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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE HANDMAID’S TALE’S OTHERWISE SATISFYING FINAL SEASON WAS
MARRED BY SERENA’S ENDING  
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Saloni Gajjar
June 1, 2025
AV Club
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_ One of the long-running show's biggest villains didn't earn her
redemption. _

, Photo: Steve Wilkie/Disney

 

_[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
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has delivered too much agony, violence, and death over six seasons
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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_
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.   

* the handmaid's tale
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* patriarchy
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* male supremacy
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* Christian nationalists
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