The Handmaid’s Tale killed off a character that wasn’t meant to die — at least not according to the book — and not everyone is thrilled about the changes.
During the Tuesday, May 20, episode, June (Elisabeth Moss) teamed up with Commander Lawrence (Bradley Whitford), who agreed to sacrifice himself in order to take the rest of the Gilead hierarchy down. Lawrence joined Commander Wharton (Josh Charles) and the other leaders as they planned to fly to Washington D.C. — knowing he wouldn’t survive the trip.
In a last minute twist, June’s love interest Nick (Max Minghella) also got onboard despite not originally planning to go. June had to watch as her ex got on the plane while knowing it would explode as soon as it was airborne. The last shot of the episode was June watching the wreckage.
While the ending to the penultimate episode shocked viewers, some weren’t thrilled about how it strayed from the source material.
“Five seasons of Nick disliking Gilead but being stuck regretting his past just for them to completely villainize him in 3 episodes & kill him,” read a post via X. “HE WAS A PLANT THAT HATED GILEAD IN THE BOOKS & WORKING WITH MAYDAY. WHAT WERE THE WRITERS THINKING WTF????????#TheHandmaidsTale.”
Not everyone remembered Nick’s story line in Margaret Atwood’s novel, which another response explained, “He saw gilead for what it was & how much of a monster the waterfords were. He became a spy giving them info. It was hinted at throughout the show too but i guess they scrapped it for a shocking final season????.”
According to Atwood’s sequel The Testaments, which is in development at Hulu, Nick was “deep undercover” within Gilead. “When you’ve read the book, and his character was working with Mayday, it’s like being gaslit for five seasons! ????,” an X user wrote.
There were some audience members who didn’t agree, with one social media user adding, “In the show he always was a nazi.”
For those who haven’t read The Handmaid’s Tale, the biggest shift came after season 1. In season 2, Hulu’s version of the series started to rely on plot lines that hinged on the show expanding the world and the characters from Atwood’s original dystopian concept, allowing the adaptation to continue for six seasons.
“None of this was in any way under my control,” Atwood told attendees at the Hay literary festival in 2018 about how the rights of the book were acquired by the distributors of the 1989 film version of The Handmaid’s Tale. “Even if I had thrown a tantrum and said you can’t do this, that would have had no legal standing.”
Despite the lack of creative control, Atwood has supported the show, adding at the time, “I think I would have to be awfully stupid to resent it because things could have been so much worse. They have done a tippety-top job, The acting is great, they’ve stuck to the central set of premises.”
She concluded: “It’s a TV series. If you’re going to have a series you can’t kill off the central character and you also can’t have the central character escape to safety in episode one of season 2. It’s not going to happen.”
Nick’s death comes ahead of the show’s highly-anticipated series finale. He betrayed June before his death, which coshowrunners Yahlin Chang and Eric Tuchman broke down exclusively for Us Weekly.
“People aren’t all good and they don’t make all the right choices all the time,” Chang explained earlier this month. “People also aren’t all bad and make all bad choices. That what was really guiding me and Eric all along was just trying to tell the truth and to also show all aspects of all these characters this season.”
The executive producers didn’t know immediately how they would “wrap up” the June and Nick romance.
“We just knew we wanted to really examine it and be honest about it. When we did that, that’s when we knew they had to reach this inflection point,” Tuchman shared with Us. “Moving forward, there’s always hope for someone to make the right move to change their mind and do the right thing.”
He continued: “June has been Nick’s beacon all along. The times he has stuck his neck out and done the right thing has been for June. So maybe this very charged situation is a huge wake up call for him going forward. We’ll have to see.”
New episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale are released Tuesdays on Hulu.
