lol. lmao, even.
Cons:
Well, at least it's all over! Man. What a bummer that this is what we're left with at the end of all of this. This show has always been so uneven, but it used to have writing that felt internally consistent with the characters it had created? I don't even really know where to start here.
For one thing, "you should write a book, June." Oh, give me a break! Like this June Osborne would write the book that Margaret Atwood wrote in 1985. Like it would bear any resemblance. I feel like it's an insult to the original text. Let this be its own thing, you don't have to do a whole "what's more powerful than stories" ending to this story. It's self-aggrandizing in the worst way. Gave me Tyrion Lannister putting Bran Stark on the Iron Throne flashbacks. Yuck. Holly says it, then Luke says it... it's just so trite and goofy, honestly. And then to go so far as to have June start to "write" the novel at the end... this isn't a full circle moment, buddy. This show broke containment from the original (completely brilliant and almost flawless) novel in a big, big way. You don't get to have this one, it doesn't goddamn work.
And, last word on Nick is this: I've seen a bit of... I guess you'd call it smugness? Directed towards the people upset about the way Nick's story ended, this idea of "this was always a story about women, and here you are caring too much about a man." And I just want to say... no, that's not how... this fucking works, though. Like, people don't fall in love with stories because of their themes or moral messaging, they fall in love with characters, with relationships, with the connections between people that they see playing out in front of them. I'm not sitting here saying that Nick should have lived and he and June should have had a happily ever after, that's not... the situation. I was always prepared for this to be a tragedy. But if this is a story about women, if this is a story about June, then it's a story about the people that June cares about, and that includes Nick. It's not some sort of feminist triumph to do a complete 180 on Nick's characterization at the end, it's just lazy and bad writing, sorry.
Like, let's talk a bit more about how this is a show about women, huh? There's that scene where June imagines her and her friends singing karaoke and being together and happy and whole, in a world where Gilead never happened. It was hard for me to feel invested in this scene, it was hard for me to bask in the good vibes or imagined world that never could have been, because in my opinion this show hasn't done a great job developing the ending to the stories of these women. Emily coming back was a nice surprise, and I'll talk about Janine in a sec, but... god, they really had nothing for Rita or Moira, our two Black women, to do all season, did they? Moira especially just got absolutely nothing in this final season, in a way that sincerely bummed me out. They hit some sort of block with her story and didn't bother to find any way to get around it.
And then, ra-ra white feminism, June forgives Serena. The thing is, June deciding to let go of the anger in her heart in an act of radical acceptance and forgiveness is like, fine, as a character beat for her. Sure, okay. But Serena getting out, with her son, with Mark Tuello making sultry "I'll find you" eyes at her, it's like... she gets to have this, because... because she's a woman? I guess? Of all the villains in this story, she's the one who gets to live, she gets absolution, we get to "forgive" her. I think I go back again and again in my head to that train, at the end of season five. Serena escaping with Noah, finding June also getting away. And how this season apparently just decided that that story wasn't what they wanted to tell anyway. Finding a way to get Serena back into Gilead, back into a position of power, only so she could again break away from that power? It's simply unsatisfying, in a really fundamental way.
You know, this show was never going to be able to make the case for full redemption of Serena, but if they'd had Serena come to this break-down realization and apologize to June like two seasons ago, then it would have been a story about what a person does when they've committed such atrocities. It's extremely rare in the real world for a complete monster to actually be strong enough to do the introspective work it takes to unpack those damaging beliefs, but it does happen. If they wanted it to happen to Serena, then why have the whole Commander Wharton story in here at all? Why not give us this last season to see a truly repentant Serena, unlearning the poison in her mind? We have this final shot of her holding Noah and saying that Noah was all she ever wanted. And I got the sense that the show wanted me to find this... sympathetic? Because it's like... "oh, I never wanted to create a violent dystopia, it was all about my yearning to be a mother." Like that's supposed to make it better? Sigh. In the same way that if they'd started seeding a Nick heel turn like a season and a half ago and led to his heartbreaking betrayal, I might have accepted it, I also might have accepted this ending beat between Serena and June if it had come after a shitton of work on Serena's end to justify it. But we didn't get that, did we.
Let's talk The Testaments for a second. One of the most frustrating "final seasons of a show I once loved" experiences I ever had was with The Walking Dead. Without getting into the specifics, the fact that the core show ends and we don't get to see Rick reunite with Michonne, Daryl, or his kids, within that show, is really stupid. You air a work of story-telling for eleven seasons and then say "do you want a resolution to the core emotional thread of the entire goddamn thing? Check out our mini-series airing next year!" It feels like a true slap in the face.
When I heard they were making The Testaments, a show based on the 2019 sequel to the original book, I immediately had a sinking feeling in my stomach. See, I've read the book. In the book, Hannah and Nichole are both teenagers, one living in Gilead, the other living in Canada. And Lydia is a secret agent working to take Gilead down from the inside. So... this show's ending is now not about ending the story, but about setting up a sequel to itself. It means that Boston is America again now, but Serena was right, they're just going to keep sending more men, and Gilead will live on, mostly unchanged. It also means no Hannah, that the show ends with June determined to keep working to get her daughter back, willing to leave Nichole/Holly with her mother so she can keep being a resistance fighter. On the one hand, Gilead being totally defeated and dismantled after such a short amount of time would be silly, but on the other hand, I just watched six seasons of a TV show and it ends with "do you want to see June reunite with Hannah, the thing she's been fighting for since the very beginning? Tune in for our new TV show!" And guess what? I will not be tuning in. Try and fucking make me, y'all. You ruined it. (In The Testaments book, for what it's worth, there is the suggestion that Nick survived and is working with May Day. So that's just an extra fuck you to the TV version.)
This finale felt like it was telling me what was supposed to make me feel emotional, rather than proving it to me, you know? If this is a show about women and their stories, then having the penultimate episode be all about Lawrence and Nick and their death doesn't feel very grounded in women's stories. And again back to Rita and Moira having nothing to do, and even Janine having very little air time here. Mark Tuello gets to talk about his family that he's fighting for, and he gets to make bedroom eyes at Serena, and we're supposed to shut up and swallow our feminism juice and just accept that we're bad at caring about women's rights if we don't like how this story ended up. I feel lectured at, honestly.
Pros:
Like, okay. The problem with this goddamn show is that from the very start, the performances have been powerful enough that I will get genuinely moved to tears by things even when in context it doesn't make any sense or is actively bad writing. Yvonne Strahovski is a talented enough performer that when she was breaking down and stuttering over her shame and regret to June, I was moved! If the story leading up to this moment had made a lick of sense as regards Serena's behavior, imagine how powerful this moment might have been! Similarly with Luke telling June that there's stuff worth remembering. People who loved her, people who she loved. Listing Nick among his examples. That was a powerful moment, imagine if Nick's character hadn't been randomly butchered all to hell before his death! Imagine if this scene had worked within a larger context. But even without that, I was moved by Luke in that moment, for sure.
Speaking of Luke, I'm pleasantly surprised by the open ending they gave them. I think it was really the only thing that made sense. The two of them being together as a couple would have been ridiculous and wrong, so instead we get this thing where they acknowledge that they don't really know each other anymore. June wonders... was there a before? And Luke says yes, and that there will be an after, too. He's going to go fight with May Day to liberate more cities from Gilead, while June is going to focus her efforts on Hannah specifically.
I did like the flashbacks to June with Hannah, it's an easy way to tug on the heartstrings but it was effective. Similarly effective was when Holly and baby Holly both showed up and reunited with June and Luke. I'm a sucker for the reunions that happen on this show even between characters who didn't much like each other before, like, one of my top favorite moments from this whole show is always going to be when Moira got out and Luke came for her because he had put her down on his list of family. Oof. Hits me right in the feels.
I'm so happy for Janine. We needed a big cathartic reunion between a Handmaid and the child she had been forced to give up, and here we got it. June's relief as she held and kissed Janine was also very powerful and lovely. June's love for and protection towards Janine stretches all the way back to the Red Room, and it's cool that it got a moment here in the finale. The way Naomi is written here, saying goodbye and saying that the only important thing is for Charlotte to be safe... that's the kind of redemptive moment that works for me, because it's subtle and it doesn't absolve Naomi of anything but it shows the spark of humanity that can be nurtured and grown. It was when Serena was at her most potent as a character for me, too, when she allowed June to leave with Nichole. It doesn't erase the rest of it, but it matters. I also liked that Lydia and June had a moment of respect... of all the "redemption" arcs this show accomplished, I think Lawrence's was the best executed, but Lydia's was, in retrospect, not bad. Maybe a little silly that she's been released after what she said at the execution, but whatever. I'll let it go.
Emily, too, it was just nice to see her. Nice to hear about her continued fight, and how she's still in her wife and son's life, even if not with with them. Wartime means families are separated, and fighting for what's right can take a major personal toll. It was a good setup for what June's going to set off to do, and it was lovely to see a familiar face.
I'm glad I watched this show, even as much as it tended to piss me off each week by the end. I feel like they honestly butchered the Nick stuff so hard, and the Serena stuff arguably even worse, that it's hard for me to take it seriously as a well-crafted story. I'm obsessed with the quote about Dickens's writing that he has bad architecture but brilliant gargoyles, I've probably paraphrased that quote in reviews of this show before, honestly. And that's my takeaway. This last season especially had incredibly bad architecture, the whole goddamn building was falling down as the season progressed. No structural integrity left to be seen. But those gargoyles... damn. There were some really beautiful moments sprinkled throughout, right to the very end.
This finale gets...
4/10
The show as a whole... had some really high highs and some terribly low lows. I think I started getting frustrated with June's Protagonist Plot Armor as early as season two, and I chuckled when she referred to Lydia here in the finale as having nine lives. At some point midway through the show I think I let go of the idea that it was ever going to hold up to the brilliant and succinct writing of the original. It was its own thing, messier and sloppier and less "good" in the purest sense of the word but still worthwhile. By the end, obviously, my opinion on a lot of these elements has really soured. But in trying to honor my thoughts when I thought the show was at its best... I'll give the show as a whole:
7/10
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