In a dystopia, there are no happy endings. Despite what June says or thinks, life will never return to the way it was. Moira can’t erase the nights of ritual rape. Janine can’t restore the eye the Republic of Gilead took from her. June can’t be there for her daughter’s childhood.
But as long as there’s resistance, there’s hope. When the handmaids first arrived to the Rachel and Leah Center for training, they shared a look of terror in their eyes, a look June (Elisabeth Moss) had never seen in real life. But by The Handmaid's Tale season finale, June, armed with a package for the Mayday Resistance, is now longer afraid. “They should never have given us uniforms if they didn’t want us to be an army,” she thinks, striding down snowy Boston streets with her fellow red-dressed soldiers.
Gilead's leaders, though, won't go down without a fight—an ugly one. After June hides the mystery package behind a bathtub at her Commander's home, his wife Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski) hits her across the face, knocking June to the floor. “I trusted you,” she says. “You could have left me with something.” Mrs. Waterford has found out about June’s illicit brothel trips with her husband, betraying the strict roles of the republic. After bloodying her face, Serena Joy hands her a pregnancy test: She needs to know that the nights with the Commander, the affair between June and Nick she helped orchestrate, have at least resulted in a baby. For Serena Joy—and the regime—that’s the whole point of June’s existence.
And it’s worked: June is pregnant. Immediately, things change. Serena Joy doesn’t harm her. Rita hugs her and prepares her a special breakfast. When June tells Nick (Max Minghella), the presumed father, we see a rare moment of intimacy, as he touches her stomach, holds her hand, and leans into her shoulder. Rape and misogyny didn’t prompt him to fight against the regime, but personal stakes—the possibility of his own child—do. They could be a family. They could escape.
Serena Joy senses their private hope, and has a plan to squash it. She escorts June into a car, locks the doors behind her, and takes her to a nearby house. June is left in the car while Serena Joy walks up and sits on the steps of the home with a little girl dressed in pink: June’s daughter, Hannah. June pleads with the driver to be let out, pounds on the window, throws herself against the car door, to no avail. “As long as my baby is safe, so is yours,” Serena Joy tells her, ensuring that June, the vessel carrying the baby she wants, remains compliant. Serena Joy may feel June has rendered her powerless in her marriage, but she always finds a way to remind her handmaid who is in control. “You are deranged, you are fucking evil, you know that?” says June, spitting the words at the Commander's wife through the window. “You are a goddamn motherfucking monster.” A monster who can use Hannah’s life as collateral. June asks the Commander to protect her daughter, but are no guarantees. She is trapped.
But Moira (Samira Wiley) isn’t. She finally made it out of Gilead after taking a man’s clothes at shiv-point and driving off from the brothel Jezebel’s. She makes it to Ontario and is brought to a government center, where we finally see the mundane bureaucracy of survivors. A man gives Moira a refugee ID card, a prepaid cellphones, a bag of clothes, a medical insurance card. (Oh, Canada.) Then, she’s free to do as she wants: to read, to shower, to get food. The caseworker tells a dumbfounded Moira, “it’s completely up to you.” Entirely alone and unmoored, she wanders out of the office to find Luke (O-T Fagbenle), her best friend’s husband, waiting for her. “You’re on my list,” says Luke. It doesn’t matter if they fought a lifetime ago—they’re family.
After Serena Joy confronts him about his affair with June, the Commander tries to make amends. Soon, Offred/June will be gone, and the three of them—Serena, Fred, and the baby—will be able to start a new family. Once the handmaid has served her purpose, she’ll disappear from their lives.
Except stealing someone’s baby isn’t quite so easy. After he made promises to his handmaid Janine that they could run away together, Commander Putnam (Stephen Kunken) can’t leave his sin in the past. He faces a tribunal of peers, and thanks to his wife’s plea that he receive the harshest possible punishment, he loses a hand for his affair. The wives still hold some power, even if it’s only vindictive.
But Janine (Madeline Brewer), the transgressive handmaid, suffers a worse fate: When the other handmaids are summoned to a Salvaging, it’s not an unknown man they’re told to stone to death, but one of their own. For once, we see the internal struggle of Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd), the woman who trained and subjugated these women. “My special girls,” she says, looking out across a sea of red dresses and white bonnets. “So beautiful.” But the punishment for endangering a child is death by stoning, and so one of her special girls must die. She blows the whistle.
But the handmaids rally and refuse to murder Janine. Ofglen (Tattiawna Jones), the most stalwart believer in Gilead, shouts out that this is insane, and gets hit with the muzzle of a gun. The rest of the handmaids stand in silence, holding their rocks. June looks up, drops her stone, and says, “I’m sorry, Aunt Lydia.” The other handmaids follow suit. It’s an act of rebellion, couched in submissive apology. Aunt Lydia is confused, upset, irate. “There will be consequences, believe me,” she tells the handmaids. But for now, they’ve saved the life of one of their own.
As June sits by her window, awaiting punishment for sparing the life of her friend, she feels calm. “I ought to be terrified, but I feel serene,” she thinks. “There’s a kind of hope, it seems, even in futility.” A black car pulls up, and before the Eyes come to take her away, Nick tells her, “just go, trust me.” Surprising no one, he finally sees the value in bucking the system when his own child is involved. June walks past the bewildered Waterfords and into the car. “And so I step up, into the darkness within—or else the light,” she thinks. She's headed for either punishment or escape; either way, she’s leaving.
Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale novel ends Offred’s story here. In an additional chapter, a professor of Gileadean Studies dissects her diary for facts, but cannot find records of the rest of her life. The first season expanded significantly from the book, through the stories of Moira, Janine, and Luke, and Season 2 will do the same. “The world has escaped from the book, and has taken on a new life of its own,” says author Atwood, who will continue to work closely with show creator Bruce Miller on the second season. The Handmaid's Tale escaped Atwood's imagination thanks to Hulu—as for June’s escape, fans will have to keep watching to find out.
