What happened in The Handmaid's Tale season 6 episode 10?

The bittersweet moment has come as the last ever episode of The Handmaid’s Tale has aired and June’s story has come to a conclusion.

The American dystopian TV series is based on a novel by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood and, since it first aired in 2017, its six seasons have followed June Osborne (played by Elisabeth Moss), forced to serve as a Handmaid because she can still bear children.

Now, as the final episode of the Emmy award-winning show has concluded, we finally learned the fate of June and the others in Gilead in season six, episode ten.

Spoilers ahead!

Titled “The Handmaid’s Tale”, the final episode of the show sees June take a journey through the annals of her life, both real and imagined.

We learn through June’s voiceover that Boston fell 19 days after Mayday’s attack, and that fighting was over before the Marines arrived in Southie.

There are bonfires and celebrations, where people like Moira, Rita and Luke are able to experience real joy.

Looking into the flames coming from burning Gilead flags, June can’t help but remember her daughter Hannah, and Nick, and all those she loves.

Walking through the empty streets of Boston, Massachusetts in the moments after it has been liberated from Gilead, she remembers precious past moments of early motherhood and secret meetings with her now-dead lover.

She is surprisingly reunited with Emily, her first walking partner, outside the shut-down ice cream shop where Emily once told June the salted caramel was better than sex.

In imagined moments, June pictures singing karaoke with all the Handmaids and Rita in some alternate reality they never got to live.

The episode is the only one to be set entirely in America and the only episode where June is not consumed by the goal to survive.

The finale ends with June returning to her old bedroom in the Waterfords’ now-destroyed home, where she will start recording her tale on a tape recorder, cleverly circling back to the pilot episode and the first monologue voiceover by June as handmaid Offred.

However, the season finale is not the end of world of Gilead, as a sequel The Testaments is currently in the works by the show’s creator Hulu.

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