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On her way out, Nick whispers, Its all right.
Go with them, but Offred (whose real name weve never learned) is uncertain.
And so I step up, Offreds story concludes, into the darkness within; or else the light.
An epilogue adds thin but integral layers of subtext.
From there, nobody knows what happened to her.
Gileads reign has ended; its now a blot in history.
Offreds precise Commander cant even be identified.
For all the import of her story, she is translucent.
Its a perfect, maddening ending that refuses to offer any tidy summaries.
How did Gilead turn to ash?
What political Vesuvius erupted all over it?
Most pressing, what happened to Offred?
But Atwoods ending for the character is no trick: Her transparency is the point.
Offreds story is metaphor; its representational.
She was just one of the many women in red who were lost to the brutalities of history.
The specificity of her story is what moves us the universality of it is what moves us to action.
She closes her eyes and drifts off … perhaps into the darkness within, or else the light.
And now its time forThe Handmaids Taleto let June die.
I dont say that lightly.
Moss made every second of it real and personal.
In less capable hands (and eyes), this adaptation might have ended exactly where Atwoods novel does.
We know instead thatit will continue into a fourth season, most likely with Moss at the forefront.
Why let go of an Emmy winner like Moss when youre luring so many eyeballs?
Since then, she has violated every rule Gilead holds dear to its fervent, Scripture-memorizing, ritual-loving heart.
Two episodes ago, she destroyed Christopher Melonis Commander Winslow, a walking protein-shake ad, in hand-to-hand combat.
Admittedly,I cheered and raved about the episode, but still.
Punishment in Gilead, were led to believe, is swift and furious.
Nicks wife Eden had a weight chained to her and was thrown into a pool for her affair.
June, on the other hand, wanders into unlikely scenarios every week and leaves them unscathed.
Sure, June could ultimately triumph after another season or two of quick wits and implausibly light punishments.
But that erases every trace of the novels crushing anonymity and substitutes a treacly sentimentality.
Atwood originally titled her novelOffred,then changed it to the purposely vaguerThe Handmaids Tale.
June has already secured her place as the handmaid whoushered a planeload of kids to freedom.
After all, there are other handmaids and other tales.
Far, far too many.
