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jessieexplores · 3 days ago

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The Handmaid’s Tale final season rant

i’m new to the fandom, ive really only been sitting on the sidelines for the last few months looking in, but i just needed to write something out in my own words, even though ive agreed with most posts ive been seeing on here and how frustrated they are with the ending of THT. i won’t be as articulated as some of you, but im about ready to boil over if i don’t get it out, i don’t really have anyone to talk to about this

so here it goes

good god, where to begin? at first i thought the season was alright, in those first few episodes, i definitely rolled my eyes at a few things, cough Serena Joy cough cough. i even cried when June was reunited with her mother, but looking back at it, it made no sense, Holly should be dead. then we got to episode 3 and i was giddy because, FINALLY, June and Nick were reunited on my screen, like the good ole days from seasons 1 and 2, but as someone pointed out later on, it was pure fan services and now makes absolute zero sense.

what i will say was consistent was Serena being flip floppy, who woulda thunk it. June wanting to fight, Nick feeling trapped, but as the season progressed it felt like i had whiplash at times, not to mention how short some of these episodes were, and for a final season? again, no sense.

they promised a revolution, and i hate to say it, they shouldn’t have been “promising” it. because ultimately, it, ONCE AGAIN, did not make sense, particularly with the sequel coming up, could they have teased it? yes, set things up for TT, but they really did none of that. the other thing i would like to point out is how many casual, or at least casual viewers who paid somewhat attention, asking the big question, “why didn’t June reunite with Hannah?” and to be honest, if i wasn’t a book reader, i would be asking the same thing. this is where i think they could have benefitted from including some material from TT in this last season, have someone on the inside (NICK BLAINE ANYONE!?) work with Lydia to have Hannah turned into an Aunt, another way to set up Lydia’s turn against Gilead in a covert way, rather than you know, her publicly denouncing Gilead and it’s “wicked godless men” blowing her cover, but apparently it didn’t because “trust me bro, it didn’t blow her cover” another example of these creators treating their audience like brainless jelly fish.

and how they treated Nichole? i’m gonna be real honest, she should’ve been put into hiding back in season 4 to remind you of how dangerous Gilead was. it would’ve at least connected to TT, while also not making June look like an actual terrible mother willingly abandoning the child she still has. it was always supposed to be Nichole can’t stay with June because it’s not safe for her to be with her mother.

apart of me wants to voice my frustrations with what they did to Nick, but at the same time, what else can i add to the conversation that hasn’t already been said? and honestly the same goes for June. i LOVE complex women, in all forms. but what they did to her? how did you make me not like the protagonist? i had always had empathy for her, but it got to a point where she weaponized her trauma, or didn’t confront it. also having her lead Luke on? i don’t hate Luke, but i know damn well she should’ve gotten to a point where she said something like “hey i’ll always love you, what we had was real, but im not in love with you anymore and i don’t want to be with you, i feel suffocated by you”. and i’m not just saying that as a Osbaline shipper.

and let’s be real, the love triangle trope in hollywood is being over used, and this was not the story for it. it felt reductive. just like it felt reductive to make the story end with June’s motherhood. it’s been said repeatedly, but idc, what kind of message is that to women?

also shaming people for liking the love story between Nick and June, as if love is anti-feminist, or frivolous, or superficial, like it’s some sort of bad thing? for the context of JUNE’S story, it made sense. like idk how to tell people this, but this was her story, love and romance are going to be just as much about that, as idk, her motherhood, her friendships, her family, her trauma, her oppression, as well as her complicity. she’s supposed to be COMPLEX, not reduced to just one singular thing.

i had a love/hate relationship with Serena Joy- i loved hating her - but “redeeming a rapist?” what sort of feminist messaging is that? i’m genuinely asking. like idk guys, some women just suck, and she definitely sucked. but they wanted to take the shitty white woman off the hook, i guess.

it was like the latter half of the season was just for shock value, and i feel like shows now do that solely because GOT did it back with the Red Wedding, but the difference is, the RW wasn’t for the sake of shock, narratively it made sense, no i didn’t want to see Cat, Robb or his men die, but he broke a vow by marrying someone else, he humiliated the Freys, and Tywin Lannister needed to be shown how ruthless he was and what he would do to win a war. but lately? (we don’t talk about the ending of GOT, that was also a shit show). in other shows it’s just for the sake of shock value with no coherent narrative sense, if you have your viewers doing mental gymnastics to explain the purpose of the shock, ITS BAD STORY TELLING. (Dany killed all the slave masters or didn’t blink when her abusive brother was murdered after he had threatened her unborn child 🙄/Nick did bad things off screen- and to that i’ll say he very well could’ve been doing good things off screen)

when Nick died, i didn’t cry, it wasn’t because i wasn’t sad or angry, it’s literally because i was so shocked that they actually did it, because i didn’t think that they would kill him like that? and how June reacted? she should have been on the floor sobbing, feeling guilty she didn’t stop him, even if she was mad at him, it made ZERO SENSE.

or how Nick just sat in the hospital while the mother of his child, the love of his life was about to be executed. the Nick from previous seasons would have gotten her out before they came to get her from her cell.

if i were Bruce Miller, i would not have left a show i had given years to in others hands, ESPECIALLY, if i have a sequel in the works. because what they did with that series ending, was mind blowing-ly stupid. no, things didn’t need to be wrapped up in a neat pretty bow, but they did need to make sense. and these guys? they dropped the ball. like why are you writing to shock ppl rather then tell a nuanced story about messy human beings? why are you writing for the casual viewer and not the ones who would have continued to rewatch your series and your sequel?

and on that note, i’m not even sure how this remotely honors the source material, when you not only fundamentally change One major character, BUT THREE!? (June, Nick, Serena) i could say 4 but im giving them the benefit of the doubt (which they don’t deserve) with Lydia, because she didn’t appear all that much in Margret Atwood’s THT. i will say though Ann Dowd is amazing, but the way Atwood wrote Lydia in The Testaments was actually incredible.

should i talk about their PR campaign and what a fucking nightmare it was? how gaslit i feel? my intelligence questioned? how god damn rude i’ve seen some people in the fandom be towards pro Nick fans? and i’m in the ASOIAF fandom, and that place is a shit storm. (i’m on another platform for that)

i literally don’t know if i can watch another television series ever again, because it feels like hollywood just keeps putting out the same nonsensical bull shit. i used to LOVE watching series, getting into them and analyzing on my own. but now? it all feels superficial, like there’s no deeper meaning anymore. the message they claim to be putting out doesn’t match what we’re actually seeing. everything lacks so much nuance now, which honestly used to surprise me, it doesn’t anymore. i’ve always seen the world as one big gray area, and i will continue to, but too many people only want to see it through a black and white lens.

this show/story used to be full of nuance, now, it just feels… one dimensional, and that’s truly sad. i’ve been going back and forth on doing a rewatch, but i don’t think i can. i don’t think i can put myself through a show that now only feels like torture porn, it’s like Janine’s character is representative of that.

i also want to add how they also treated Moira, it was like they had her working with the refugees, which i loved, but then dropped that. that felt important. until it didn’t.

i probably have more to say, but this is already so long, so im going to leave it here. the show was great in those first 3 seasons, it had serious potential to wrap up to be great, but once June left Gilead and just sat in Canada, bitching about not doing anything, it wasn’t good anymore.

i will not be watching The Testaments ✌️

#osblaine #the handmaid's tale #nick blaine

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jessieexplores · 10 days ago

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PLEASE, please Osblaines read this one — I highly recommend it. It had me bawling.

(God, I hate the Handmaid’s Tale writers.)

I loved it so much I had to share why this three-part fan fic resonated so deeply with me and made me remember why I fell in love with this novel and the characters in it. It brought me back to the real heart of Atwood’s story: the one about agency, survival, unconventional love, and the quiet defiance of building something entirely your own.

Castles in the Air does what the show flat-out refused to do: it writes June and Nick not just as a couple, but as true partners. It builds a life for them that isn’t conventional, clean, or easy but it’s honest, free, and chosen. This fic gave me everything canon took away.

There’s a version of The Handmaid’s Tale that remembered what it started as: not just a dystopia, not just a warning, but a rebellion against every “right way” a woman is told to live. A story that gave space for love that didn’t follow the rules. For women who don’t make the choices the world wants them to make. The show used to be that story. And then it wasn’t.

But this fic is.

Set after Season 3, Castles in the Air picks up where the real story should have: with Nick making a choice. Not just for June, but for himself. To step outside the structures he helped dismantle. To be part of something better. To fight, not just for the woman he loves, but alongside her. And not in some idealized way. This fic gets messy. Their relationship isn’t picture-perfect. It’s strained by trauma, guilt, grief, old wounds, and impossible choices. But they stay. They talk. They listen. And for once, the words aren’t one-sided.

What moved me so much is that this fic lets Nick finally say what the show never allowed him to: how deeply June’s tunnel vision has affected him, how often he’s been asked to sacrifice without being considered, how her choices, even the brave ones, have sometimes come at an unbearable cost to him. And the best part? The fic doesn’t frame him as wrong for saying so. He’s not punished. He’s heard.

And June—God, June—is so well written here. Still fierce, still raw, still capable of burning down everything in her path for the people she loves. But here she’s forced to sit with that. To look at how that fire has hurt the people closest to her. There’s a period of separation between them that just wrecked me but it’s necessary. It’s not melodrama. It’s growth. When they come back together, it’s because they’ve both chosen it. Not because they have to. Not because they’re stuck. Because it’s what they want.

This fic doesn’t just give them love—it gives them freedom. Not the hollow kind the show teases, where everyone ends up in Canada as proof they’re safe. This is a different kind of freedom. One built on mutual trust, shared purpose, and the radical act of saying:

We don’t have to follow the rules. We don’t have to live how people expect us to. We can build something real, even if it doesn’t look like what the world says a family should be.

And oh my god, the ending. I won’t spoil it, but it’s so in line with what Atwood was getting at. June choosing a path that’s uncertain, imperfect—but hers. Choosing love that’s not safe, but true. It’s powerful in the quietest way. The kind of ending where you finally exhale and realize just how long you’ve been holding your breath.

Also, the side characters? Chef’s kiss. Luke is given depth and care. He’s not villainized but he’s not centered either. His grief is real, and his arc feels earned, even as it makes clear that his and June’s lives are no longer aligned. And Beth—oh my god, BETH. She’s smart, she’s direct, she calls June out when she needs it and supports her when it matters. She’s the perfect grounding force in all this chaos.

In the end, it doesn’t just give Nick and June a future, it gives them a choice. And more importantly, it lets June reclaim something the show tried to take from her: the right to define happiness on her own terms. Not what the world expects. Not what a good mother or good survivor is supposed to want. Just what she wants.

This fic broke my heart and then put it back together in a way canon never tried to. Please read it.

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jessieexplores · 12 days ago

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The Betrayal of Nick Blaine: How The Handmaid’s Tale Undermined Its Own Storytelling

As a university professor with a PhD in literature, I’ve dedicated my career to analyzing narrative structure, character arcs, and thematic coherence. And I can say this with full confidence: what the writers did to Nick Blaine in Season 6 of The Handmaid’s Tale was not bold, subversive, or daring — it was a narrative betrayal.

And just to be clear: I’m not a shipper. I didn’t love Nick because of his romance with June. I appreciated him as a deeply layered character — one whose quiet resistance stood in stark contrast to the more performative defiance of others. Not every act of heroism is loud. Nick’s resistance began long before June entered his life, and for several seasons, the writers honored that. Until they didn’t.

Nick represented something rare on television: a portrayal of a man caught inside a brutal system, not loud or showy, but quietly working to survive while retaining his humanity and fighting back in the ways available to him. His arc was thoughtful, subtle, and realistic — and it offered a necessary counterpoint to the broader, more visible forms of rebellion in the series. That narrative was coherent, moving, and consistent — until Season 6 shattered it for the sake of shock value.

A HISTORY OF RESISTANCE — CAREFULLY BUILT

Nick’s arc was never centered on power. In fact, he resisted it. He smuggled contraband to Jezebels, joined the Eyes in order to report predatory Commanders (after Waterford’s first Handmaid died by suicide), and helped take down Commander Guthrie, one of the architects of the Handmaid system. These weren’t incidental moments — they were intentional signs of internal rebellion that the show carefully planted over multiple seasons.

After meeting June, Nick continued to act strategically. He was the one who secretly smuggled the Jezebels letters out of Gilead and delivered them to Luke in Canada — an act that directly led to Canada refusing to sign a diplomatic agreement with Gilead. And crucially, Nick did this without June asking him to or even knowing about it. At the time, June was in a terrible mental state, so desperate that she tried to burn the letters in the sink. Nick hid the Jezebels letters in his apartment before Eden moved in — making it all the more risky once she arrived and began snooping through his things.

His promotions weren’t rewards but consequences. Serena arranged his marriage to Eden out of jealousy. His rise to Commander wasn’t a reward for loyalty — it was a consequence of his decision to pull a gun on Fred to help June and Nicole escape, as even Joseph Fiennes has confirmed in interviews. Even his marriage to Rose served a clear purpose: to get closer to Hannah’s captors, the Mackenzies, and position himself in a place where he could act.

Importantly, the Marthas in Season 4 speak to Nick like an equal, not like someone they fear. One even asks him, “Is this business as usual?” — a small but significant clue that Nick had been working with the Martha network for a long time. This wasn’t a sudden shift. His ties to the resistance were consistent and deliberate. Even other Commanders call him a “boy scout” in Season 6 — a nickname that reflects his perceived moral rigidity and difference from the men around him.

THE HINTS THE WRITERS LEFT — THEN ABANDONED

Throughout the first five seasons of The Handmaid’s Tale, the writers laid down clear and deliberate hints that Nick was meant to function as a quiet resistor embedded within Gilead’s system. His actions were not accidental or incidental — they were purposeful choices, woven into the narrative to build a coherent, morally complex character.

Another major hint came in a cut scene from Season 3 — one that never made it to the screen but is preserved in the official scripts. In that scene, Nick is shown at the front during Gilead’s military campaigns, standing alongside Commander Mackenzie. This wasn’t designed to show him as complicit — quite the opposite. It placed him close to Hannah’s captors, setting up his position to act as an inside link, a person who might eventually help June find and rescue her daughter. This scene reinforced what the show had been quietly building all along: Nick was where he needed to be, playing the long game.

His abrupt marriage to Rose further aligned with this arc. It wasn’t a romantic choice or a reward — it was another calculated move to get close to the Mackenzie family. The fact that we saw him and Rose at dinners with them in Season 5 wasn’t coincidence — it was strategy. Nick was positioning himself exactly where he could observe, influence, and perhaps, one day, act.

And here’s something telling: in his apartment above the garage, we see Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez. That’s not just a random prop. It’s a novel about enduring love and resistance in the face of cruelty and loss. The writers deliberately placed that book in his apartment. It was a clear, intentional signal: Nick was written as someone with inner depth, quiet resistance, and a poetic soul. Bruce Miller says in The Art and Making of The Handmaid’s Tale:

“We were very careful about what books he reads, what books he has, and where we got them.” (p. 34)

And yet, all of these threads were dropped in Season 6. The Mackenzies vanished from the story. The careful groundwork that had been laid for Nick’s internal resistance arc was erased, discarded in favor of a last-minute, illogical narrative pivot that portrayed him as complicit without reckoning with everything the show had previously told us about him.

What’s worse, both the show’s own deleted material and the actual scenes up until Season 6 make it clear that Nick was never meant to be the villain they later tried to paint him as.The official scripts and cut scenes show him as a man horrified by the violence of Gilead’s rise, caught in it but never fully part of it. These clues weren’t just abandoned — they were actively contradicted in a way that undermined both the character and the larger themes of the series.

WHAT THE CREATORS & ACTOR SAY

Before Season 6, both the creators of The Handmaid’s Tale and actor Max Minghella consistently described Nick as a fundamentally decent man — a character carefully constructed to be morally complex, but not complicit in Gilead’s ideology.

Max Minghella, who portrayed Nick, made his view of the character clear as early as 2018:

“I trust Nick. I stand by him … at the root of Nick, he’s a good person. Whether he always does the right thing is a different question.” (Glamour, 2018)

Minghella recognized Nick as morally conflicted but ultimately decent — a man navigating impossible choices in an impossible world. His performance was built on the understanding that Nick was not a villain, but a man trapped by circumstances beyond his control, revealing himself through small gestures and quiet decisions.

In 2022, at the end of Season 5, showrunner Bruce Miller reinforced this characterization:

“I know what we’re setting up for Nick, which is exactly what you think it is. He’s the guy who we think he is. And even if he tries not to be the guy he thinks he is, it’s either going to be very uncomfortable for him like he is with Rose, or it’s going to fail and he’s going to end up not being able to stop himself from punching Lawrence. I think the nice thing is he follows his heart, and the scary thing is he follows his heart.” (Deadline, June 2022)

This statement from Miller is especially revealing in light of what ultimately unfolded in Season 6. His words confirm that as of the end of Season 5, Nick was intended to remain exactly as the audience understood him: a man driven by emotion, not ideology; someone uncomfortable when forced to conform; someone who couldn’t suppress his decency even when doing so put him at risk.

However, after Season 6, Miller’s commentary took on a different tone, attempting to reframe Nick’s arc:

“Nick isn’t choosing Gilead as a sudden endorsement of its beliefs and practices, but rather a belief that there’s no beating this regime; it’s better to protect yourself by moving with it rather than against it.” “Nick was trying to stay out of trouble … thinking about how to keep himself safe for his family.” (TV Insider, 2025)

These post-finale remarks sought to justify Nick’s sudden portrayal as complicit in Gilead’s horrors, but they stand in stark contrast to Miller’s earlier statements. What happened in Season 6 was not the culmination of a long-planned character journey; it was a last-minute pivot that abandoned Nick’s carefully built arc. His proximity to Gilead’s power structures had always been framed as about survival, not ideology — a distinction that Season 6 discarded.

Even Minghella was surprised by the shift in Nick’s moral framing, as he revealed in an interview with ELLE in 2025:

“Transparently, I was surprised … I thought it was a really bold and interesting choice to bring that story into this more nihilistic viewpoint.” “Maybe I hadn’t been playing this character correctly the whole time … there was probably a darker side to him that I didn’t realize was there.”

When even the actor playing Nick for six seasons no longer recognizes the character he’s portraying, it highlights how drastic and jarring the shift in writing was. Nick’s final arc wasn’t the result of a gradual, coherent evolution — it was a sudden, dissonant rewrite that undermined everything the audience, and even the show’s own team, had come to understand about him.

Where once the creators framed Nick as a survivor and quiet resistor, they later attempted to retroactively paint him as complicit. This contradiction is not just a failure of internal consistency — it’s a betrayal of the character they themselves had worked so carefully to build.

A SHIFT BEHIND THE SCENES — AND ONSCREEN

The betrayal of Nick’s arc didn’t happen in a vacuum. It was the result of major shifts behind the scenes that dramatically altered the show’s direction and tone, particularly in Season 6.

After Season 4, there were significant changes in the writers’ room, and after Season 5, Bruce Miller — who had been the showrunner and primary architect of the series’ complex moral landscape — stepped down as showrunner to focus on developing The Testaments adaptation. What followed was a tonal and narrative shift that was most starkly reflected in the treatment of Nick’s character.

In Season 5, the writers appeared to be setting up Commander Lawrence as the morally compromised figure whose choices would catch up with him. Lawrence, after all, had designed Gilead. He was one of its architects — a man who wielded enormous power and made decisions that cost thousands of lives, including the bombing of Chicago and the systemic torture of women. He was unwilling to help June find Hannah, even when she begged him, and he stood by as Gilead shot down American planes attempting to raid Hannah’s school. He didn’t intervene to stop this act of brutality, just as he never truly opposed the suggestions of other Commanders to have June killed when she became too much of a threat. But reportedly, Bradley Whitford — who plays Lawrence — pushed back against having his character face the full consequences of those choices.

So what did the writers do instead? They redirected that arc onto Nick. Rather than grappling with the moral failings of Gilead’s true architects, the show chose to scapegoat the one male character who had consistently resisted, quietly and at great personal risk, from the inside.

The result was a jarring pivot in Season 6, where Nick was denied the nuance and complexity afforded to characters like Serena, Lydia, Lawrence, and even Naomi Putnam. Naomi, a character who had benefitted enormously from Gilead’s brutal hierarchy and who had always relished her privileged position, was suddenly handed a redemption arc without narrative justification. Her decision to give Charlotte to Janine came out of nowhere, contradicting everything we had seen of her character before.

Meanwhile, Nick — who had quietly resisted for years, who had risked his life for June, Nicole, and the resistance — was given no such grace. His entire arc was collapsed into a simplistic and inconsistent portrayal of complicity, as if all his sacrifices and small acts of rebellion had never happened.

The complexity that had once made The Handmaid’s Tale so compelling was flattened in favor of a reductive, black-and-white view of its characters — one that betrayed both Nick and the show’s own core themes.

THE GASLIGHTING OF FANS

To make matters worse, in the wake of justified fan backlash over the abrupt and illogical rewriting of Nick’s character, the public statements from the show’s creators, writers, directors, and even lead actor felt like gaslighting. Rather than acknowledging the inconsistency or taking responsibility for the narrative pivot, they shifted blame onto the audience — particularly the female fans who had thoughtfully engaged with Nick’s arc for years.

The writers claimed that viewers misunderstood Nick because “we don’t see 95% of the things Nick does in Gilead.” This was offered as an explanation for why fans were supposedly confused — suggesting that any contradictions in Nick’s character came not from inconsistent storytelling, but from unseen off-screen actions. The writers also implied that fans had misjudged Nick because they saw him primarily through June’s eyes, and that her love for him clouded both her perception and, by extension, that of the audience. This framing felt deeply patronizing. It reduced thoughtful, critical engagement with the character to the idea that fans (especially women) were simply too emotionally attached to see the truth. The creative team further argued that Nick had plenty of chances to leave Gilead but chose not to, reinforcing their revisionist narrative. What makes this claim especially disingenuous is that the show itself repeatedly demonstrated how difficult, if not impossible, it was to leave Gilead. Even Lawrence — a man with immense power — tried to leave in Season 3 and couldn’t. To suggest that Nick could have simply walked away contradicts the very world-building the writers established.

And then Eric Tuchman went on to claim:

“Even though Nick is a wonderful savior and protector for June and Max Minghella is an incredibly charismatic actor with wonderful chemistry with Elisabeth Moss, Nick has a life beyond June in Gilead. We’ve known since Season 1 he was an Eye, as well as a driver. The Swiss didn’t want to talk to Nick because he was a war criminal and couldn’t be trusted. Serena told June, ‘Didn’t Nick tell you what he did? To help create Gilead?’ — and it was something ominous. June chose not to ask any further questions. We know that he bombed Chicago and a lot of innocent people were killed — June and Janine were there. Yes, he was following orders, but Nick has always been a fully willing participant in Gilead. He’s always embraced Gilead. The only times he ever helped the resistance were because of his connection to June. She has been his beacon to do the right thing. Nick’s betrayal was proof he wasn’t really part of the resistance.” (Cast Q&A, @handmaidsonhulu on Threads, 2025)

But these statements are deeply misleading. They ignore what the actual canon of the show established and contradict the very material the writers originally produced. The Swiss refused to talk to Nick not because of war crimes, but because of optics and politics — as shown in official deleted scenes and the scripts archived at the Writers Guild. In those cut scenes, Nick is portrayed during the rise of Gilead not as a war criminal, but as a minor guard, visibly horrified, described as “looking sick” at the violence unfolding around him. When a comrade is killed, Nick fires back “out of instinct” — hardly the mark of a man shaping or embracing the regime.

Another scene — one that did air — shows Nick returning a salute from Gilead troops. In the official script, this moment is described with a crucial note: Nick is “hating all the choices that led him here.” His internal conflict is explicitly spelled out, revealing that even in this small gesture of outward compliance, he is burdened by regret and trapped by circumstances. This wasn’t a man embracing Gilead’s ideology. It was a man caught in a web he couldn’t easily escape, trying to survive while carrying the weight of every decision that brought him to that point.

Bruce Miller himself confirmed that Serena’s ominous comment to June about Nick’s role in creating Gilead was a lie, meant to hurt her emotionally. And we know from canon that Nick objected to bombing Chicago, but didn’t have the power to stop it.

Director Daina Reid added fuel to the fire, directly targeting women in the fandom. In her Eyes on Gilead podcast interview, she said she “doesn’t understand these women who still defend Nick.” She went even further, claiming that viewers “invent scenes” to justify Nick’s actions — as if fans who had paid close attention to his arc were simply imagining things to excuse him. In doing so, she dismissed female fans specifically — implying that their continued support for Nick was irrational or misguided, and reducing thoughtful engagement with the character to naive emotionalism. This wasn’t just dismissive; it was a troubling attack on a loyal, thoughtful fanbase that had engaged deeply with the show’s themes of resistance, complicity, and survival.

Even Elisabeth Moss, who plays June, contributed to this gaslighting. In interviews, she misremembered key parts of the story — for instance, forgetting that Eden suspected Nick’s lack of sexual interest in her and feared he might be a gender traitor. This was a significant part of Eden’s arc, yet Moss appeared unaware of it, undermining her credibility when discussing Nick and June’s relationship. Moss also insisted in interviews that June “absolutely did not want Nick to die,” while simultaneously suggesting that June could never forgive Nick for his so-called betrayal — despite the fact that if Nick hadn’t made that difficult choice in the moment, he would have died on the spot. The logic simply doesn’t hold: how can June not want him dead but also not forgive him for the very act that saved his life?

If we’re now expected to view Nick as a villain based on things we never saw, it’s not the audience inventing scenes — it’s the creators retroactively rewriting them. That’s not a failure of interpretation on the part of the fans; it’s a failure of storytelling on the part of the writers.

Adding to the irony, Elisabeth Moss recently explained in interviews that in respecting the book, they wanted to preserve a sense of open-endedness — to “keep a lot of loose ends” as the novel itself ends on a cliffhanger. Yet in doing so, they chose to alter one of the most crucial threads from the book: Nick’s arc. Adding to this contradiction, Bruce Miller himself asserted:

“I think the series has been good in large part because I chose to follow the story and tonal spirit of the novel as much as possible.” (Deadline, 2025)

If preserving the spirit of the book was truly the goal, they would have honored Nick’s role as Atwood envisioned it: a symbol of survival, moral conflict, and quiet rebellion.

What’s most telling is how drastically the messaging from the creative team has shifted. The Nick who was once described by Bruce Miller as a man of survival instincts, not ideology — a man navigating impossible circumstances while trying to protect his family — was suddenly reframed post-Season 6 as a willing and eager participant in Gilead’s horrors. This contradiction not only betrayed Nick’s character but also undermined the integrity of the show’s moral universe.

ATWOOD’S VISION, THE BOOKS, AND THE DANGER OF THIS REWRITE

Resistance from within is a hallmark of dystopian literature. From 1984 to The Hunger Games, these narratives often explore how individuals embedded in oppressive systems work quietly, strategically, and at great personal risk to undermine them. These characters are complex, morally ambiguous, and realistic — because real-world resistance is rarely loud or simple. The Handmaid’s Tale, as originally written by Margaret Atwood, understood this nuance, and Nick Blaine was designed to embody it.

Atwood herself envisioned Nick as a figure of internal dissent — a man trapped by circumstances, but capable of moral clarity and quiet rebellion. In The Testaments, set fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale, Nick is still alive, still inside Gilead, and still working as part of the underground resistance. We see him reunite with Nicole, the daughter he risked everything to save, and we see that his arc was meant to reflect the endurance of hope and the power of resistance that survives even in the darkest places.

The show, for five seasons, respected this vision. Nick stayed in Gilead because that was his purpose — to help destroy it from within. His positioning near Hannah’s captors reinforced his role as an inside man. The writers kept him in Gilead because he was meant to be there, playing the long game. Until Tuchman and Chang decided they knew better than Atwood and discarded this crucial thread.

Atwood has been outspoken in her view that dystopian systems like Gilead harm everyone — men and women alike. As she has said:

“Patriarchy hurts men too. Totalitarianism hurts everyone — men and women alike.” (CBC, 2017)

And on feminism:

“Feminism is not about demonizing men. It’s about working with men so that everyone has the same rights.” (New York Times, 2018)

The show’s final season abandoned this fundamental ethos. Instead of portraying the complexities of complicity and resistance across genders, it simplified its moral world: all Commanders were framed as irredeemable, while even characters like Naomi Putnam — who had thrived under Gilead’s brutality — were suddenly offered redemption with no coherent justification. This flattening of moral nuance betrayed the depth and realism that had defined the show’s earlier seasons.

By erasing Nick’s internal resistance arc, the show not only disrespected Atwood’s source material but also weakened its own critique of authoritarianism. The danger of this rewrite isn’t just that it harmed a character — it’s that it undermined the very lessons dystopian literature is meant to teach us. It replaced complex truths about power, survival, and quiet resistance with simplistic, black-and-white moral judgments that serve neither feminism nor thoughtful storytelling.

Nick’s character was supposed to remind us that even those caught inside the machinery of oppression can still fight back in their own way. Erasing that lesson robbed the audience of hope — the most vital tool dystopian fiction can offer.

NICK’S ATTRACTIVENESS AND THE MISOGYNY BEHIND THE CRITICISM

One of the most troubling aspects of the backlash against Nick’s character — and against the fans who continue to care for him — is the way his physical attractiveness has been weaponized as a reason to dismiss thoughtful engagement with his arc. Critics, including members of the show’s creative team, have implied that fans (especially women) only care about Nick because of his looks — as if audiences are too shallow or simple to appreciate deeper qualities.

Disturbingly, this attitude wasn’t just reflected in off-screen commentary. It became embedded in the writing of the final season itself. After five seasons in which no character ever explicitly commented on Nick’s appearance, Season 6 abruptly shifted focus, framing his physical attractiveness as the defining reason June loved him. For the first time, June says that she would have noticed Nick even if he were bagging groceries or driving for Uber because he was very handsome. Moira joins in, comparing Nick’s looks to Rihanna’s and rating his hotness as if she were judging a celebrity. Even Lawrence remarks that June was “swept away” by Nick’s “smothering looks.”

This was no accident. The writers deliberately chose to center Nick’s attractiveness in a way they had never done before — as if to validate their own revisionist narrative that June’s love for Nick was shallow, and that fans’ attachment to him was based only on surface-level traits. In doing so, they reduced what had been a deeply layered, emotionally rich relationship to a matter of lust and superficiality — diminishing not only Nick’s character, but June’s as well.

As brilliantly articulated in the Above the Garage podcast’s cathartic essay on Nick:

“Nick’s physical attractiveness has nothing to do with the reason we love his character. Women are not as simple and shallow as you’re making them out to be. No matter how someone may try to shame you, it is not antifeminist to believe in, and care about, romantic love. Our protagonist herself has said, many times, that it is for love that she lives. Love is empowering, and we thought that was a message the show understood.”

What Nick represents is not some idealized, flawless hero. No one who values Nick as a character denies his flaws or excuses his moments of complicity. What Nick offers is a vision of the human capacity for joy, tenderness, and compassion in the bleakest circumstances. His quiet support of June, his ability to love and be loved amid horror, reflects the reality that even in war, oppression, and captivity, people have found ways to fall in love, to marry, to create art, to dream of a better world. Nick’s story was an opportunity to show how resistance can be sustained not just through defiance, but through humanity and connection.

The suggestion that shipping Nick and June, or simply caring about Nick as a character, is somehow naive or antifeminist, fundamentally misunderstands the complexity of these relationships. As the essay points out, the show could have leaned into Nick and June’s profound connection — a connection that empowered June, supported her agency, and could have stood as one of television’s greatest romances, without undermining the power of her friendships or her other relationships. Life is not either/or. Women can value deep friendships and romantic love. The audience can appreciate both without one diminishing the other.

Finally, it’s important to call out the hypocrisy in how romantic love is treated. As the essay puts it: “You know who else thought romantic love was naive and silly? Our old friend, Fred Waterford. May he rest in peace.”

Dismissing viewers who value love and connection as naive is not progressive — it echoes the mindset of the very villains the story sought to critique. It is not antifeminist to care about love, or to see beauty and strength in a character who represents its survival under tyranny. And it is certainly not a weakness or character flaw to find meaning in these narratives.

THE DANGEROUS MISLABELING: NICK AS A “NAZI”

One of the most disturbing narrative choices in Season 6 was the decision to have multiple characters — including June’s mother, Holly, and Luke — refer to Nick as a “Nazi.” This label was not used in earlier seasons, despite Nick’s long-standing position within Gilead’s structures. It was introduced only in Season 6, coinciding with the writers’ abrupt pivot toward framing Nick as complicit and irredeemable.

The comparison is not only morally and historically inaccurate — it is dangerous. Nick is not portrayed as an architect of genocide, nor as a willing enforcer of Gilead’s ideology. As the show itself spent five seasons establishing, Nick is a survivor — a man who joined the Eyes not to impose tyranny, but to report on and take down predatory Commanders after witnessing the suicide of Waterford’s first Handmaid. He smuggled contraband, helped the resistance, facilitated June’s and Nicole’s escape, and positioned himself near Hannah’s captors in hopes of aiding in her rescue. These are not the actions of a true believer in the system; they are the actions of a man trapped within it, trying to undermine it where he can.

Calling Nick a Nazi collapses the moral complexity that The Handmaid’s Tale once prided itself on. It flattens the nuances of complicity, survival, and resistance into simplistic, black-and-white thinking that does a disservice not only to Nick’s character but to the audience’s understanding of history. Gilead is a fictional regime meant to reflect elements of real-world authoritarianism, but equating every man in a uniform with a Nazi trivializes both the horrors of the Holocaust and the lived realities of people trapped within oppressive systems who did not have the power to change them, but found small, courageous ways to resist.

It’s also worth noting that the writers making these choices surely have not lived under totalitarian regimes themselves — which cannot be said about many of the show’s viewers. For those who have experienced or have family histories marked by real-world authoritarian rule, these labels are not just inaccurate; they are deeply offensive and reflect a dangerous misunderstanding of what life under such regimes actually entails.

June’s mother’s use of the term might be explained by her extremism and ideological rigidity — but when Luke adopts the same language, it becomes clear that the writers themselves wanted to frame Nick through this lens, erasing the character they had spent five seasons building. This lazy labeling serves neither history, feminism, nor good storytelling. It reduces complex questions about survival, complicity, and moral ambiguity to cheap, inflammatory rhetoric — the opposite of what dystopian fiction is meant to encourage us to grapple with

WHY THIS MATTERS

Nick didn’t need a heroic ending. But he deserved a consistent one. His arc represented a type of resistance that is rarely shown on screen: strategic, quiet, and deeply human. Nick’s story gave voice to the reality that not all acts of rebellion are loud, and not all heroes stand on podiums. His form of dissent — subtle, calculated, often invisible — was no less important than June’s louder, more visible defiance. In fact, it reflected the kind of resistance that most people caught inside authoritarian regimes actually engage in: the quiet, careful acts that chip away at power without drawing lethal attention.

More than that, Nick was the show’s most realistic character. He was an ordinary man swept up by the rise of Gilead — lured into the Sons of Jacob not out of malice or ideology, but because of the brutal socio-economic conditions that preceded Gilead’s rise. Like many who find themselves caught in the machinery of authoritarian systems, Nick became increasingly trapped as the years passed. But crucially, Nick almost immediately saw Gilead for what it was. He recognized the horror. And despite the danger, he chose to resist in the ways available to him — quietly, strategically, and at great personal cost.

We needed that Nick. His arc was supposed to remind us that even those inside the system, even those who have made mistakes, can choose to act with compassion, courage, and moral clarity. His story offered a rare and vital kind of hope: that decency can survive in the darkest of places, and that ordinary people can make extraordinary choices even when the odds are against them.

In the difficult times we live in, as extremism and authoritarianism rise in the real world, Nick’s story could have served as a reminder of the importance of quiet resistance — of the fact that the fight against oppression doesn’t always look like a revolution, but can begin with small, courageous acts.

By collapsing his arc into a simplistic tale of complicity, the writers not only betrayed Nick as a character but stripped the audience of that hope. What happened to him wasn’t just a sad ending. It was bad writing. And it was a missed opportunity — a failure to honor both the character they had built and the powerful tradition of resistance that dystopian fiction exists to celebrate.

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jessieexplores · 1 month ago

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“The fandom is centering a man in a story about women, all they can talk about is the man, all they care about is the man and the romance.”

Actually no, what we care about is representation of a strong woman being portrayed as a whole person who can contain multitudes: able to be a mother, daughter, friend, fighter, leader AND a lover if she wants to be. A complexity the character used to be granted before the writers apparently somehow decided it wasn’t “feminist” (a fallacy, btw).

We care about the message it would have sent for the main character to have been allowed to choose for herself a love that makes her feel alive, grounds her and helps her to be the best version of herself as she continues her fight. For her to trust and follow her own heart, mind and gut, as opposed to caving to the societal pressure telling her what she should be and who she should be with.

Rather than the message we were given, which is that sexual desire and the love and companionship of a romantic partner is a distraction (a “flight of fancy”, even); that as a woman, you don’t get to have that if you want to be strong and independent and reach your true potential (think about how often media sends this same message about a male lead… yeah, not very).

We care about the fact that we wanted to fully emotionally immerse ourselves in an ending that involved beautiful female friendships we’ve been following for nearly 10 years and reflections on motherhood, family and resistance, but were too distracted by nonsensical, unsatisfying character choices, carelessly dropped plotlines and completely unrealistic and unearned moments shoehorned in at the last moment to enjoy the resolution as a whole.

We care about the fact that in the end they seem to have turned a main character we deeply cared about and rooted for into either a sociopath who doesn't care that the man she claimed to love* (at least as of 2 weeks ago) died horrifically, or else has become so fully numbed to death that she is unable to process it, and that this is yet another wound she will have to rip open at some point, another gut-wrenching loss she will have to mourn when she finally reckons with all the the lives needlessly lost over the years.

We care about the show staying even the littlest bit faithful to the spirit and the underlying themes of the source material (and not just in the literal words with which the first novel begins).

The reason we're talking about "the man" (aside from the fact that we appreciate this deeply layered and complex character, which yes, we're allowed to do even in a show centering on women) is that, in so fully and shockingly (the point, ostensibly) destroying not just the character but also apparently everything he had meant to the lead, it also inevitably denies the lead of one of the aspects that made her so relatable in all her messy humanity.

Can she be whole "without a man"? Yes, my god, of course. But she would also not be less with one, or even continuing to love one (or hell, even two) from afar. Was it really necessary to literally blow up the man she loved in order to deny her the choice, even at some potential point in the future beyond what we see after the screen goes black? Personally, I don't find that very "feminist", satisfying or hopeful, but hey that's just me.

*I won’t even get into the fact that we’re not even just talking about romantic love and sexual agency and desire here, we are also quite literally talking about familial love because this was *the father of one of her children*, because quite honestly my point here is that romantic love and sexual agency and desire actually do matter on their very own merit as well.

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jessieexplores · 1 month ago

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Season 6 - Critical Mass

Fuck me. Season 6. Some loved it, most hated it. Episode 9 in particular really brought the whole house of cards down for this season, and left the writers and show runners with nothing but angry fans and a thousand questions to answer. I started making my own list sometime ago and episode 9 just tipped me over into critical mass. Because it involved the death of not one but two beloved characters, fans were let’s say, a little miffed. The choice to off Nick Blaine in particular has drawn considerable heat and there’s plenty of reasons why. Let’s take a look at some of the biggest reasons that Season 6 broke abso-fucking-loutely everything.

Firstly, I don’t think that it’s an exaggeration to say that at times season 6 just felt surreal and not in a good way. Previous seasons had set up the rules and guidelines for this world and season 6 simply didn’t care about any of them. For instance; how were people just waltzing in and out of Gilead now? That place used to be fucking locked down. Spot lights, dogs, guard towers, drones, Eyes….anyone remember how Emily had to swim over that freezing river with Holly to get to freedom and it was scary AF? Baby Holly nearly drowned. Now June Osborne, Gilead public enemy number one is just jumping in the car to go shuttle Lawrence across the border to a completely abandoned aircraft hangar. But season 6 didn’t stop there, it also didn’t respect the laws of gravity when it dangled Osborne from a crane 30 feet in the air and then hurled her to the ground without a scratch. In addition to disregarding the very laws of physics, Season 6 also gave characters amnesia on multiple occasions, cited off screen occurrences as lore as some sort of “fail safe”, sought to rewrite characters very natures, violated original texts, assumed knowledge, disregarded plot holes and selectively altered the basic moral compass by which characters would be judged. In fact, there really isn’t much that season 6 didn’t do in terms of just breaking all the guidelines that keep a world intact. I can only hope that it will be used as an example of what NOT to do by future writers, because quite honestly the disbelief and anger by audiences has been visceral, and personally I’ve never wanted to smash my television more.

This season was meant to be about people showing their true faces and I am STUNNED that somewhere, somehow these writers have justified that a woman who participated in multiple rapes, stole a baby, and had her hand in the conception of Gilead, has a benevolent “true face”. On Serena’s wedding night she was astonished to learn that her new husband, King of all the High Commanders was a die hard loyalist who liked to keep a handmaid on staff. She had a bit of a whimper but next morning she was ready to kiss and make up, and then her new hubby left for a morning appointment to execute her bestie. Despite this, Serena the baby snatching rapist, was afforded a redemption arc. I was and am, horrified.

Show runners have seen fit to state that Serena and June were actually the love story all along and I cannot tell you how much it disgusts me to hear that they would actually think that a victim / abuser relationship should ever be described as such. I am deeply disturbed that the creators of this show believe it is appropriate to describe the relationship between a kidnapper, rapist, physical and psychological abuser and their victim, as a love story. To say that June is able to forgive her abuser is one thing, to say that she loves her is quite another. If Serena had been a man, a father, she would have pushed her aboard that doomed plane. As it was she was a mother and therefore untouchable so she ultimately walked away virtually unscathed. So the writers message was we could be forgiven anything, even the vilest acts against our own gender, as long as we reproduced. If they intended me to feel all supported and warm and fuzzy as a woman, they well and truly missed the mark. Women like Serena Joy are fucking traitors, because they know full well what it’s like to be a woman, to fight for every single tiny square inch of freedom, and yet they seek to seize power by crushing their fellow women beneath their heel in order to get it.

Next in line is Aunt Lydia, who sanctioned and carried out torture, rape and murder. She arranged for Janine’s eye to be ripped out and farmed women into slavery. Suddenly she was pleading ignorance over what actually happens to the handmaids in their retirement? Are you fucking kidding me? This woman was so far up Gilead’s arse there was literally nothing that demon didn’t know about what was happening to those Handmaids. Atwood’s text reveals the aunts kept secret detailed files on all of them, and having Aunt Lydia now whining about her “poor girls” after tasing them for 5 seasons is laughable. She’d chained a pregnant handmaid in the basement and informed June she’d be shot after giving birth, so all of her sudden crocodile tears about the ex handmaids being sent to Jezebels was the weakest bunch of bullshit I’d ever seen for her entire character arc. But she’s needed for The Testaments, so she had a benevolent face slapped on her at the last moment and was given a redemption arc of sorts as well. Writers also failed to explain how Aunt Lydia was going to be embedded back into Gilead society now that she’s blown her cover.

Next victim is Lawrence. Last season Lawrence shot down the rescue planes for Hannah and told Blaine that it was a free for all to use June Osborne as target practice. He’s responsible for inventing a world of slavery and death, and he kept his wife imprisoned for years, but Lawrence has a strong papa bear vibe with some punchy one liners, so he gets a redemption arc and a heroes death. It’s worth mentioning that Joseph was actually the one responsible for dragging Serena back to Gilead and NOT Blaine as the Show runners would have you believe. Blaine actually spoke up for her, asking if “it was really necessary to drag her back into this”, however this was painted as Blaine’s decision to bring Serena back……despite the fact it was Lawrence who suggested it…..and physically went and got her…..and virtually strong armed her into the car. It’s also worth noting that Lawrence was all aboard the Gilead train, chowing down on that delicious power as a newly appointed High commander, until he learned that all the other commanders (except Blaine) were gunning for him. So it’s really not like he gave a shit about Mayday out of some sense of righteous justice, he just thought it might save his own neck. The martyr’s death / self sacrificial death are the highest value character deaths and quite frankly I’m not sure he deserved that quality of death but he’s cuddly and Whitford didn’t want him to die a villain, so there you go.

Finally we come to Nick Blaine. Out of the Gilead four this season, he was definitely the one most deserving of a redemption arc, but you know clever plot twist, scapegoat required….and guess who gets fucked after 5 seasons. Nick Blaine had spent 5 seasons risking his life on almost a bi seasonal basis for the protagonist, was deeply in love with her and had connections in Mayday. But in season 6 the writers decided to transform him into nothing but a greedy, power hungry, little fascist over the course of 3 episodes, and then unceremoniously had the protagonist kill him off as some sort of true measure of her strength. The writers not only made him the villain and had him killed, but gave him a death befitting a coward. I’m not sure who thought it would be a good idea to serve up this pile of revenge to a fan favourite who’d been a benevolent companion to the protagonist for the last 5 seasons….but it hideously back fired. I foresaw this when I viewed the original trailers and I prayed that they hadn’t been so stupid as to destroy both a character and a couple that over 80% of the audience were deeply invested in with a spin off waiting in the wings….unfortunately they were and the backlash has been brutal. It was around the time that they decided to bring it all home, that I couldn’t help but notice that out of all of the Gilead four, they’d actually taken the lowest socioeconomic character and seen fit to make him the sole villain and then grind him into a fine powder. It was one thing in season 1 when they illustrated how the poor and uneducated masses could be easily targeted and recruited, it was quite another to make the statement that because he came from “nothing” he was more likely to turn to villainy. Reality is the well spring of most of the worlds evil fuckery lies deep in the hearts of those born to wealth and power. They’re used to it, they don’t like to share it, they’re terrified of losing it and they’ll do anything to get more of it. My nomination for most likely villain out of the Gilead Four was actually Serena. She's used to wealth and power and desperate to send her little spawn of Satan to a decent private school.

Meanwhile in Mayday central the folks there could do no wrong; Tuello fed civilians into the meat grinder that was Gilead’s highly trained military against Blaine’s advice, and yet remained untouched by any moral judgement from the writers. While everyone cheered as Tuello strode purposefully into the room to find Serena breathless at the sight of her little thirst trap, I ground my teeth and felt my fingernails digging into my palms. I just couldn’t help but wonder why on earth would Tuello trust Lawrence after that little incident with Hannah last season either. He’d just been burnt by Nick and his first response is to go pal up with the Architect of Gilead himself? I also didn’t understand why Tuello was skulking around in No Man’s Land in the first place. All the other diplomats were welcome in New Bethlehem, so why wasn’t he running recon or checking in with why Blaine suddenly wasn’t answering his calls? Why not set up a diplomatic embassy in New Bethlehem? Perhaps because IT WOULD HAVE MADE SENSE. This season saw Blaine give up Mayday’s plan. He’d chosen his side apparently and it wasn’t Osborne….after 5 seasons of choosing Osborne (sigh). So I couldn’t help but wonder why this hideous traitor didn’t just tell the other commanders where Mayday central was? He knew approximately where it was and yet there they were all hopping on a plane to DC to work out some intricate plan to curb the rebel operations. I mean the guy could virtually draw a map with a sign that says “bomb here” pointing to the Mayday camp and yet…..Urgh.

The character transformations have gone from zero to a hundred with nothing in between this season. Luke went from wanting to join Mayday, to planting bombs, to running around screaming with a machine gun and hand grenades. Rita went from not wanting to get involved with Mayday, to poisoning the cake with sedatives, to running screaming down the street shooting wildly. Serena got engaged and married in like a week and went from “I didn’t really think about what happened to the handmaids”, to teary eyed demanding to know the “real name” of her new one. Nick proclaimed his undying love for June, 10 seconds later they had a brutal break up, next episode he virtually skipped down the aisle with his wife singing about his new baby and renouncing the parentage of Holly, then he completely ignored the fact that the love of his life was about to be hung (can we just pause and consider how absolutely unbelievable THAT is please), said some BIZARRE shit about commanders being the winners and promptly exploded. Fuuuuuuuck. I mean it would have been hilariously ridiculous if it wasn’t just so fucking tragic to watch all that potential come to such a pointless end. Like so many things this season, this plot line doesn’t make any sense at all. I mean how were these commanders the “winners”? The rebels had just bombed their city and killed most of them, they were practically an endangered species. Somehow the audience was convinced into believing that if the Boston commanders ever made it to DC, Gilead would win and rule over the earth forever and ever. I guess that must have been where they had been keeping their secret special map room and chanting circle. I mean where is the plot? Is the plot in the room with us now? The trajectory on Blaine’s character arc comparative to other seasons, felt like the pilot had suddenly decided to fly the plane into the mountain (excuse the pun). He’d been building to something huge and both of Atwood’s texts indicated that Mayday was in his future, however it was at this point that the writers took incredible licence and deviated from the source material completely. It seemed a huge violation that Blaine’s character was altered from the version in both texts and while all the other characters were carefully manoeuvred into place, he was killed off. Granted Miller and co. had, had the freedom to fill in the blanks between season 2 - 6, various elements of the texts still acted as a guide for these characters natures, journeys and ultimate destinations and there was just no way around the fact that they’d chosen to completely ignore it. Insultingly I was asked to ignore Blaine’s death on the basis that he “had it coming”. Not only was that NOT an answer as to why such liberties were taken with the source material about his nature, depicted allegiances, and you know the fact that he was fucking ALIVE in the book, but that reasoning was also completely riddled with holes.

Throughout the seasons Blaine had been firmly established as an ally to the protagonist via a multitude of mechanisms which were now being blatantly discounted. For example; ALL of the acts of violence that the audience had been shown that were directly and voluntarily committed by Blaine were all performed AGAINST a member of Gilead to either protect the protagonist, at her request or as a form of righteous justice for her cause. Now I was being told that off screen he’d been sneaking around the protagonists back committing horrendous acts on behalf of Gilead….but we just hadn’t seen it….and didn’t know about it…..and SOMEHOW the writers couldn’t understand how that would be confusing..…or even believable. Urgh. The more I looked, the more holes appeared and the more it all just reeked of rewriting history for the sake of a plot twist and a quickly constructed political narrative. For whatever reason it was done, it was sloppy and completely contradictory to the characters original nature, both on screen and in the texts. Even if I did give these writers the benefit of the doubt and BELIEVED their spiel about this character, I’m not sure it worked in their favour to be constantly pointing out that they had neglected to fill in the audience properly on vital character elements during previous seasons.

For some reason the writers and show runners were now under the illusion that their audience had not actually been paying attention while watching the previous 5 seasons, that they had developed some sort of selective amnesia. They also deemed to give the protagonist amnesia, thus making her seem unempathetic, heartless and deeply unlikeable. Blaine had turned up for her countless times and yet was given no quarter. She had simply developed amnesia about what it was like to try and survive in Gilead after a brief stay in Canada. The writers may have intended to make her look strong and assertive, but her failure to extend any measure of compassion or even seek to dig further, made it seem as though the entire relationship had been transactional. It was as if now that Blaine had ceased to serve a purpose, he was being abandoned. This effectively destroyed any integrity to their former bond, it simply made him look like a liar and her an opportunist. I became a bit suspicious that it was not entirely unintentional that these creators were now seeking to change the very nature of this relationship in retrospect, when June attributed Serena responsibility for their relationship in the first place. It sought to completely discount the fact that these two had been circling one another prior to Serena's interference, or even that they continued their relationship despite her objections and efforts to seperate them later.

It was simply more evidence of an almost desperate attempt by the writers to erase this loving connection and replace it with something convenient and superficial. They’d forgotten that Nick and June’s love was actually an act of rebellion, forbidden, a place where both Blaine and Osborne sought freedom and autonomy. Had they remembered this, they might have understood that for a true depiction of a successful rebellion, Nick Blaine should have joined the underground and the two lovers destinies remained intimately intertwined. His true character narrative was as an Eye with connections to Mayday. June / Offred was unsure if she could trust him, but he remained a source of hope, love and quiet rebellion within Gilead. The Handmaids Tale afterword revealed that he’d risked his life to help June escape and gone on to join the resistance. Gilead had tried and failed to kill him at least once and he was later reunited with June and his daughter. The successful depiction of a rebellion that used their relationship as the intended metaphor, was one that had Blaine subvert Gilead as an Eye turned agent for Mayday. Instead his death indicated the success of Gilead to eradicate collective rebellion….by somehow encouraging rebel forces to self sabotage. It simply made no sense, particularly given the rebellions success in the area where Blaine had been stationed. It was like someone had either failed to understand the metaphor completely OR had simply been so desperate to destroy the character and the relationship, that they didn’t care if it meant tearing apart a central theme. Which was absolutely fucking insane.

Fans had followed the writers cues and had understood the underlying message of rebellion in their bond. They’d waited years for the rebellion to succeed and the symbolic narrative to reach it’s natural conclusion, by having Blaine cross the border to join June and Mayday. So when instead the writers chose to start labelling Blaine as a loyalist and gut this relationship, slaughtering this manifestation of collective rebellion, the audience was understandably angry and confused. His role as an embedded Mayday agent in The Testaments stand as evidence that this was precisely who Blaine was and not some dubious fascist all along. Atwood consulted during season 2, but it was only during season 3 that show runners decided to whack a commander suit on Blaine and start using him for statements about patriarchal power that had nothing to do with his original character construct. He was never a commander, not in The Handmaid’s Tale and not in The Testaments either…..but these writers thought they knew better than the author, so here we are. I think about the potential for this story line had it been completed correctly and I could just weep. I could write a book on why the destruction of this character and relationship was one of the dumbest fucking things I’ve ever seen a writer do to their own creation, and how this is one of the biggest violations of an authors symbolic narrative I’ve ever witnessed, but honestly I’ve got a lot to get through today.

The writers and staff scrambled to provide clarity about who Nick Blaine was all along, but what they failed to understand was that it was utterly irrelevant. If they had to tell audiences after the fact who their character actually was and what their true motivations were, then they’d failed their mission. Writers cited story elements that supposedly occurred off screen, as lore when they either should have been clearer from the beginning or just followed the established on screen character arc through without trying to get clever. Now for clarity I believe the rot started in season 5 but only truly set in in season 6.

Come season 6 Minghella would be lucky to get a few minutes of screen time in 6 episodes, and in that time they had to convince the audience that he’d been a totally different person than the one they’d been shown all along. Consider the characters nature, established relationship with the protagonist and everyone around him….over 5 seasons….now with ALL of that think about how impossible it actually is to flip that character in the space of approximately 10-15 minutes, and how insane you’d have to be to green light that shit. And yet SOMEHOW it was my fault for not believing them. Probably because I’d read the books.

Writers asked audiences to reassess characters 4 episodes from the end of a final season. That’s neither realistic or wise and they shouldn’t be surprised if people feel like they’ve been duped and cheated. The fact is that they told audiences that a character had a particular motivation for the last 5 seasons, etched it into to him like it was the very essence of his being, and suddenly they wanted audiences to believe that he was forsaking it in the last moment. That he would simply give it up at the first sign of adversity. That he’d be just kosher with not only giving it up but destroying the object of his obsession within 2 brief episodes. It’s utterly ridiculous, I don’t believe any of it and these writers shouldn’t be surprised by that. You can’t tell me that someone is deep and sensitive in one breath and then tell me they’re angling for an upper management position in a society that enslaves the vulnerable in the next….particularly if the bottom of barrel is exactly where they come from. It makes no fucking sense.

Because of his core nature as a sensitive, loving and loyal individual, the ONLY parts of Nick Blaine’s character that actually EVER made any sense were the ones attached to Mayday, those that loved June, that “would do anything for me and for Nicole”, that were trapped and tricked into signing onto Gilead, anything else just seemed in direct conflict with his personality overall. Blaine cried over a dead handmaid and refused to call June by her slave name, he had contacts in Mayday that he referred to as “friendlies”. What made the writers think I would believe an individual this sensitive and obviously invested in rebel operations, would seek a higher position in this society for ANY other reason than to subvert it? Ambitious greedy ghouls do not smuggle out letters of imprisoned handmaids and they don’t baulk over sleeping with their child brides. They just don’t give a fuck.

Right now show runners are working overtime to create a narrative in which they write off Nicks damning choices in episode 6 as the result of both full autonomy AND coercive control. If he acted with full autonomy, Blaine was a monster who knew what he was doing, sought power and subscribed to Gilead’s rhetoric of slavery. If he was acting as a result of coercive control he was frightened, abused and controlled with little to no recourse. The reason that the writers couldn’t decide which one it was, was because they wanted it to be the first, but they knew full well it was the second. Season 1 and 2 had already shown that Blaine was indeed stripped of his autonomy and yet in 5 10 Tuello claimed that he could have run away with her while he lived at the Waterfords. They were trying to alter the narrative around how much power he had possessed, but it was too late, we’d already seen the dogs, the drones, the spotlights, the checkpoints and all those guardians. We’d already seen all that terror and we weren’t about to forget.

Show runners claimed that Blaine had full autonomy on the basis that he had many chances to defect, but again there was plenty of evidence to discredit this theory. In season 2 June boarded a plane to leave and a driver attempted to sneak on board. He’s hauled off the plane and shot by Gilead guards, this heavily implied that Blaine would have died if he’d tried to accompany her. In season 3 Eleanor told June that Lawrence could never leave because he’d be imprisoned for life. In season 4 Fred was arrested at the border and jailed, when he tried to negotiate immunity he was traded back to Gilead and ended up dead. In season 5 Blaine WAS offered a deal from Tuello which he took, but it did require that he remain in Gilead indefinitely. Throughout season 6 the presence of Wharton was inserted specifically to create an environment of coercive control that restricted and monitored his movements. So no I don’t believe he had full autonomy. It also seems incredibly odd for the writers to say that Blaine has full autonomy and THEN have Serena tell June “If he ever thought he had a choice, he would have chosen you”. I mean in what alternative dimension should an audience NOT be confused by this constant mixed messaging?

I was informed through various forms of PR, that the second Blaine knew his relationship was over with Osborne he’d simply sought to lose himself in power, but this was utterly ridiculous. Blaine had been confronted with the reality of losing her many times before and he still hadn’t stuck his face in a bucket of Kool Aid. The idea that Blaine had failed to show up and do anything about June being executed because he considered their relationship over, was laughable. In season 4 he’d strong armed Lawrence into keeping her alive even though he knew she “was never coming back to him”. In season 5 he dashed across the border and signed a contract with Tuello just to ensure her safety even though “she already has people who care for her, I’m nothing”. It didn’t wash. NONE of it washed. Now I MIGHT have been able to swallow that he’d taken solace in Gilead after his relationship with Osborne completely dissolved but there was no period of mourning for the loss of a deep abiding love he’d carried with him for 5 and half seasons. No tears, no despair, nothing….Instead Blaine immediately started rambling on about Gilead like it was Sale of the fucking Century and he couldn’t get enough of those Nazi war spoils. It was utterly baffling. Mid season we all travelled deep into the Twilight Zone when Blaine made some sort of schizophrenic switch from prioritising June to an unquenchable thirst for power. It was impossible to reconcile with his previous manifestation, but somehow this all remained my fault for failing to grasp it, rather than the writers for either not communicating it in earlier seasons or an ill advised quick change.

We were also told that Blaine was a villain because of his role in the original attacks and that well, because you had to be a bad guy to be promoted to a commander. Firstly; scenes of Blaine actually participating in the original attacks were cut and are now being cited as part of the character history, and I’m not sure that works in their favour, as the original ones show him being sick and stunned at the violence anyway. It read more like someone who’d been roped into something that had quickly turned nightmarish and of which he now couldn’t escape. In season 3 Blaine said about the government “they don’t give a shit about us” and “once you get in bed with the government, it’s not so easy to get out”, not REALLY the words of an enamoured loyalist. Secondly; Blaine was promoted from a Eye to a Commander as a form of punishment from Fred for his insubordination, to have him sent to the front to die. These two singular moments should have been definitively painted to follow the writers intention from the beginning, but they weren’t and as a result his characters role in Gilead's conception and growth remained hazy at best. Again, not the audiences fault, the writers. Creators can't keep claiming they had an active loyalist on their hands all along when everything they ever showed their audience said otherwise. They can't keep claiming it in the face of the source material which completely contradicts them.

It’s pretty telling that audiences aren’t so much sad as angry about it. Writers are doubling down because well, they don’t have much choice. What’s done is done and they’re never going to take any of it back or admit any shortcomings. They’re never going to admit they sidelined and significantly altered a character from the source material. They’re never going to admit they out right IGNORED their audience and then proudly claimed to be listening to them. After analysing all of the diatribe and reasoning that the cast, writers and show runners have put forth I’ve come to a few simple conclusions about why Blaine was killed off. Firstly: Certain individuals could not tolerate the idea of a woman leaving her husband for another man, I believe this stems from a deep seated theological indoctrination that is ingrained into American society and consequently into ALL of their writing. It’s most evident in their attitudes to sex and love and these moralistic shackles severely restrict all of their plot and character development. My advice, go and learn from some of our British friends, they know how to write and their final seasons don’t look like a dogs breakfast. Secondly: He was used as a scapegoat for the rest of the Gilead four. Put simply, they had to have at least one bad guy. Thirdly: they wanted to make a political statement about young males being recruited into neo fascism in America today. They were not concerned about breaking with literary integrity, character construct or even narrative symbolism in order to achieve it. As someone who has taught analysis of media and literature, I can honestly say, they should have been concerned, because it definitely looks fucking broken and it will cost these creators.

I’m still reeling from the fact that so many gossamer threads in this vast story line which could have been pulled together beautifully, were instead clumsily tangled or just abandoned. Replaced instead with plot lines delivered with a clumsy ignorance of how the audience would actually feel. Which sick fuck thought that plane trip into the abyss should be the Casablanca ending they were referring to all along? I’d prefer to leave The Handmaid’s Tale behind me at the end of season 4. Even though some of the constructs of Blaine’s character were already incorrectly portrayed by this point, it was during season 5 that show runners decided to truly begin Blaine's slide from ambiguous ally to Gilead loyalist. One of the biggest appeals of Nick Blaine was his mystery but it seems that during these last 2 seasons show creators were intent on stripping him of it and reducing him to nothing but a 2 dimensional family man who just turned to water at the sign of a strong father figure.

Miller’s Wilderness was possibly one of the most amazing television season finales I’ve ever seen, and it just never got any better than that. It set the story line up beautifully to lead into The Testaments, and he could have simply walked straight into his spin off with a few cameos to smoothen the transition. I don’t know why those writers were so afraid of the character dynamic between Nick and June, it was extraordinary and we’ll be lucky to see one like it ever again. From the beginning there was something about these two that the audience emotionally engaged with and if the writers had been smarter they would have truly acknowledged and embraced it. Instead their relationships sudden end, and the death of Nick Blaine, will become the one thing that follows this series around, and sticks in the craw of many viewers for years to come.

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