The Handmaid's Tale, season 6, review: at last, this show is being put out of its misery

Telegraph

03-05-2025

Nobody could accuse The Handmaid's Tale (Channel 4) of soft-soaping its portrait of a near-future dystopian America – a sort of manosphere on steroids where women wear bonnets and are reproductive slaves, and the men all look shifty and forlorn. But as the depressive drama returns after a two-and-a-half-year gap for its sixth and final series, the wall-to-wall misery is wearing thin. The relentless gloom has reached the point of no return, for all the good intentions of the show's commentary on the evils of unrestrained patriarchy.
Having long since sprawled beyond the 300-page 1985 Margaret Atwood novel of the same name, The Handmaid's Tale is also straining under the weight of a plot as murky as its brown-grey colour scheme. It takes up the story immediately after the conclusion of season five, with Elisabeth Moss's former 'Handmaid' June Osborne on a train bound for Alaska. Introduced initially as 'Offred', the glorified sex chattel of Joseph Fiennes's unctuous (and now long dead) bureaucrat Fred Waterford (hence her indentured name), she is now a free woman. But she refuses to bury her trauma and has devoted herself to overthrowing Gilead – as America has been renamed when plunging birth rates trigger a takeover by Bible-thumping zealots.
The previous season ended with June and her former tormentor, Fred's widow Serena Joy (the brilliantly brittle Yvonne Strahovski), on the run together. But their uneasy truce is tested when a passenger recognises Serena – once a poster girl for Gilead's oppressive treatment of women – and leads an attack on her. June comes to her rescue in what should be a nail-biting scene. Yet, so all-encompassing is the oppressiveness, it's hard to care much either way about June or Serena – or anyone else for that matter. Regardless of their circumstances, every character is locked in perpetual misery. What's the point in investing in their future when it is sure to be as grim as their present?
The Handmaid's Tale has at least weaned itself off the sadism that was a feature of earlier years. Scenes of eye-gouging, sexual assault and waterboarding were widely criticised for verging on torture porn. Was the show condemning violence against women – or revelling in it?
But if the gore is gone, there isn't much to take its place. There are moments during these new episodes when a keener satirical edge might have made all the difference. But while it refuses the easy bait of drawing parallels between Gilead and Donald Trump's White House, the alternative is to slog through the motions. Serena flees to New Bethlehem, a god-fearing Potemkin village created to portray Gilead in a positive light. June, meanwhile, is still glumly flirting with her former love interest (Max Minghella) while plotting the downfall of Gilead – something she has worked towards since escaping the Waterfords, with little notable progress. It's all aboard the misanthropic merry-go-round for one final whirl.
One person who has already moved on is Atwood. In 2019, she published a sequel, The Testaments, which bears no resemblance whatsoever to later seasons of The Handmaid's Tale (though it is to be likewise adapted for television). Trudging through a grim final series, you can only commend her for her good judgement, putting as much daylight as possible between her unflinching account of future shock misogyny and Moss's unsubtle and dreary trauma fest. It's time this tale was put out of its misery.