The Handmaid’s Tale is over after 6 seasons, but our obsession with dystopian TV will go on

If there’s one thing you can expect from a dystopian series like The Handmaid’s Tale it’s that it won’t wrap up neatly with a pretty bow. 

The show, based on Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s acclaimed 1985 novel and shot largely in and around Toronto, has come to an end. The final episode dropped on the streaming service Crave in Canada early Tuesday morning.

Don’t worry. CBC News won’t be revealing any significant spoilers. 

For six seasons, June Osborne (played by Elisabeth Moss) guided us on a disturbing and often brutal journey inside Gilead — a society built on gender oppression under a totalitarian, theocratic regime that took over much of the United States and forced fertile women to become “handmaids” in a life of servitude, abuse and rape as a means of countering declining births.  

But it’s as much a story about Osborne’s resistance as it is about the downfall of society. 

While The Handmaid’s Tale has wrapped, there’s no shortage of TV shows with dystopian themes. Their popularity has only grown in recent years amid fears about the state of democracy, wars, a global pandemic and financial crises. Experts and critics who follow the genre say these shows can help us make sense of political or societal upheaval and cultural change. 

“It’s a way that we begin to kind of work out our fears as a collective,” said Shana MacDonald, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo. “We get to talk about it at the water cooler.”

A ‘canary in the coal mine’

Without giving too much away, the final episodes centre on a rebellion led by Osborne, an army of handmaids and a resistance known as Mayday, aimed at toppling Gilead and its oppressive commanders. 

For Osborne, it’s an act of vengeance but also another step in her unrelenting quest to reunite with her daughter, Hannah, who was taken from her in the very first episode and eventually sent to live as the adopted child of another Gilead commander. 

The show was set in a fictitious world in a not-so-distant future, but MacDonald says one of the reasons it was so relatable was that it was on the “edges of possible.” 

Atwood, who wrote the book more than 30 years before the series debuted in 2017, has said that one of her inspirations for the story was the political climate of the 1980s and the rise of the religious right in the U.S. 

“People, even back then, were saying what they would like to do, should they ever have a chance to take power. Now that faction is in power in the United States,” she said in 2017, referring to U.S. President Donald Trump, who had taken office just months before the series premiered.

MacDonald sees similar parallels between what plays out in Gilead and what has happened in the U.S.

She points to the repealing of women’s reproductive rights under Trump and the rise of prontalism — a movement to encourage or incentivize people to have more babies for the sake of society. 

“What’s so striking about it,” she said, “is how much it’s become so close to the truth in some ways.”

MacDonald, who researches misogyny and popular culture, admits that she finds the series too close for comfort and can’t bring herself to watch it. 

“It’s the canary in the coal mine, for me,” she said. 

But for regular viewers, women in particular, a show like The Handmaid’s Tale can be “sort of like doing a test run” to understand what one might do in reality, said Jen Chaney, a freelance TV critic who has written reviews for Vulture, The Washington Post and The New York Times. 

“It’s almost as if we’re preparing ourselves for some hypothetical and now that seems much less hypothetical than it used to,” she said.

Not so far from reality

Some series like The Handmaid’s Tale or Apple TV+’s Severance, in which a group of office workers have their memories of their work lives surgically separated from their personal lives, are set in times and places that closely resemble those in which we live.

Shows like Amazon Prime’s The Boys, a violent satirical story of superheroes who abuse their powers, or HBO Max’s The Last of Us, about a fungal infection that turns people into mutant monsters and brings about the collapse of society, may seem a little bit beyond the realm of reality, at least on the surface. 

The narratives “might be a little far-fetched and might not be here yet,” but the underlying themes are still relatable, says TreaAndrea Russworm, a professor of cinematic arts at the University of Southern California. 

For example, she notes that The Last of Us deals with topics like the dismissal of science and medicine, as well as individualism and survivalism, while also exploring the violent lengths people may go to in extreme scenarios. 

It gives us “a psychological lane for exploring that darker side of humanity that now has free license to just unleash its violence,” she said. 

But there’s also something therapeutic about facing your worst fears play out in these fictitious scenarios, said Lynn Zubernis, a clinical psychologist and professor at West Chester University in Philadelphia. She also researches the psychology of fans. 

Whether it’s The Handmaid’s Tale or The Boys — which she’s writing a book about — Zubernis says dystopian shows can help people cope with the uneasiness of what’s happening in society because you can build up your emotional regulation skills and sense of resilience by “immersing yourself” in a world that is “disturbing and frightening,” even though you know it’s not real. 

Although she believes there are benefits to viewing dystopian shows, she cautions that they aren’t for everyone. 

“If you’re missing that message of hope and you’re just feeling completely overwhelmed by all the darkness or the violence,” she said, “then it’s not good for you and you should not be watching it.”

No happy endings, but that’s OK

MacDonald says that with a story like this, you should never expect a tidy conclusion. 

“It never really has a happy ending because the society we know has collapsed and we’re in a new place.”

But she believes that can be a good thing because the best dystopian shows “plant the seed” that there are still “possibilities of a better future.”

Even before the finale, the audience knows this isn’t the last we’ll see of Gilead. 

Atwood wrote a follow up to The Handmaid’s Tale, 2019’s Booker Prize-winning The Testaments, which is set in Gilead 15 years in the future. 

The Testaments is being adapted into a series that reportedly began filming in Toronto in April, but it’s unclear when it may be released. 

Chaney says the fact that Gilead still exists at the end of the series speaks to the lasting implications of oppressive and authoritarian governments once they’ve been in place. 

“You have to keep fighting over and over and over again,” she said. “It doesn’t just go away magically.”