The end of The Handmaid’s Tale explained: how does it end?

What fate for June? Sarana? Hannah? Creator Bruce Miller deciphers his intentions for the conclusion of the poignant history of scarlet servants.

Obviously, the series has never managed to reproduce the narrative power of its first shock season. But The Handmaid’s Tale is still a series that has marked its time. And its final without big revelation or a crash – broadcast this week in France on OCS – is like the dark sobriety that has characterized it since 2017.

Attention spoilers!

In the last episode of the series, June Osborne (embodied by Elisabeth Moss) stroll through the city of Boston, released from the yoke of commanders. She ends up returning to the Waterford house, partially destroyed by bombing. She manages to climb to her room, her scarlet servant prison. He has a last mission to him: to record his story, to write his memories. We hear a click, that of the tape recorder it lights. THE same click as the one we heard in the very first scene of the pilot. A detail that Bruce Millercreator of the series, had carefully planned from the start. He assures him in Variety:

“I always thought it was logical. The last thing we know in the book about Offed is that she recorded all of this. If you look at the pilot again, you can hear this click of the tape recorder at first – and no, we did not add it later. It was already there. “

Hannah’s heartbreaking absence

But this discreet final will still have forgotten to show us the reunion between June and her daughter Hannah. Pain assumed by the creative team, but dictated by production imperatives. Indeed, Hulu has already ordered the rest, a series adapted to The Testamentsthe novel published in 2019 by Margaret Atwood, which takes place fifteen years after the events of the series and notably follows Hannah (now Agnes), Daisy, and Aunt Lydia.

“Our hands were linked, unfortunately,” confession Yahlin ChangCo-showrunner of season 6 in Los Angeles Times. “We could not bring together June and Hannah because of The Testamentswhich was very difficult to accept, for spectators as for us. “

Eric Tuchmanalso in control, abounds in this direction:

“We knew that we could not do this reunion, and it was overwhelming. But with hindsight, it changed June’s emotional engine: what do we do when we do not get what we want, nor what we hope? And if it never happens? It becomes an even more powerful message: we continue. We never stop loving.”

June and Luke: a love without promise

Another striking moment of this last episode, the sequence of goodbye between June and Luke. The story of the couple ends without real resolution. They are now very different. They know it and cannot pretend that nothing had changed. He went to continue the war against Gilead in New York. She will try to recover Hannah. Their roads separate again, but they promise to meet, after … a promise that is not in vain, according to Miller:

“They will not stop to get to know each other. They know that their relationship will be long, complicated, whatever its form. They love each other, this is not the question. What remains vague is if they will live together full time or half. “

Because Luke, for his part, has taken his emotional independence this season:

“He no longer tries to make someone else’s life. He wants to do what is right. But he also wonders: ‘If I am not there for someone sad, then what I serve?'”

And Serena in all of this?

The Serena Joy case (interpreted by Yvonne Strahovski) has always been a little delicate and he almost took a much brutal turn. If she ends alone, without money, but with a child in her arms, in a UN refugee center, she almost was killed! Bruce Miller Reveals in TVLINE:

“I thought about it seriously. If she came across a checkpoint, they would probably have stopped and executed it. This is what Mayday would have done. Whenever she meets a group, she fails to be killed!”

So why have spared it? Miller wanted June to keep the story control, and not be tempted to cry!

“If Serena died, it is as if she had the last word. And I did not want June to take pity on it. She forgives her for herself, not for Serena. As she says: ‘We must start somewhere”.

For him, Serena’s true punishment will come over time, when her child begins to ask questions:

“In twenty or thirty years, when his son asked him: ‘What did you do, mom?’ … This is what we really want.”