The Handmaid’s Story Collection Finale Is A Sizzling Mess, However Its Last Message Is Value It

The final season of “The Handmaid’s Story” had explosive deaths and a lethal wedding ceremony, however the remaining episode is sluggish and impressionistic, quite than the crescendo of a climactic plot. June principally wanders across the newly liberated Boston, desirous about her previous, current, and future — and even an alternate actuality the place the women of Gilead led regular lives singing karaoke to Stevie Nicks’ “Landslide.” chunk of the episode’s final ten minutes is simply June strolling up the steps of the Waterfords’ charred dwelling in slow-motion. By this level within the sequence, using molasses-paced montages and excessive close-ups has misplaced its poeticness, turning into self-indulgent and bordering on parody.

Whereas the dialogue-heavy callbacks, reunions, and goodbye scenes are supposed to reward followers, they really feel very compelled. Serena begs June for forgiveness; June thanks Aunt Lydia for her remaining act of heroism in releasing the Handmaids; Emily makes a random reappearance and divulges she’s been working for the resistance all alongside; Luke and June acknowledge that their relationship is irreparable. Each one in all these fastidiously constructed exchanges screams, “THIS IS THE FINAL EPISODE!”

All the pieces wraps up rapidly in a neat little bow, which paradoxically is strictly why the present creator Bruce Miller advised The Hollywood Reporter {that a} glad ending with June discovering her daughter Hannah was by no means within the playing cards. The present solely focuses on “June’s journey from handmaidness to freedom. The query of how she rebuilds her household felt like a complete different step.” It is unsatisfying to not see June reunite with Hannah or to solely make a small dent in Gilead’s downfall, but this ending often is the most sensible — and most related — given our present political local weather. Is hope and happiness the antidote we want proper now, or would it not really feel disingenuous?

The finale presents little catharsis and is extra of an introspective and artfully shot approach of circling again to the start of June’s story. The scene the place June tells her mom that liberating Boston is just the start of toppling Gilead is essentially the most real a part of the episode. It conveys why “The Handmaid’s Story” shies away from providing any false hope or overly optimistic closure: 

“However the factor is, Mother, I am not protected. Neither are you. They’re by no means going to cease coming for us. And even once we’re gone, they’re gonna come for our youngsters and our grandchildren. Combating may not get us every little thing, however we do not have a selection. As a result of not preventing is what obtained us Gilead within the first place.”

June’s observations about not preventing again recall her voiceover within the third episode of season 1:

“Now I am awake to the world. I used to be asleep earlier than. That is how we let it occur. After they slaughtered Congress, we did not get up. After they blamed terrorists and suspended the Structure, we did not get up then both. They stated it might be non permanent. Nothing adjustments instantaneously. In a regularly heating bathtub, you would be boiled to dying earlier than you knew it.”

It looks like right this moment, in America, we’re simply as deep in that boiling bathtub. Submerged on this scalding water, it is troublesome to visualise a future the place the subsequent generations will escape the ideological injury that deepens with every passing day, pushing us additional in the direction of authoritarianism.

Again in 2017, /Movie author Hoai-Tran Bui hailed the then-new sequence as politically related. That political likeness has solely grown. Below Donald Trump’s second time period, America appears nearer to Gilead than ever. The overturning of Roe v. Wade and the banning of transgender women and men from the army was just the start.

Now, Donald Trump is deporting immigrants with out due course of; he is frozen federal funding for prestigious universities akin to Harvard, gutting applications that analysis kids’s most cancers; he is banned the Related Press from protecting main occasions as a result of they disagree together with his administration. Much more alarming, he is overtly mentioned staying for an unconstitutional third time period. These are assaults on our most simple rights: to exist, to be educated, and to talk freely. The highway to fascism is being paved earlier than our very eyes.

In remaining shot of “The Handmaid’s Story,” June begins to put in writing her story. She appears to be like straight into the digital camera with a decided stare and says, “My identify is Offred.” It is her approach of warning the viewers: That is in your fingers now. Open your eyes and do one thing — otherwise you’ll find yourself like me.

A sequel sequence, “The Testaments,” will observe June’s daughter Hannah and the true finish of Gilead. If it additionally runs for eight years, it is arduous to say the place America’s political panorama will probably be by the tip. Will now we have saved ourselves, or will issues have solely gotten worse? The “Handmaid’s Story” finale could lack a definitive conclusion, however its message is one we have to hear. We lengthy for a glimmer of hope and the assumption that oppression can finish joyfully, however the one approach we are able to obtain that in actual life is that if, as June says, we get up and do as a lot as we are able to to combat again.