The Handmaid’s Tale review, season 3, episode 13: A knuckle-whitening finale far less disappointing than the last

The final episode of the drama’s third season sees Elisabeth Moss’s June land in grave danger – but will she make it out alive?

There is obviously no such thing as a happy ending on The Handmaid’s Tale (Channel 4). But last year’s clunking twist in which June (Elisabeth Moss) opted to stay behind in Gilead rather than flee with her daughter confirmed the series knows all about underwhelming conclusions.

Season three at least avoids such disappointments. True, Handmaid ever so slightly recycles its greatest hits by leaving June once again in the lurch as the child refugees make it across the border to Canada.

Yet the execution is so much more plausible on this occasion. June is cut down by Guardians. But then she is carried to safety by Handmaids emerging from the tree line like figures from a fairytale. It’s predictable – the show must go on and so, also, must June’s torment – and gorgeously executed.

The finale succeeds in other ways too. The real meat of the story through the season has been in Canada as Serena (Yvonne Strahovski) and Fred (Joseph Fiennes) campaign to have baby Nichole repatriated. Their soap opera in hell is now amped up as the ghastly Waterfords turn on one another with a vengeance.

Arrested for crimes against humanity, Fred and Serena have pulled the gloves off. This will, you feel, descend into a game of mutually assured destruction (perhaps we are already there). The spoils, as of now, go to the Commander. Fred paints Serena as having enabled Nick’s “rape” of June, so that she fell pregnant with Nichole. The baby is taken from Serena, along with her immunity from prosecution.

Fred’s claims aren’t entirely inaccurate. Serena undoubtedly encouraged the pair to become lovers as it became evident hopeless, hapless Fred was incapable of impregnating his Handmaid. However, genuine romance flourished between Nick and June. Serena is guilty of a lot of things. She is not the Aunt Lydia-in-disguise portrayed by her estranged other half.

There’s a wrenching, almost unwatchable, opening as we flash back to June and the other women of Gilead being herded, concentration-camp style, and separated from their children. The Handmaid’s Tale explicitly evokes the ghosts of Buchenwald and Treblinka. Women are stripped of their clothes, their dignity, their names, even, as men bark at them.

Back in the present, June is the one doing the barking. She comes within a hair’s breadth of shooting a Martha who panics as the countdown to the trolly dash with the kids across the border approaches. And she leaves Commander Lawrence (Bradley Whitford) in little doubt as to wears the britches. “You are not in charge. I am.”

This is as close to knuckle-whitening as The Handmaid’s Tale has come this series. We’re obviously never in any true doubt as to whether the heist will succeed. But as June is gunned down in the woods, it briefly crosses your mind that the show might go where other prestige dramas would never dare and kill off its lead character.

It doesn’t, of course. June abides, the story continues. The challenge The Handmaid’s Tale will face in its fourth season will be to give us more of these moments where it truly feels the road map has been ripped up and anything might happen.