Hold Onto Your Hat — The Handmaid's Tale Finale Is Not Going To Be Pretty

Hulu's cautionary drama The Handmaid's Tale has never really been a rollicking good time. It's about women that have been reduced to their natural value — whether or not they can produce babies. But for all its narrative ambition, the show is a bit of a slow-burner. The characters speak slowly and deliberately, and the events occur with a calm inevitability. According to showrunner Bruce Miller, though, the season finale will be a bit different.

"The finale might as well be a season of the show in and of itself," Miller told Entertainment Weekly. Much of the show is spent in the relative quiet of Gilead, a newly born theocratic country founded on the belief that fertility matters above all else. The concept is violent, but much of the day-to-day is not. "What we try to do in the finale is make sure we don’t lose that perspective of how terrifying that world is," Miller added. "It looks so pretty and seems so nice and everybody’s so relatively quiet, you can almost ignore the machine guns."

Part of the reason the finale, which will be available for streaming at midnight, is so expansive, is because the show is anticipating its second season.

"We are realizing that especially as we move into season 2, that there’s lots more to explore, and at the end of season 1, short of finding new and interesting areas to go, there’s so many things that have happened during the season that have been unresolved," Miller explained.

As for the second season, Miller claimed that the writers haven't even started planning. He admitted, "I think we have way too much stuff that we want to do." But he added for good measure: "Season 2 will be exploring lots more to the world of Gilead."

As for that epic, action-packed finale, it doesn't sound like it will be anything short of horrific. Or, in the showrunner's words, "One of the themes of this final episode is, What happens when the terrible thing you’ve been dreading finally happens?"

As if the events of the show haven't been terrible enough. There's been female circumcision, death by suicide, and non consensual sex. What could possibly be next? We find out at midnight.