‘The Handmaid’s Tale’: Did Season Six Give Us What We Wanted?

Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale has now officially ended, after six seasons of tension, terror and very intense close ups. It ended right where it began, with June sitting in Offred’s room in the old Waterford house in Boston, where everything has changed and yet everything stays the same, laying the groundwork for The Testaments, which will pick up where this show left off. With this in mind, did season six give us what we wanted? Here are my top moments from season 6, and there will be spoilers. Oh yes.

I had a very simple set of wishes for season six, some of which were based on clues from The Testaments. We knew that June would not get Hannah back as she’s a central character in the sequel, but The Testaments also promises Rebel Aunt Lydia. Oh how I wanted to see Rebel Aunt Lydia. I also wanted Team Jurena to burn it all down, and for nothing bad to happen to Janine.

Based on those parameters, season six delivered. Eventually. It also gave us a lot of other treats along the way.

1: The Return of Holly
I cried big fat happy tears when June and Nicole arrived in Alaska and were reunited with June’s mum. Although Holly was relegated to babysitting for most of the season while June went on her missions to Gilead, we’ll always have that glorious moment where she called Nick a Nazi. Blessed be the tough love.

2: Jurena Scenes Forever
Serena has an uncanny ability to fall on her feet, partly because she feels like she should be the boss in any situation and people just…let her. June is the only person who consistently calls her out on her BS. Although we didn’t get a full season of Jurena, the scenes with them together are some of the best in the show. The sniping! Serena’s constant lack of awareness! Beautiful. After June pushes Serena and Noah off the train to save them from an angry mob, Serena finds shelter with a religious commune of sorts, before being recruited by Lawrence to lead the PR campaign for New Bethlehem, aka Make Gilead Seem Nice Again. Once there, she falls in love with Commander Wharton, Nick’s father-in-law. In her latest rise to power, she seems genuinely like she wants to make things better, but better always seems to mean she’s in charge and doesn’t have to feel bad about anything. What she really wants is June’s forgiveness, and she works hard for this, first sheltering June when she gets trapped after a mission, and then providing crucial info to her so that the next mission can go ahead. She chooses June and what’s right over her husband and power. It helps that her husband is awful, to be fair. But she still made the right choice.

In the end, June forgives her to be kind, and Serena is last seen in refugee accommodation with Noah. She has no power, no status, no belongings, just her longed-for child. Oh yes, Serena is now fully in Boy Mom mode. Imagine how terrifying she will be as a mother-in-law…

3: Janine Gets A Happy Ending — Eventually
A lot of very bad things happened to Janine, but she’s got nine lives too, and there would have been a riot if she didn’t get a happy ending. Poor Janine was sent to Jezebels with lots of other ‘retired Handmaids’, where she was preyed upon by some sadistic jerk Commanders. When the Americans decide their next big mission is to kill off the High Commanders, Jezebels becomes a good spot to access them, and June and Moira decide to lead the charge to make sure Janine is rescued. Their mission is betrayed by Nick (BOOOOO) and all of the women are executed, except Janine, who is Sadistic Jerk Commander Bell’s favourite girl. After this, she is freed, captured and freed again, but she finally gets the nicest happy ending of all the characters: reunited with her daughter, and in the land of the free.

4: Aunt Lydia Gets Mad
She’s so mad, y’all. She believed in the cause, unlike literally everyone else involved who was in it for the power and used the cause as an excuse. When she finds out her ‘precious girls’ are not treated with respect once they have served their time, she is livid. She lobbies Lawrence and Serena to try to make things better. She sniffs out the Big Handmaid Plot because she’s smart, but when confronted with her role in what has happened to her ‘girls’ she stands down and lets them go. When she’s taken out for her execution, there’s a nod and a tight smile for June. Her scaffold speech about the evils of ‘godless men’ is one of the best moments of the whole show; she is saved by the arrival of troops, and she has somehow managed to stay in her post, but she is a changed woman. Her last act in the show was getting Naomi to give Janine her daughter back. She’s not going to burn it all down any time soon, because she still believes in the cause; it’s the ‘godless men’ in charge that are the problem for her. It’s a start though. All the awards for Ann Dowd, please.

5: Commander Lawrence Does The Right Thing
Doing a better job of burning it all down is Lawrence. He’s still a misanthrope but he’s the ‘father of a daughter’ now, and worried about the ‘extremist Commanders’ in the ranks. (Cough, that’s all of them, cough.) When it’s clear that his reform plans are going down like a lead balloon, he strikes a deal with the Americans to take them all out, before he ends up on the Wall himself. When Plan A and Plan B don’t pan out, he takes the briefcase bomb onto the plane himself, with a smile and a nod back to June. Farewell, Lawrence, Nick, Wharton and assorted other horrors.

6: Handmaid Justice Is Served
The jerks on the plane were the only Commanders left in Boston after Plan B aka Handmaid Justice wiped out everyone else. June and Moira infiltrate the Red Center with the help of Rebel Aunt Phoebe (D’Arcy Carden), and when the Red Center handmaids meet up with the posted handmaids for Serena’s wedding, they pass out knives to them. Rita drugs the wedding cake so that the Commanders and the Wives fall into a deep sleep when they get home. Then the posted handmaids get stabby with it. June goes to Commander Bell’s house, stabs him in the eye and rescues Janine. Many of them get caught trying to escape and they are rounded up for a big execution, but don’t worry, America’s coming!

7: America Strikes Back
The big hitters are all on Team America. Aunt Phoebe is really Ava, a former CIA operative who kicks some butt. (This is how to be a spy, Nick!) Luke and Rita infiltrate the crowd with grenades and guns. With the command levels wiped out, America takes Boston in a matter of days, and then there are three stars on the flag. Tuello is now Commander Tuello, which isn’t ominous at all, because Mr Chin Dimple is reassuringly hot, strutting about being heroic and not a crushing disappointment anymore. Luke gets the power back on. June can walk around the city now, and we’re treated to a reunion with Emily outside the former ice-cream shop again. Dead guardians have been displayed on the Wall and that’s also not ominous at all. We also get a dream reunion with our departed former friends who got squished by the train.

Luke and June are making plans for their next steps; Gilead is wounded but not gone, and the fighting will continue on new fronts. Commander Mackenzie has been promoted and is moving from Colorado to DC with his family, so Hannah will be closer, but it’s still going to be a mission to get her back.

June’s visit to the old Waterford house becomes her moment to reckon with her past, to reflect and to look ahead. She can’t make peace and forgive everyone, but she can see it for what it is, know that it’s over and find a renewed purpose going forward. Holly is going to keep Nicole for a while, so that June and Luke can keep fighting, not so much together as on parallel missions. June’s story of her handmaid years is over, but her fight goes on.

That’s the rub, though, isn’t it? The fight goes on. Gilead persists; more Commanders will replace the ones killed off by Handmaid Justice, and they are all going to be awful too. Our heroes are healing, but they aren’t riding off into the sunset to Happily Ever After Land either. I’ve seen some laments that the finale was both too cheesy in tying things up and holding back on resolutions in other areas, and I can see that, but I think it’s a good balancing act between the way the book ends and what we want as viewers. My wishlist is checked off, and now I’m off to re-read The Testaments because I am still a sucker for all this, and watching Ann Dowd’s Aunt Lydia become Subversive Number 1 is going to be worth the wait.