Orwell. Huxley. Atwood. The power of dystopian fiction is felt most when it seems like a chilling reflection of reality. When you have chills running down your spine, thinking that someone, somewhere, mistook a cautionary tale for an instruction manual.

As eerie as The Handmaid’s Tale has felt since its first season in 2017, it was not the initial intention of the creative team to make a modern social commentary. They were simply adapting Margaret Atwood’s 1985 book of the same name; a story set in a future where women have lost all rights in a fundamentalist Christian republic called Gilead. To refresh, Gilead is run by wealthy men known as Commanders and armed guards called “The Eyes,” all supposedly operating on the principles of the Bible and a belief in the sovereignty of men.

The women assigned to be handmaids become prisoners in the homes of the Commanders and their wives who are unable to have children of their own. Every month, the Handmaid is subjected to a “ceremony” (i.e. rape) to have her impregnated by her Commander. If successful, she is forced to hand over the baby once born and go through the experience all over again in a new household for the remainder of her childbearing years. Those who don’t abide by Gilead “law” (be they handmaid, commander or anyone in between) face public hanging and display on “The Wall” as a reminder to all citizens of the penalty of independent thinking and rebellion.

The title Handmaid of the book and series is June Osborne (played by Elisabeth Moss), who was separated from her husband Luke (O-T Fagbenle) and daughter Hannah (Jordana Blake) when captured by soldiers while trying to flee the new Gilead regime. Assigned to the Waterford household to carry and birth a child for Commander Fred (Joseph Fiennes) and his barren wife Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski), June is driven to reunite her family, taking down Gilead in the process if need be.

Luke Bankole (O-T Fagbenle) Photo by Disney/Steve Wilkie

Anyone who has watched the series in its entirety so far is deeply invested in how it all ends for its many characters in its sixth and final season. It has not always been easy for the devoted viewers who have witnessed an often-shocking unfolding of events, and the inherent realism has made the stakes feel high.

Eric Tuchman and Yahlin Chang took over as showrunners for this final season as creator Bruce Miller moved to sequel series The Testaments, and both assured us that the journey has been worth it. They spoke with Creative Screenwriting Magazine about concluding this controversial and riveting series to a logical and satisfying crescendo.

[More: Showrunner Bruce Miller Discusses ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’]

This is a show that has seemed timely since it first aired in 2017 – now, even more so. What has it been like to write this type of content in the context of current politics and society?

Eric: I’ve been on the show since the beginning, and we opened the writers’ room in early 2016. It was before that year’s campaign and Federal election took place. Honestly, we were just focused on doing a really great adaptation of the book at that time. We weren’t so aware of how much what we were doing would resonate and would parallel things that were happening in the real world. It wasn’t until we were in production, when the scripts had already mostly been written, that the election happened. Then it was an opportune circumstance for the show because it drew more attention to it – but not necessarily a great thing for all of us living in the country at the time.

Yahlin Chang

Yahlin: For this last season, we put together our writers’ room in January 2023, but then it was delayed because of the WGA strike for five months. Then we came back for a month or two with the writers. It was really just me and Eric writing through 2024 and we started shooting in September that year. We had written the scripts, but it was almost similar to the timing of Season 1 where, while we were shooting, the show unfortunately became more and more relevant.

It’s fiction that we make up, and we imagine the worst-case scenarios about what could happen when you strip people of all their rights… when you strip women of all their reproductive rights. The real world seemed to get closer and closer to our show rather than us trying to channel the real world. We’re just imagining these worst-case scenarios with an authoritarian regime in America, and then things happen in the world that make the show seem more real than we ever imagined or wanted it to be.

Having been with the show for years, what was it like to step into the role of showrunners for the final season?

Eric: Kira Snyder had really been running the writers’ room for several seasons and making a lot of the creative decisions – with Bruce Miller’s blessing, of course. I think the main difference this year, when Bruce was focused on the sequel, is that Yahlin and I had all the responsibility for post-production. Editing the show, promoting it, doing interviews… but it felt like a very natural progression for us to step into that role once Bruce moved on to The Testaments. We were able to streamline decisions this year because we had the decision-making ability. It was exciting for me to work hand-in-hand with Yahlin, who I’d worked closely with for so many seasons and have so much respect for. It was really just wonderful collaboration for the two of us.

[More: Kira Snyder On ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’]

Yahlin: I’ve been thinking, “How can I ever run a show without Eric?” It’s been a really wonderful collaboration and helpful to be able to make decisions without having to run them by anyone. Both Eric and I came into the final season wanting to make two creative departures from previous seasons. One was to give all of our secondary characters more of a complete arc. We don’t do justice by those amazing actors and their characters’ stories. The second thing is informed by this being the last season – we really picked up the storytelling. There’s more plot, in terms of more things happening faster than in previous seasons.

How did going into a final season, as opposed to a next season, affect the writers’ room?

Eric: Since it is the last season, we had a limited number of episodes to tell a lot of story. We knew we had a lot of ground to cover and, like Yahlin said, we wanted to make sure the entire ensemble of characters was fully engaged in the story, that they played essential roles and had individual journeys. When we first got together as a room, we knew what we were heading for. We had promised and teased rebellion for so long that we knew that this was the “now or never”, “do or die” time for revolution. That was our beacon. We knew where we were going and it was just a matter of putting the puzzle together, all the right pieces… and we had a lot of pieces this season, so it was a very careful, considerate construction.

Eric Tuchman

What were some of those bigger moments that you needed to tie up?

Yahlin: Revolution and rebellion is the big one, and we wanted to come up with a great story for June, Luke, and Moira (Samira Wiley) to get there. We wanted them to be fully engaged with Mayday. We wanted to tell a great story for Serena. We knew that we had the ability to kill some characters that we would have been more hesitant to kill in previous seasons, because we would have still wanted to keep playing with those characters and those actors… but now that this is the final season, there were some who could die interesting deaths.

Eric: Broadly, this is the season where the characters reveal who they really are, and we knew that. For instance, there’s this love triangle that people talk about between June, Luke and Nick (Max Minghella); we wanted June to really reckon with her choices, the decisions that she’s made and how they’ve impacted people. They should be at a crossroads where they have a decision to make, one that is very telling about who they are at their core – and that really carried through for every character. We knew we would take Serena on a journey, and the same with Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd). The decisions they are faced with really show just how far their characters have grown in the course of this series.

Yahlin: I feel that, because of the slow-burn storytelling of the previous seasons, those evolutions of characters like Aunt Lydia, Serena, and Commander Lawrence (Bradley Whitford) are really well-earned transformations. I think it’s a mistake we see a lot in TV and movies where someone transforms really quickly because they only have two hours to do it. That’s what has been so great about having six seasons – you see these characters take two steps forward and one step back. Like real life, like real human beings, they evolve and they change, but then they go back. Serena, for example, has been through this process of reforming and evolving, but she still has an ego. She still is narcissistic. She still has huge ambitions. She still wants to change the world and thinks that she’s the one who has to do it, and she has that arrogance and hubris. With the revolution, too, I think that it would have been very tempting to tell that story in Season 2, but a reason the show feels so real is because we have taken our time with it.