to the authorities as an unfit parent, sending her son into foster care. Foreshadowing her role in Gilead, Lydia told herself that she had acted out of love, saved the child, and put his wayward mother on the path to salvation. Love has always been Lydia’s purported motivation. Love for God and for the tainted-but-redeemable souls of her “girls” has been her justification for meting out acts of outrageous cruelty. Having Janine blinded, or Emily mutilated, or June tortured, were all done for the girls’ own good, Lydia told herself. Everything she did was for the righteous love of the lord, as hallowed by the holy republic of Gilead. Now, in season six, Lydia has made a move that was genuinely motivated by love. When she arrived unexpectedly at Serena Joy and Commander Wharton’s wedding and discovered the Handmaids mid-rebellion, June asked her not to further punish the women, but to let them escape. Deep down, said June, Lydia must know that the Handmaid system was glorified rape, and that the women and girls she had delivered to the Commanders over the years did not deserve their abuse. It wasn’t until Lydia’s “special girl” Janine entered to make her appeal that Lydia finally thawed. She apologised for sending Janine into the home of the abusive Commander Bell, held her, and let the women leave. Speaking to US Weekly, actor Ann Dowd explains that Aunt Lydia is where she is “because she loves Janine as her daughter.” Lydia clearly saw similarities between Janine – who was also a young single mother – and Noelle in their early interactions, and over six seasons, has come to a genuine, familial love for Madeline Brewer’s character. Lydia is “a softer human being,” says Dowd, “because she has come to love in a real way – Janine and the girls.” Co-showrunner Yahlin Chang agrees. “In that moment, she can’t see what to do other than let them go. She does it out of love for Janine. She just goes over to Janine and says, ‘I’m sorry I hurt you.’” As the Handmaids, led by June, Janine and Moira, leave the Red Centre, Aunt Lydia sinks to her knees. “She understands what she’s done,” Dowd tells US Weekly. “She can’t bear it. I’m sure she’s begging for forgiveness. She’s not going to deny anything. When it comes to what she’s done, she would do it again.” We leave her praying for divine help. And she’s going to need it, according to co-showrunner Eric Tuchman, who told US Weekly: “Now we know she’s made that decision to liberate the Handmaids. She’s aligned with them in the eyes of Gilead. She has betrayed her duties to Gilead, so I can’t spoil what happens with her, but she’s on very shaky ground moving forward.” Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! The Handmaid’s Tale streams on Hulu on Tuesdays in the US, and airs on Channel 4 on Saturdays in the UK.