Will The Handmaid's Tale go out with a bang, or a whimper?

One of the greatest success stories in modern Canadian literature is The Handmaid's Tale, a stirring and eerie speculative fiction novel by Margaret Atwood.

Now a staple in many high school and university classrooms, the story is set in a dystopian future where the United States becomes a theocratic, totalitarian state renamed Gilead where women have virtually no rights

The TV adaptation of the novel is now in its sixth and final season. It's been described as a window into the future when it comes to reproductive rights and women's autonomy, but it also has a lot to say about the dynamic between Canada and the U.S.

Today on Commotion, illustrator and author Arizona O'Neill as well as culture writer Moira Donegan join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to unpack the story's relevance today, and whether the series' critiques of contemporary life still have teeth.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Okay, so now let's go deeper into the show…. Just to bring us up to speed in terms of the context of this season, Arizona: June is the main character. June Osborne is played by Elizabeth Moss. You said she's one of your all-time favorite female characters. For anyone who's not watching, what is June grappling with right now?

Arizona: Well, in Season 5, she was all about revenge. And then when she finally received her revenge, it was unfulfilling, of course, as it always is. And so in Season 6, she's in Canada as a refugee and she's forced to leave to Alaska. Now she's finally joining the rebellion in an attempt to save her daughter. And so that's an arc that goes through the entire show, which might seem repetitive, but I think to achieve a goal as big as she's trying to do, it takes repetition. It's not an easy task…. 

The way that she won't leave Hannah, her daughter, behind in Gilead is the same way that I can't leave June behind in this world, and why I keep returning to the show. It's almost like a chore at this point, because I need to make sure that June is okay. So I'm glad that this is the last season, because I'm determined for there to be a resolution of some sort.

Elamin: But this is where we have a bit of an away team in our midst here…. Moira, June has been seen by some folks as a powerful symbol of the feminist resistance, but you said you're kind of disappointed in her character arc. Why the disappointment?

Moira: Like Arizona, I'm really rooting for June, even though she starts to frustrate me. Because the narrative requirements of this season, of this renewed show, have required June to go back into Gilead over and over again, even after she escapes to Canada at the end of season three. And this has been accompanied by a shift in the show's perspective. In the first couple of seasons, particularly the first season, the show is very committed to its feminist interpretation of Gilead, to its investment in the politics that emerged from Gilead's central horror, which is about ritualized rape and forced childbearing. 

But in the latter seasons, as June becomes more complicated, she develops real emotional investments in Gilead, including with members and participants in the Gilead regime. And she has an investment in the redemption of those characters and of people in Gilead that I think sort of complicates the feminist message of the show a little bit. Arizona spoke a little about the show's fourth and fifth season, which dwell on women's rage and revenge in the wake of sexual violence and how it's unfulfilling. I think you can interpret those seasons, which were written I believe in the aftermath of #MeToo, as really a reflection on that movement and sort of a cautioning against what some have seen as a vengeful or rageful kind of feminism that doesn't maybe brook a lot of possibility for restoration and repair.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Jess Low.