Elisabeth Moss, O-T Fagbenle and others talk to ET about the emotional and shocking end to season 5.
After another intense installment of The Handmaid's Tale, season 5 has officially come to a close. Written by creator Bruce Miller and directed by Elisabeth Moss, "Safe" marks another shocking and emotional finale for the ongoing Hulu series, which will wrap up its adaptation of Margaret Atwood's groundbreaking novel with season 6.
While speaking to ET, Miller, Moss and other members of the cast reacted to a "perfect bookend" and "crazy" end to the season. "I guarantee you the last episode is gonna blow your mind. It's so good," O-T Fagbenle says, with Moss adding, "I'm so excited for everybody to see it." [Warning: Spoilers for The Handmaid's Tale season 5.]
In the end, June (Moss) and Luke's (Fagbenle) attempt to rescue their daughter, Hannah, failed as they found themselves facing off with Commander Lawrence (Bradley Whitford), who revealed his true colors by attempting to have the former handmaid assassinated. Even in Canada, June found her life in danger as the border proved to no longer be a safe boundary between the land of the free and those still in Gilead with increasingly deadly and dangerous motives.
"This is the most notorious handmaid in Gilead," Whitford says.
After a car attempted to run June over, Luke put a stop to it by nearly beating the driver to death before convincing her to escape on a train going west and avoid intervention by the police. And he's not the only one who finds himself facing time behind bars as Commander Blaine (Max Minghella) faces retribution for ruining Lawrence's wedding to Naomi Putnam (Ever Carradine) after agreeing to work with Mark Tuello (Sam Jaeger) and Janine (Madeline Brewer) is taken away in shackles for defying the rules of her trial handmaid period under Lawrence and Putnam.
Elsewhere, Blaine's pregnant wife, Rose (Carey Cox), reveals she wants nothing to do with her husband and Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) has completely lost control of the situation surrounding the care – and abuse – of her handmaids.
As everything comes to a head, with Canada no longer the safe haven it used to be, June finds herself aboard a train for American refugees organized by Tuello and once again separated from Luke. Once she and baby Nichole make their way through the car, she bumps into Serena (Yvonne Strahovski) and her newborn baby, Noah, who have been reunited after briefly being separated a few episodes prior.
As the two lock eyes, the episode ends in an appropriately ironic fashion with Serena asking June, "You got a diaper?"
"It just f**king rips your heart out, man. It packs a wallop. Like, it's really emotional," Moss says. "I don't know how else to describe it except it's really emotional and it just doesn't let up. I mean, it's a heartbreaker."
And the reason it's such a gut-punch is how things were set up going into the final two episodes of season 5. "It just sets it up for everything to work out perfectly," Fagbenle says of audiences expecting "a happy ending" that ultimately never comes.
"And then you think you get to the end and you're like, 'Oh, it couldn’t possibly. This couldn’t possibly get more emotional,' and then it does," she continues, adding that "it's crazy."
"I think it's one of the best episodes of The Handmaid's Tale so far," Fagbenle says, crediting Moss for helming the finale. "She's got her little magic in there." Echoing that sentiment, Miller says, "Lizzie doing the first and the last is always the perfect bookend," especially when you think about "the seasons as chapters that are telling a story."
"One of the strengths of the show is that it's a continually collaborative process," Fagbenle says of everyone involved in making the series. "You got all these really skilled people pouring their hearts into [it]... They're continually pushing to make it better and better and people really did that this season. They really pulled out all the stops."
And now it's just a matter of seeing how they close out the series with the sixth and final season of The Handmaid's Tale.
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