Anticipating the Finale: How ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Season 6 Promises a Fulfilling Conclusion

The Handmaid’s Tale delivered something unexpected when it ended last season. The cliffhanger finale to the penultimate season of the Emmy-winning saga put the complex pairing of June (Elisabeth Moss) and Serena (Yvonne Strahovski), along with their babies, on a train to the unknown with other Gilead refugees. That finale, titled “Safe” and written by creator Bruce Miller and directed by Moss, ended with a range of facial expressions from June that landed on a smirk.

“At the very end it feels like June is powerless. She can barely walk after the car accident, she has her baby all by herself and is in misery — she’s starting at the bottom,” Miller told The Hollywood Reporter at the time, recapping her harrowing season. But then he delivered some optimism about what was to come: “Look at all these people who are acting under her influence. She’s a leader now [and] all the seeds she’s planted are blooming.”

After that finale, which released back in November 2022, Miller said he wanted the audience to spend the next several months asking themselves about that smirk. “Because I spent all this time going, how do [June and Serena] feel about each other? And, how does June feel in that moment?” he said of the show’s central relationship between the former handmaid and ex-Gilead wife.

But months would turn into years, due to the Hollywood strikes of 2023. Now the Hulu saga is returning with its sixth and final season, and viewers finally get to see how those seeds will bloom with the release of the first three of the final 10 episodes, which are now streaming.

As the trailers have teased, a red revolution is on the horizon. And it’s a rebellion that has been years in the making.

Before that season five finale released, Hulu had announced that the sixth season would indeed be the final one. The Handmaid’s Tale universe will continue on, however, with sequel series The Testaments, which is being adapted from Margaret Atwood’s follow-up book to her bestselling hit and takes place after the events of June’s current story.

Miller remained an executive producer on the final season of The Handmaid’s Tale, and he is the showrunner on The Testaments. Longtime writers and exec producers Eric Tuchman and Yahlin Chang took over as co-showrunners for season six. Moss, star and executive producer, continued to direct, including the first two and last two episodes of season six.

When it came to plotting the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, Miller now tells THR that he had initially pitched the series as a five-season story, but that changed as they were heading into season five.

Chang recalls to THR, “We were doing a little retreat before the beginning of the season five writers room, and we were talking with Bruce and Bruce was like, ‘I think we have two more seasons.’ He was like, ‘I think we should do two more.’ And we’re like, ‘Okay, let’s do it. We’ll do two more.’”

Moss adds, “I remember we were contemplating season five being the end, and I think it was one of those things [where we said], ‘Should we just do one more?’ [smiles]. I don’t know if we knew how to get to where we wanted to go in the amount of time we had in season five.”

Miller says that even with the added season, the ending that he had in mind from the very beginning didn’t change. Moss says the only thing that shifted slightly was the location of that top-secret ending.

“Interestingly, when I pitched the series and said, ‘I think this is the end,’ that is exactly what we ended up doing,” says Miller. “And I pitched it right at the beginning. It was one of those things that I thought, ‘Okay, we should aim for that.’”

Moss explains that after opening up their dystopian series to follow so much of the sprawling ensemble — which includes Bradley Whitford, Max Minghella, Ann Dowd, O.T. Fagbenle, Samira Wiley, Madeline Brewer, Amanda Brugel, Sam Jaeger, Ever Carradine and Josh Charles this season — they needed one more season to do every character justice.

“Maybe it’s because I started directing in season four, but I feel like this story really picked up that season and started to develop in a really exciting way with a lot of different characters,” Moss tells THR. “You started to see a lot more of different characters, so it felt like there was still so much story left to tell, not just with June but with all of these other people. It just didn’t feel like five seasons was going to be enough, so that’s what resulted in the sixth season.”

She adds, “And I think I was one of the only people who was then like, ‘Seven? Anyone for seven. No? The cheese stands alone? Fine!” (Laughs) “I was like, okay, we’re done I guess.”

Season five was about June and her feelings of revenge. As Miller put it then, “how to exact revenge in a way that feels good and that feels like you’ve corrected some of the balance in the world.” Season six, he says, moves her closer to being someone who has the ability to act and effect change. Miller has always summed up the show as being one that’s easy to understand: “They take something from June in the first scene of the series that she wants back, that she’s not a complete person without. And that’s the whole show.”

What was taken from June was her oldest daughter Hannah (Jordana Blake), who is now a preteen renamed Agnes still in Gilead. Season six remains about June and husband Luke (Fagbenle), fighting to get their daughter back.

The final season theme is about rising up, and once again — just like when the series launched eight years ago — The Handmaid’s Tale is again coming out during pivotal times.

“Many people have called the show a cautionary tale and it seems to me that not enough people were cautioned, and here we are again after a very consequential, shocking election,” Tuchman tells THR, comparing the first and final season releases. “I never would have anticipated that’s where we would be. But here we are.”

Chang, who joined the show in season two, points out, “I cannot believe that as a woman I have fewer rights now than when I started on the show in 2017. I never thought that Roe v. Wade would get overturned. It seems like the stuff you would make up. I was working on a show where we make stuff up, right? Especially at that time with the #MeToo movement, it seemed like society was really moving forward.”

Chang says that when working on The Handmaid’s Tale, in order to write the characters on the Gilead side, the writers get into the mindsets of authoritarians. “It’s about imagining what the worst people would do if given the reins of power,” she says. “You have to imagine if you have no moral compass, if you are completely guided by avarice and selfishness and cowardice and covering your own ass, how would you act and what would you do? In that way, what’s happening now feels very understandable and predictable to a certain extent.”

Though that all sounds grim, once again the team plans to deliver a surprise: more optimism. It’s time, says Tuchman, to give the viewers what they’ve been waiting for.

“We really wanted this season to be, as Yahlin has called it, one of triumph and uplift,” he says. “It’s been a lot of dark and disturbing stories in the past, but now it’s the final season, and it’s a season about fighting back, about defiance and resilience and courage and guts and hopefulness. It’s time.”

He continues, “Our audience has stuck with us through the darkest times, and it’s time for them to be rewarded for that passion that they have for the show and that commitment that they have for the show, and we’re going to deliver it for them this season.”

The Handmaid’s Tale is now streaming the first three episodes of season six on Hulu.