After eight years of broadcasting, the series The Handmaid’s Tale is taking its final bow this May 2025. It took six seasons to bring the adventures of June Osborn to a close, much longer than the novel from which the series draws its inspiration.
The Handmaid’s Tale is calling it quits, not without a final episode that oscillates between the desire to put a full stop… before adding suspensions as the launch of The Testaments approaches. We have lost count of the number of series that have largely disappointed when it came time to say goodbye, did The Handmaid’s Tale succeed with its final episode?
Two sides of the same coin?
In the novels, DeFred is the window through which Margaret Atwood describes her totalitarian world. It is through her eyes and her thoughts that the theocratic society founded by the sons of Jacob is depicted; it is entirely she who guides the story. The American author chose to think of her story as a disjointed chronicle of daily life in Gilead, to make it of tapes found decades after the death of the woman whose name we do not even know.
An approach that could hardly be transcribed on the small screen, while the adaptation had to multiply the entry points to captivate its audience. The cantankerous and mysterious Serena Joy thus became another anchor point of the narrative, almost as much as June Osborn. Relieved of her cane and her past as a religious singer, she became an influential political figure, having accelerated Gilead's rise to power. society, the victims of an overwhelming and toxic masculinity. This final season reconnects with the accuracy of its predecessors, no longer limiting the interactions between the two heroines to incessant back-and-forths between hatred and complicity. In its final minutes, the series seems touched by the grace of more nuanced writing and therefore more impactful.
A chair, a table, a lamp
After the shock of the grand finale of the previous episode, which ultimately had more of a conclusion than this tenth chapter, Bruce Miller's series thus takes the time to look back to better immortalize the end of June and her companions' journey. The series wallows in good feelings, returns to its slow motion with violin compositions, but, this time, just this once, we let ourselves be carried away by this obvious nostalgia.
The ambient sentimentality appears as a welcome comfort, after having seen the heroines prey to all the moral and physical abuse imaginable. More than ever, the series focuses on sisterhood and pays homage to the intertwined destinies of its female victims and avengers, these martyrs and symbols of emancipation.
Even those we hated, when the series still gave us visceral emotions, find favor in our eyes as viewers satisfied by a semblance of resolution. The whole thing sometimes (often) lacks subtlety, to the point that two characters invite June to tell her story as a Handmaid (yes, because the series is called The Handmaid's Tale in English for those who haven't followed).
At the same time, we rehash June's questions about her relationship and her future... before returning to the essentials: the world she wants to leave to her daughters. Still looking for Hannah, she finds herself where it all began to begin a new chapter of her rebellion. A chair, a table, a lamp... and hope.
New Testament
This tenth episode not only aims to close the book on The Handmaid’s Tale, it also strives to prepare the ground for the spin-off commissioned by Hulu: The Testament. For while Boston is no longer in the hands of Gilead, the dictatorship continues to exist in other cities. Luke is on his way to New York and June to Colorado. Behind enemy lines, Lydia seems ready to see the theocracy in a new light. She rebelled against the High Commanders and did everything she could to reunite Janine and Charlotte.
Readers of Margaret Atwood's saga know that this grand finale mainly prepares the beginning of the next series. The same goes for Hannah and Nicholle, who are comfortably settled where the series, which is supposed to take place 15 years ago, will see them return to the forefront. A crude payment preparation, but this is not the first time the series has made a mistake.
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