In March, a Texas midwife was arrested for allegedly performing illegal abortions (and practicing medicine without the appropriate license). She became the first health care provider criminally charged in the aftermath of Texas’ 2022 abortion ban.
The arrest prompted horror and instigated one of left-leaning social media’s favorite doomscrolling games: declaring that each new diminution of rights and bodily autonomy proves that we have gone from figuratively living in The Handmaid’s Tale to more literally transitioning toward a Gilead-like nation.
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The timing, then, is perfect — or perfectly awful — for Hulu‘s The Handmaid’s Tale to return for its final season, nearly two and a half years after the fifth season concluded with Elisabeth Moss‘ June and Yvonne Strahovski’s Serena aboard a refugee train heading for Alaska or Hawaii or anywhere but the inhospitable terrain of Toronto or Boston.
Perfect — or perfectly awful — timing has always been the sweet spot for The Handmaid’s Tale, a series that both benefited and suffered more from circumstances outside its control than any in recent memory. A confluence of real-world events and fictional choices contributed to the show being hailed as prescient, celebrated by critics and awards givers and worming its way into the vernacular in a way that far exceeded the reach of its revered source material. At the same time, the show’s topicality sometimes hit so close to the bone that it became difficult to watch.
The Handmaid’s Tale premiered in April 2017 as Donald Trump was settling into the presidency, and it’s going to end in May 2025 as Donald Trump is settling back into the presidency. That sort of temporal tidiness is inevitable for a show that has been treated more like a cosmically symbolic text than a mere piece of television. The Handmaid’s Tale was science fiction that people confused with documentary. Depending on your perspective, it was the Oracle of Delphi or it was Cassandra; it was either a strident cautionary tale or a limp warning to shut the barn door long after our personal liberties had gotten loose.
In my first review of the series, adapted by Bruce Miller and directed in its stunning early installments by Reed Morano, I pondered an alternate reality in which Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election and The Handmaid’s Tale was “merely” a speculative thriller (featuring some of the best cinematography on TV and carried by Elisabeth Moss, cementing her position as Peak TV’s most essential performer).
Margaret Atwood’s dystopian allegorical novel didn’t over-explain the U.S.’ descent into fascist theocracy and thus left itself open to interpretation — so open that even American conservatives were able to claim it as a warning about Muslim fundamentalism. (It wasn’t.)
But the simultaneous arrival of the TV series on the small screen and Trump in the White House precluded textual flexibility. The show lost the power of the hypothetical and gained the precarious responsibility of the actual. Instead of leaving it to viewers to spot smoke on the horizon and find their own meaning in the inferno, it plunged us into the fire. Every federal or state restriction on abortion access or every limitation on female health care caused fatalists to say, “SEE?!?” and deniers to sigh, “Stop being hyperbolic … every Trump Supreme Court nominee has said that Roe v. Wade is settled law, so that will be our levee.”
Atwood didn’t need to spell things out, but real-world factors forced Miller and company to feel that pressure. So Gilead became less and less a looming Anyplace, Anytime and more and more a concrete attempt to respond to and keep up with our own paradigm-shifting junta.
Narratively, The Handmaid’s Tale was so deep in the Trumpian mire that even when Trump decisively lost the 2020 election, there was no opportunity to imagine or reflect any resumption of liberty tied to a Biden presidency. The reception of the fourth season was colored by the lingering resonance of the Jan. 6 insurrection, by the still vivid image of American landmarks being desecrated by costumed citizens. The fifth season, then, premiered in the noxious contrail of the Dobbs decision, which silenced those who believed a 1973 Supreme Court case could serve as a permanent finger in the political dike.
Rewatched from a limited distance, that fifth season might have been the show’s freest and most forward-looking. The shifting of action to Canada broadly presaged our current diplomatic crisis with our neighbors to the north as the series imagined a situation in which the friendly Canadian veneer might finally shatter. The reason for Canada’s anti-American (anti-Gilead, but that’s a distinction without a difference in the show’s universe, and maybe ours) sentiment in season five is almost the opposite of what’s driving Canadian fans to boo our national anthem at sporting events. But the souring of a special relationship on the show is, in retrospect, eerily resonant. At the time, it felt like we were more than two or three years from Canada getting sick of American bullshit. We should have known better.
The Handmaid’s Tale has been so bleak for so long that I began watching my season six screeners without knowing what to expect. This isn’t a show that has ever been heading toward a happy ending, and as Trump and Musk and Co. race to erase any trace of Biden/Obama/Clinton policy, even a mildly hopeful ending runs the risk of making the series as Pollyannaish as the “It can’t be Gilead, because Roe v. Wade is still in place!” optimists.
The eight of 10 episodes sent to critics largely examine which adversarial characters will be capable of introspection and regret and which will be stuck in self-justification. Bradley Whitford‘s Commander Lawrence remains convinced that the Gilead he helped construct was a viable response to economic and environmental conditions and that its extreme overcorrections can be fixed. Ann Dowd‘s Aunt Lydia clings to her belief that her cruelty toward her red-cloaked charges offered them their best chance of survival. Strahovski’s Serena, who spent last season being forced into her own version of subservience, continues to prioritize her personal salvation — boosted by potential love interest Commander Wharton (excellent guest star Josh Charles) — even when, time and again, she’s given every opportunity to leave Gilead behind.
Meanwhile, June and her rebels insist there’s a single dramatic action that will turn the tide and provoke a conclusive revolution, but you know the show doesn’t believe that’s possible, so it settles for smaller, if less interesting, avenues of resolution, like the love triangle with Max Minghella’s Nick and O-T Fagbenle’s Luke.
The Handmaid’s Tale is still more than capable of nightmarish images and emotionally potent sequences. Moss has become perhaps the series’ finest director (albeit one in need of an editor willing to trim five to 10 minutes per episode) in addition to anchoring a still powerful cast. But even as The Handmaid’s Tale nears its end, Hulu has announced casting for a follow-up series, The Testaments, based on Atwood’s 2019 sequel set 15 years later. Viewers and pundits alike will have to brace themselves for the inevitability that, like the real world it’s sure to mirror, it will not be the stuff of comedy.
This story appeared in the April 2 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
