June: Boston is free. The Gilead occupation is over. We won. Here at least. Boston is America again. Praise fucking be.
We have lived through six seasons of violence and brutality against women, witnessed the cruel deaths of so many of them, seen characters escape only to be returned to even worse situations. The Handmaid’s Tale, which is both a beginning and an end at the same time, makes the deliberate decision to spend an entire episode on the hope of a new start, never leaving the bounds of recaptured American territory, deliberately leaving the space and time for reflection, breathing, regathering. It’s not the end of the fight – Mayday and the US forces are intent to fight Gilead state-by-state, a process that sounds like it could take a long time, and Gilead is reorganising now that the Boston High Commanders are all dead, promoting people from Western states (which means that Hannah's family will be moving from far away Colorado to much closer Washington D.C.) to take over leadership. All of this is for the future though, not for The Handmaid’s Tale, which has now ended with the beginning of the storytelling of what happened. This has always been June’s story, but now it will be June’s story as told by June, left for future generations to read – as her mother says, for the people who are still incessantly looking for their lost loved ones and need hope, and as Luke says, as tribute to those who loved her along the way and were lost in the struggle. Margaret Atwood transported June’s manuscript so far into the future that it was read by archaeologists who had to piece together the to them frequently culturally ineligible pieces to make sense of the past, but June’s story here is about the close future, where a warning about what happened in Gilead is salient and relevant, where a new future must be built with the full awareness of what exactly happened to allow the past to occur. It’s fitting because that is precisely the function that this show has fulfilled over the last few years, as the distance between what the show depicts and what reality is becoming has narrowed.
What I love about this finale, and maybe didn’t expect because The Handmaid’s Tale has been so incessantly brutal, is that the entirety of it is about the women who surround June. Serena’s whole arc of trying to change Gilead from the inside, her incomplete journey to realising how wrong Gilead was from conception, has now ended for good. She is a refugee now, stateless, as disempowered as she ever has been. Before she goes on a bus to a UN refugee camp with Noah, she talks to June. She gives her the opportunity to grieve Nick, which June refuses (“He led a violent and dishonest life”), but Serena reminds her that if he had the opportunity, he would have chosen her and Holly. June tells Serena that she it is enough to be Noah’s mother, that she should focus on that, be that, instead of trying to reach for more, and these words land with her once she is alone with Noah on the cot in the camp – that this can maybe be enough for her. Serena also finally fully takes responsibility for what she has done to June without attempting to shift the blame or argue that her own suffering has cancelled out what she has done, and it is delivered with enough genuine intention that June, for the first time, accepts it and forgives Serena – and maybe that forgiveness ultimately means more to Serena than the power she has been trying to attain. In the end, Serena is left with a bed, chair and table – and maybe that is enough to sustain her and Noah, in its eerie echo of how June begins her own story, with Offred in her chamber that contains the same things, just enough to forge a new path to freedom.
June goes home to her old neighbourhood, looking into the storefront of what used to be an ice cream parlour, the same one she bonded with Emily over all those years ago when they first met. And then the most impossible thing happens – Emily is right there, another survivor, somehow back at the end of the beginning. June takes something away from all of her interactions in the episode, but among them, this one is more magical than even Janine’s survival and return is. Emily, who went back to Gilead, should have died, but here she is, telling her own story of survival in a household as a Martha, with a Commander who became a friend, with a tentative sustained connection to her wife and child and the prospect of rebuilding those bonds. She says that her family was the reason for why she was fighting, and the same is true for June, with Hannah still somewhere in Gilead. Emily went back because she found it impossible to return to a regular life in Canada, even when she reunited with her family, and later in the episode, when June makes up her mind to return to the fight not just for Hannah but for all the other children, there are echoes of Emily’s resolute decision in her. As long as Gilead continues to exist, they won’t be safe wherever they are. Gilead isn’t just a regime, a state, it’s an ideology that spreads like the plague (remember what happened in Canada), and can therefore reach wherever it infects the minds of others. June and Emily’s reunion is so impossible that, as Emily says, they might as well adjust their concept of the impossible and believe in what can happen in the future. As they walk along, Guardians are strung up on the walls that used to hold the victims of Gilead.
At the halfway point of the episode, June dreams of a present that is unlike the past before Gilead or Gilead itself: it’s a version of reality where Gilead never happened, where Janine never lost an eye, where all those friends she made along the way didn’t die horrible deaths. They are singing along to Fleetwood Mac’s Landslide, they are unburdened by the knowledge of what horrors Gilead has wrought. It’s an unreachable dream, but in its essence, it doesn’t deny what happened: it just paints a picture of what life should have been, what each of these women was robbed of.
If I were more cynical, I would refute the impossible rescue of Janine, but instead it feels as if some kind of account is being righted: nobody has suffered more. If Janine did not end up free at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, hope would be lost. Someone wakes up June, who has fallen asleep exhausted on the streets, to take her to the new border with Gilead, where Eyes drag a body forward on the path, and then Naomi and Lydia step into the light. They have returned Janine, and even more incredibly, Charlotte. We won’t know what strings Lydia pulled, who was a minute away from being hanged, to deliver on her own promise to save her girl, but here she is, free and united with her daughter. June thanks Lydia, who returns to Gilead to continue the fight on the inside and on The Testaments: “Blessed is the woman who does not walk in stride with the wicked.” It has taken a long time for Lydia to realise that Gilead is brutalising these women, that she has sold herself to a wicked regime by doing its bidding, and it feels impossible to forgive her for her past actions, but there is value to changing your mind at the risk of your own life.
Finally, after Luke has managed to restore power and opened Logan airport, Holly returns with baby Holly to reunite with her daughter. June, at this point, has already made up her mind. She has to return, “because Gilead doesn’t need to be beaten, it needs to be broken”. She is doing it to get Hannah back, but also for the children and grandchildren who won’t be safe until Gilead is gone. She has come to this decision completely independently of Luke, and this whole episode makes it clear that their paths have finally diverged, even if they may come back together in the future. Luke has found his place: he will continue his fight with Mayday, has found meaning in using his skills for the resistance, even if that means that June is walking a different path from him. They don’t even fight about this, both of them have made up their mind. Both Holly and Luke tell June to write her book as a record, to create something that can be passed on into the future. She returns to the burned out shell of the Waterford residence, where everything began, to the chamber she found an impossible escape from, to begin narrating her story.
Random notes:
I loved the episode, I thought it was a graceful an end as the show could have delivered, and yet I ask: what about Moira? It’s never been more glaringly obvious that this show stopped having ideas about what to do with her character a long time ago and then didn’t even make an effort in this final episode. By all rights, it should have been June and Moira at the end of all of this, especially with the theme of the episode being all of the women that June connected with. Justice for Moira!
Serena: Congratulations on your victory.
June: None of it would have happened without you.
Serena: Yes. I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.
Serena, the unnamed architect of Gilead, ended up being the one to deliver the greatest blow to the regime, helping to kill its elite which included her husband. She doesn’t know yet what the consequences will be, especially for herself, but it’s the least self-interested thing she has done, and I think it’s this decision that ultimately made it possible for June to forgive her. It’s also a lovely coda that June picks out a Boston Red Sox onesie for Noah that saves Serena in her new, severely resource-depleted life: June has been involved in every step of Noah’s life, has been more instrumental in his life and survival than anyone else.
We love a good knitted hat!
I actually cheered when I realised that Alexis Bledel agreed to return for the final episode to give Emily a last chance to shine: I still think this would have been a better final season if she had remained on the show.
There’s some great acting in this episode, but the very bittersweet moment of June seeing Janine united with Charlotte, while haunted with memories of Hannah, is a stand-out. She is so happy for her, and yet she is grieving that her own reunion is still far out of reach.
I very recently realised that Mabel Li is going to be in The Testaments (maybe you can’t make The Handmaid’s Tale without Australian actors), so there’s a good chance that I’ll start writing about the show once it airs next year.
What this episode reminded me of, in a weird way, is the series finale of the great The Expanse: where by all rights not everyone should have made it through alive, based on what had happened on the show previously and the books it was based on, and yet in the end, survival triumphed. It feels like such an impossibly positive ending for a show that was frequently almost unbearably bleak, and yet I'm glad that it happened this way, at this moment in time, where everything seems to be getting darker.
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