The Handmaid’s Tale Season 6 review: a finale finally

Trigger warning: sexual assault. Spoilers for Seasons 1 through 5.

The most unnerving dystopias emerge from very real cracks in our society. So it was when Margaret Atwood sat down to write what would become The Handmaid’s Tale in the spring of 1984, a year already loaded with existential dread thanks to George Orwell.

Atwood was living in West Berlin at the time, a city divided physically by the wall and in every other conceivable way by the post-WWII order. Surrounded by the all-pervasive fear of spies and the trauma of the disappeared, the threads of her novel were everywhere. But the policing of women’s bodies, of queer people and more by the church, governments and soldiers was not limited to a divided Germany.

The author has always insisted that every horror perpetrated by the theocratic tyranny of Gilead, the extremist theocracy that overthrows the United States government in the novel, subjugating women in a near-future where environmental collapse has brought about mass sterility, has already happened somewhere in the world. Quite often in US history. In Puritan New England, Atwood’s ancestor Mary Webster was accused of witchcraft, after all.

Handmaid’s Tale: adaptation

The Handmaid’s Tale was first adapted for the screen in Volker Schlöndorff’s 1990 film. He replaced director Karel Reisz on a production fraught with behind-the-scenes battles. Playwright Harold Pinter disowned his screenplay, which was tinkered with by several figures, including Atwood herself.

While it’s a pretty decent run at the book, it’s the Elisabeth Moss-led TV show that most folks associate with the story. And the first season of showrunner Bruce Miller’s HBO show was spectacularly gripping, with much more space to writhe in the hell that is Gilead.

Moss plays the terrorised June Osborne, captured by Gilead’s soldiers and separated from her young daughter Hannah and husband Luke (O-T Fagbenle). Forced into sexual slavery and assaulted monthly by Commander Waterford (Joseph Fiennes) and his wife Serena Joy (Australian actor Yvonne Strahovski), she is renamed Offred in deference to her abuser.

June forged an alliance with Rita (Amanda Brugel), the Waterford’s housekeeper and has an affair with the Waterford’s driver, Nick (Max Minghella), a Gilead spy or Eye. All this after June was reunited with best friend Moira (Samira Wiley) at the Red Centre training facility, where they were brutally indoctrinated by menacing Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) alongside unpredictable handmaid Janine (Madeline Brewer).

As with the latter seasons of Game of Thrones, the writing wasn’t quite as tight once the book was done, from Season 2 on. There’s a lot of frankly implausible and eventually exhausting toing and froing as June escapes and is recaptured multiple times, including being placed with dubiously aligned Gilead architect Commander Lawrence (a deceptively cuddly Bradley Whitford).

There’s been a lot of lingering as a refugee in Canada since having her second daughter, Holly, and finally reuniting with Luke and Moira. The latter made it out solo after a brief spell in Jezebel’s, the brothel where the none-too-holy commanders enjoy lying with women.

Sadly, Wiley and Fagbenle have had jack shit to do for years now and must surely be cranky at their agents. June never quite seems to align with the rebel alliance, May Day, either, to bring down Gilead and free Hannah, despite much handwringing about her fate and despite the assistance of the exiled US government personified by useful suit Mark (Sam Jaeger).

Will the finale finally ramp things up to where they should have been a long time ago?

Handmaid’s Tale: the final season

Eventually, is the answer. As with all seasons of impeccably well-made but in no darn hurry show, it’s two steps forward, one step back. We can only discuss the first three episodes of eight we’ve seen for now, though the pace picks up considerably from there as the actual US teeters on the brink of Atwood’s warning.

Strahovski’s arc as the now-widowed commander’s wife, Serena, has long been more intriguing than June’s. A populist conservative author in the before times, she desperately wanted the power and the glory of being a commander’s wife, despite having to subjugate herself to the weaselly Fred.

After he was torn apart by a pack of pissed-off handmaids, including June, Serena had no real power, with her biological son Noah – long story – placed in the care of Gilead zealots, Commander Ryan Wheeler (Lucas Neff) and his wife Alanis (Genevieve Angelson).

She nabbed Noah at the end of last season, winding up on the same refugee train June and Holly have also boarded after things took a turn in Toronto. And it’s great to see them face-to-face again, with Moss and Strahovski making much of their twisted union, all fear and loath/loving muddled with Stockholm syndrome and a messiah complex.

‘We’re not the same,’ June glowers at Serena, who counters, ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’.

Righto. It’s a golden televisual moment when Serena sneers at June after being reprimanded for picking up Holly, ‘Do you think I’m going to steal her like some Disney villain while you’re sleeping?’ Talk about cognitive dissonance.

Sadly, they’ll soon be separated again – we’re not allowed to say how or why – but Serena winds up in the more dramatically rich position, with June spinning her wheels again.

Though not as much as Moira and the currently banged-up Luke, both of whom finally step up only to get stuck once more. Bear with them. Much like the show, they’re getting there slowly but surely. At least both get a moment to pull the often-self-centred June’s head in, reminding her they’re all in this mess together.

Nick, often as milquetoast as Luke, finally manoeuvres into a fascinating position halfway between Lawrence’s loopholes and the smiling menace of a new commander played by The Good Wife actor Josh Charles. However, Nick’s subplot exacerbates the plot holes over how easy (and fast) it is to cross Gilead’s supposedly ironclad border.

Watch The Handmaid’s Tale Season 6 trailer.

Thanks to a wonderfully sassy turn by Whitford, Commander Lawrence continues to be good/bad value as he scrabbles to maintain power while simultaneously undermining Gilead’s foundations, with Ever Caradine magnificently prissy as the snippy Naomi, now remarried to him for want of a better husband.

There are some neat surprises, including the unexpected return of a genuinely awesome character who – surprise – won’t get much to do but is nonetheless very emotionally welcome.

Handmaid’s Tale: Season 6 opening

That the show – often directed by Moss, a controversial figure for her membership of the Scientology cult – never really dealt with race in any rigorous way continues to be a disappointment in this final run.

It’s a misstep, too, that after 2.5 years between seasons, the fates of the key characters are equally divvied out across the first three episodes. We don’t catch up with Aunt Lydia and Janine – arguably the Jack and Karen of the show, eclipsing June and Serena’s Will & Grace – until the third.

They are their dark mirror, with Lydia loving Janine like a daughter, except for press-ganging her into sexual slavery and kidnapping Janine’s actual daughter. Lydia’s icy demeanour may be thawing, and the real heart of the show lies in the bitter truth that Janine can’t quite help but love her back despite her righteous fury, even as she tells the older woman, ‘Every time you try to help, you only make things worse’.

For better or worse, I hope Brewer will be back to play some role alongside Dowd in the announced sequel series based on Atwood’s belated follow-up novel, The Testaments. But if you’ve come to the final season of The Handmaid’s Tale expecting June to triumph over a burning Gilead, hold please. The wheels have a way to turn yet.

The Handmaid’s Tale Season 6 premieres on SBS On Demand on 8 April 2025.

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