The Handmaid’s Tale season 5 finale is as unexpected as it is explosive. Its creator Bruce Miller returns to this episode and teases the end of the series as well as its spin-off.
Warning, spoilers. It is advisable to have seen the final episode of season 5 of The Handmaid’s Tale before continuing to read this article.
Like previous chapters, Season 5 of The Handmaid’s Tale was full of twists and turns. June (Elisabeth Moss) is a refugee in Canada with her husband Luke and her daughter Nichole but her ultimate goal is to recover her eldest Hannah, still captive in Gilead.
A figure of the resistance, June tries to navigate offers from the US government, Canadian authorities and Commander Lawrence to Gilead, which is trying to modernize its dictatorship, in order to get her daughter back. In vain.
While her hopes of freedom are dashed as the episodes progress and she almost gets killed by a Canadian driver assigned by Gilead, June has no other choice but to flee. She finds herself in the same position as at the very beginning of the series.
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Cornered, June accepts Mark Tuello’s offer to direct her to a special train for American refugees that is to take them to safety in Hawaii, since Canada no longer wants to take in refugees.
Unfortunately, June and Nichole are the only ones who can board. Luke surrenders to the authorities so he can save them. But June will not be alone on the train, she finds Serena (Yvonne Strahovski) there with her son Noah, whom June helped give birth to. The destinies of the two women – however enemies – are more than ever linked.
What future for June in season 6 and the spin-off?
With this return to square one, what future does June have in the sixth and final season of The Handmaid’s Tale? A very different fate than that depicted in Margaret Atwood’s novel, which did not offer her a real end.
Showrunner Bruce Miller is already working on this season 6 but also on the spin-off, The Testaments, as he explains to Deadline:
“I’m working on The Testaments while I’m working on The Handmaid’s Tale Season 6. It’s so nice to have another book to refer to. I think people who watch the show need to be comfortable with it. the fact that, just as The Handmaid’s Tale does not follow the book to the letter, The Testaments is really a sequel to the series.
Bruce Miller talks a lot with author Margaret Atwood, who actually watched part of the show before she started writing. The Willspublished in 2019, thirty-four years after the publication of The Scarlet Maid.
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Despite all the respect he has for the source material, Bruce Miller wants to follow the path he charted for June since the series moved beyond the events of the book:
“For June, I feel no allegiance to handing her the same fate she has in the novel. I just want to follow the story and make sure it makes sense. But what you need to remember , it’s that the voiceover we hear is June’s, it’s her story.
It’s not called Gilead, it’s The Handmaid’s Tale. I thought of the series as a kind of memoir of a part of June’s life, and not one where she would consider herself a servant. I think in the end she will have her own life. She will move on and continue her life as she wishes but we will not see it.
As we have had access to such an intimate part of his life, I feel like we care about what may happen to him next, but it will not be that story that will be told. [dans Les Testaments].”
Even though he knows where he wants to go, Bruce Miller feels some pressure to wrap up The Handmaid’s Tale. The showrunner revealed to Entertainment Weekly that he has an amazing method for writing his series finale:
“I think about it very prosaically and immerse myself in it thinking about ‘television history’. I rewatched the last season of Game of Thrones and watched the last season of The Sopranos, just to see how they put the pieces of the puzzle together. And above all I wonder if they thought of the final season as a season in its own right or as the end of a series.
From my side, I just want it to be a solid season, with solid episodes and scenes. And that’s all I think about. And if it doesn’t look like a big series finale, that’s okay. To tell the truth, the beginning did not look like a real beginning of the series either.
All five seasons of The Handmaid’s Tale are available on OCS.