The Handmaid’s Tale has just one episode left to wrap up the story of June Osborne (Elisabeth Moss), who’s been fighting to take down Gilead since 2017—and has finally made some rather big strides in that direction. The penultimate episode of the Hulu show’s sixth and final season packed in a few major “oh shit” moments, including several farewells. Some were poignant. Others were not.
Nobody is going to cry for Commander Wharton. That includes Serena, who’s now twice a widow, and whose intel helped June and Commander Lawrence plot to blow up the plane that would be carrying Gilead’s surviving leaders to an emergency meeting in Washington, D.C.
Commander Lawrence, however, we’ll miss. The Handmaid’s Tale‘s quirkiest commander spent much of his time trying to undermine the dystopia he’d helped create, and he had hope for the future once the most evil commanders were taken care of. Too bad his scheme to plant a bomb aboard their private jet was ill-timed, and he was forced into making it a suicide mission.
But we’re not sure how to feel about Nick. The Max Minghella character had a complicated arc this season—he’s still deeply in love with June, but that didn’t stop him from ratting out the resistance to save his own skin. Seeing him board the doomed flight at the last minute—as June watched in horror from her hiding place—was kind of a perfect farewell. Nick came from a troubled background that muddied his choices once Gilead came to power, but in the end he made it clear he’d moved completely to the dark side.
In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, The Handmaid’s Tale co-showrunners Eric Tuchman and Yahlin Chang talked in-depth about Nick’s journey in season six. “It was really important that this season would be about testing and challenging these characters and having them reveal who they really are,” Tuchman said. “What have they learned or not learned over the course of this series? … For Nick, I’ll just say we know it’s a polarizing fate for him and that many of our fans are upset about it, but we understand that that comes from the love that they have for this character and the relationship he’s had with June.”
“But we have to remember that she’s not the only thing in his life, and that he’s a commander in Gilead. And if there’s one thing the series has shown is there’s no such thing as a good commander. No matter how wonderful you may be to our main character, he has still been a willing full participant in Gilead.”
Added Chang, “I actually have a lot of sympathy for Nick. I mean, he was a guy who did wonderful things to save the woman that he loved. While at the same time he had this job as a commander in Gilead, and I don’t see him as an evil villain. I think that he was under a lot of pressure … the idea that he suddenly went from white to black or from hero to villain is just that we would be doing a disservice to our characters by painting them as just one thing or the other. They’re all embodied in shades of gray because that’s what humans are.”
In a separate interview with Variety, Minghella reflected on his own surprise after learning what direction the character was going to take in season six.
“It was quite different to how he served the show previously … the Nick and June relationship has been a reprieve from the more tense thematic elements of the show. And so to ground that relationship, then, into some of the darker, more nihilistic points-of-view that we have to explore in The Handmaid’s Tale, I was surprised by it—but interested in it as an actor. I don’t know that I would have played everything the same in the past had I known that was where we were going to land.”
The Handmaid’s Tale finale arrives Tuesday on Hulu.
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