The Handmaid's Tale aired its final-ever episode today on Hulu, and while it was an emotional affair, it left a lot of questions unanswered. For one, lead character June never reunited with her daughter Hannah, who has been living in the totalitarian, oppressive regime of Gilead this whole time; finding her has been one of June's main drives. And while Gilead was weakened, it did not fall.
Creator Bruce Miller explained to The Hollywood Reporter why the show ended without this thread being tied up: "I think they say it in the book: There’s plenty of stories from people who get their kids back. Those are the one-in-a-million stories we always tell. I want to tell the story about the 999,000 people who don’t get their kids back. They have to go through life and live, and it’s not easy. June is a good example of someone who doesn’t ever take the easy way out, but this is as hard as things get in the world and you see what that does to somebody."
There's also a more practical reason: The Handmaid's Tale is based on Margaret Atwood's book of the same name; the show goes beyond the books, and Miller admits that had they made the show undernormal circumstances, June may well have reunited with Hannah at the end. But in 2019, Atwood released a sequel book The Testaments. In that book, Hannah is one of the main characters, and she and June still aren't together.
"Talk to Margaret Atwood," Elizabeth Moss, who plays June, told Variety. "It definitely is something we have carried with us since The Testaments came out, knowing that wasn’t going to be an ending. That was a choice that Margaret made that we, of course, followed, and I don’t know if we would have done it if she hadn’t written The Testaments. I really have no idea, but I can’t imagine it any other way. I think if there was no Testaments, this would be a very different experience for me."
"Our challenge was to be loyal to what Margaret decided to do, but at the same time honor Hannah’s presence. There is literally no one more aware of the audience’s desire for June to get Hannah back than me. It is the number one question I’m asked. It is the number one thing people want. I don’t want to call it a burden, but I’ve carried this question with me for many years. And I want to say to every single person who says to me “Please tell me she gets her daughter back,” like, I get what you’re feeling, but that doesn’t happen in Margaret’s sequel."
As for Gilead being toppled, Moss thinks it would be "unrealistic if somehow June, in one episode, was able to topple this evil empire. The fact is that this war is won battle by battle, book by book, protest by protest. That is the truth. And so it gives us hope for our future."
And so the show ends with loose ends, but according to Miller, those have a power all their own. “You appreciate the end of the novel and why leaving you loose ends is still satisfying because you feel like, ‘This woman is still around. She made it this far,'” he said. “If she didn’t make it any further, that’s okay, but what a story of her making it this far. It is the story of women through history.”
Will Elizabeth Moss appear in The Testaments?
We'll catch up with Hannah, as well as a few other characters from The Handmaid's Tale, in a new spinoff show called, naturally, The Testaments. There are no plans for Moss to appear in the first season, which will likely come out next year. But Miller would like to see her show up at some point. "I would love to see her," he said. "I love Lizzie Moss, she’s awesome! She’s very involved behind the scenes."
Moss, who is executive producing the new show, is also down to come back, if things line up. “Maybe one day…Hopefully, if we get a second season," she told Forbes. "June is not dead, and she has a lot of fight left in her, and there's a war to be won. We know that June will never give up on Hannah. She has work to do. She won a battle, but she hasn't won the war. And she has not gotten her daughter out. Her battle will never be over until that happens.”
The last scene of The Handmaid's Tale
But we'll deal with all that later. For now, let's focus on the final scene of the original show: June returns to the house where she was kept prisoner at the start of the season, now in ruins. She repeats a slightly modified version of an internal monologue she gave at the end of the very first episode, and we understand that she's ready to tell her story.
Moss can't imagine the story ending any other way. "This whole series has always been about the same thing," she said. "It’s the same thing that I fell in love with in the first episode, and the reason I said yes to it, and it’s the same story we’re telling in the final scene. It’s about how this woman will never, ever give up fighting for her children. And she will never give up fighting for the next generation, and the generation to come. That has been her story from the beginning, and it’s her story in the final scene. The fact that what she starts with is what she ends with, to me, is so fucking genius. And I can say that, because it’s not my idea. To me, there is no better way to say what the show is than her telling her story."
“For me, the ending is perfect,” Moss told The Los Angeles Times. “I also don’t feel like it is an ending. The war is not over. June’s journey is not over.”
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