Hannah—renamed Agnes by Gilead—leads the story of The Testaments, Atwood’s 2019 follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale (originally published in 1985) and soon-to-be sequel series on Hulu. When TV creator Bruce Miller began conceiving his adaptation in 2016, The Testaments was not yet a spark in Atwood’s mind. That meant Miller, whose series eventually went beyond the original text, had begun to conceive of his own ending before he knew there would be an addendum to the story directly from its source. For better or worse, it sounds like he and Atwood were largely on the same page about what that ending should be.
“Margaret came to me as soon as she was having the inkling [of writing The Testaments], so it was very early for me to get the information. She let me know as the creator of the world that things might be shifting a little under my feet,” Miller recently told The Hollywood Reporter. While he thought giving June and Hannah a reunion and happy ending “felt like it was tying it too much in a bow,” he was “playing with a lot of the things that [Atwood] talked about doing in The Testaments” as the ending for the show.
Moss, who directed the series finale, “didn’t have the task of writing [the ending], but I understand and I’m aware that that was the biggest challenge: The Testaments has Hannah not get out. That was definitely something we would have played with for the end of Handmaid’s; June maybe getting her out,” she also told THR. “But we had to move towards the sequel that had been written. Now, I don’t think that was a bad thing. But was it the thing that was probably most present? Yeah, I would say so.”
Miller (and Moss as producer) will get to explore Hannah’s story in The Testaments, which is currently in production. Luckily for The Handmaid’s Tale‘s team, however, Atwood’s surprise novel didn’t impact a different aspect of the ending they’d planned since the pilot. At the end of the finale, June goes back to the room in the Waterford house she initially inhabited as Offred and begins to record the voiceover we hear at the very beginning of episode one. “The click of the recording at the beginning, we put in the pilot. So we have been thinking about this particular moment since then,” Miller said. June may have a long road ahead of her, but she’s also come so far.
