The Handmaid´s Tale after eight years: how far from reality?

The sixth and final season of The Handmaid’s Tale was finally released last April: after eight years, it ends a powerful and brave story about inner strength and resistance. However, the adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s work to the big screen will be continued in the spin-off The Testaments, based on the sequel novel by the author.

With impressive performances, carefully crafted aesthetics, and the courage to cross non-politically correct lines, The Handmaid’s Tale is worth watching. It had the capacity to become a symbol in the fight for women’s rights, by the fact that the dystopian story exacerbates to the extreme the violence suffered by women simply because they are women.

The end of the sixth season, however, leaves in some way the flavor that it is still a series from the United States with colonialist biases, some stereotypes and full of those typical twists in the scripts just made to create tension between the characters.

This article will point out some general strengths and weaknesses of the series as a whole, without getting into details of the plot, the different seasons or the particular stories of the characters.

The power of the story

-The series exposes the way the far right occupies positions of power. Discursive strategies, networks of grey collaborators and the hypocrisy of sitting a powerful person responsible for thousands of deaths at your table, help to build a state of things where a totalitarian system is installed as if it represented the values of a democratic society.

–It reflects on the impact violence has on the victims. After the experience of repeated harms and abuse, taken to an extreme in the fiction, the victims are capable of doing atrocious things in order to liberate themselves. No one is pristine and immaculate.

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–The evils finally get what they deserve and that happens in the way that our darkest desires would like to. Alert spoiler! Would you like to see a rapist lynched by a furious group of women, driven by hate to an almost animalistic state? Would you like to put a bomb in the plane where the leaders that spread hate and suffering over the world are gathered all together? You got that and even more.

–The evolution of the characters in the whole development is credible and very well achieved, supported by the main performances of Elisabeth Moss, Yvonne Strahovski, O-T Fagbenle, Max Minghella, and the rest of the staff.

–How would our lives be if the worst personal tragedies had never happened? Well, there is no way back. They just happened, and we keep going. We also have networks of affection to support us. The series also reflects on that, and it is at the end a tribute to everyone who continues seeking justice in the hardest situations: families who are still looking for a disappeared daughter or son after years of fighting.

Some weak points

-The series works as a distorted mirror that exacerbates the atrocious features of the patriarchy and the violence of the extreme right, yes: but it is still a continuation of the colonialist narrative of the United States, inserted ad infinitum in movies. We already have seen so many films where the good guys are the intelligence of the United States, and they represent the values of democracy and justice. Alert spoiler! This is as well another victory of the United States army, crowned by a white and red striped flag with stars, and released in the context of April 2025.

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-Although sexual diversity is represented, maternity is still shown in an idealistic way. Kids are all a woman can desire, not only the wives but also the women who are seeking for freedom. Scenes of June and Serena with their respective babies border on naive, with flowers and backlit sunbeams. Alert spoiler! A declassed Serena who lives now as a refugee, doesn’t understand what to do with her life. “You are his mother. Just be that”, are the literal words of June as a reply.

-The script´s implausible twists and turns that complicate the relationships between the characters have already been mentioned and do not deserve more development.

More stories with strong women

Despite some limits imposed by the fact that it is, at the end, a commercial product, The Handmaid´s Tale has the courage to get into deep places where violence and power get involved, and in which most mainstream productions do not dive. In a world with wars on territory going on and where right-wing governments are threatening women’s and diversity rights, we still need more stories about strong and brave women.