Portside

[Editor’s note: This piece contains spoilers for The Handmaid’s Tale.] 

The Handmaid’s Tale was never going to have a happy ending. Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood‘s dystopian novel has delivered too much agony, violence, and death over six seasons for everything to be tied up with any kind of tidy bow. Plus, series creator Bruce Miller is already busy prepping for the sequel TV show, The Testaments. So THT‘s epilogue-style conclusion (which dropped May 27) is less definitive and more open-ended, but still mostly satisfying. June Osborne (Elisabeth Moss) sets foot in the same house where she was once imprisoned and frequently raped. Except now, in a Boston free from Gilead’s totalitarian rule, she’s in control and ready to keep fighting for the rest of the country’s liberation. 

June sits in the same room where she lived under the tyrannical eye of the Waterfords and records her experiences as their former handmaid, a servant whose “duty” was to reproduce for the couple. One half of that pair is Serena (a consistently terrific Yvonne Strahovski), whose crimes include holding June down while her husband, Fred (Joseph Fiennes), sexually assaulted her. And yet, in the closing chapter, Serena becomes a UN refugee along with her infant son. Before departing on the bus, she tearfully apologizes to June for her atrocities. In all her generosity, June forgives her. (“You have to start somewhere, right?” our heroine claims.) Unfortunately, this perfunctory end to Serena’s arc doesn’t match the urgent, persistent statement of resistance at the core of The Handmaid’s Tale. 

Throughout its run, the award-winning series revolved around June’s dedication—no, rightfully rage-driven obsession—to survive, save her daughters, and help other women trapped in a patriarchal regime. As a reminder, THT is set in a future where environmental disasters have led to very low birth rates. So the top Gilead commanders, after taking over the U.S. government in a coup, enslave fertile women to forcibly impregnate and then separate them from their children. Serena is not only complicit in helping Fred take advantage of June, but her pre-Gilead work as a famous conservative public speaker and author helped spearhead and promote ideas of stripping away women’s rights. Ironically, she eventually lost autonomy in the very system she helped create. 

Still, over the show’s admittedly self-indulgent and drawn-out run, Serena evaded proper justice, unlike Fred, who (thankfully) brutally died in the season-four finale. Serena, meanwhile, got out of Canada’s detention center, eventually finding her way back into Gilead’s leadership with her son by working with Commander Lawrence (Bradley Whitford) in New Bethlehem. The self-absorbed Serena is also a survivor, but she was instrumental in the founding of the theocratic regime. Despite her somewhat shaky friendship with June toward the end, it’s frustrating to watch her win, considering she never stopped believing in Gilead’s principles. “Your children were not taken from you. They weren’t stolen; they were saved,” she defiantly defends herself in the season-six premiere. “God hated America because America turned its back on God, and God took your country away.” Give us all a break. 

Serena’s storyline, like everything else about THT, is particularly timely due to the nation’s ongoing political affairs (not to mention the steady rise of the TradWife phenomenon). This adaptation faces the pros and cons of arriving at the exact right time, premiering just months after Trump’s election in 2016 and turning into a harbinger of doom. While it’s tough to watch THT because it feels all too real, the show got its electrifying mojo back in the final season. It’s rewarding to witness June, her allies, and the Mayday warriors overthrow Boston’s top officials. They drug and kill these leaders during Serena’s wedding to yet another Commander (played by Josh Charles) in episode eight. And in the show’s action-packed penultimate hour, Lawrence sacrifices himself to pay for his sins of creating Gilead’s economic structure, taking the remaining evil men down with him, including June’s former lover Nick (Max Minghella). While reflecting on his death later, June says Nick “reaped what he sowed” as a violent soldier. 

Despite having helped June in the past, villains like Lawrence and Nick aren’t redeemed for the sake of a misguided full-circle story. That’s the problem with Serena’s denouement. The writers were determined to bring things back to the beginning, and they did a better job of that with June’s reunion with Emily (Alexis Bledel) and her dream sequence of going out drinking and singing karaoke with friends. (This recalls something Madeline Brewer’s Janine mentioned to June in season one.) In Serena’s case, she’s left powerless and unhoused because the EU and Canada won’t give a war criminal a passport or citizenship. (That said, U.S. officer Mark Tuello, played by Sam Jaeger, promises her with a touch of affection that he’ll “find her,” so someone is looking out for her well-being.) But she accepts her situation because she has what she’s wanted from the start: a child. Serena has Noah now, but at what cost? 

The price was indirectly paid by a million other women who were separated from their families and disenfranchised because of policies Serena helped form. Her big fear of Noah being taken away begets empathy, but doesn’t erase that her favorite way to emotionally abuse June in earlier seasons was to threaten the safety of June’s daughter if she didn’t cooperate. A heartfelt expression of regret and a little long-overdue help to bring down Gilead isn’t worth much in the larger scheme of things.