The Handmaid's Tale is over after 6 seasons, but our obsession with dystopian TV will go on

If there's one thing you can expect from a dystopian series like The Handmaid's Tale it's that it won't wrap up neatly with a pretty bow. 

The show, based on Canadian author Margaret Atwood's acclaimed 1985 novel and shot largely in and around Toronto, has come to an end. The final episode dropped on the streaming service Crave in Canada early Tuesday morning.

Don't worry. CBC News won't be revealing any significant spoilers. 

For six seasons, June Osborne (played by Elisabeth Moss) guided us on a disturbing and often brutal journey inside Gilead — a society built on gender oppression under a totalitarian, theocratic regime that took over much of the United States and forced fertile women to become "handmaids" in a life of servitude, abuse and rape as a means of countering declining births.  

But it's as much a story about Osborne's resistance as it is about the downfall of society. 

While The Handmaid's Tale has wrapped, there's no shortage of TV shows with dystopian themes. Their popularity has only grown in recent years amid fears about the state of democracy, wars, a global pandemic and financial crises. Experts and critics who follow the genre say these shows can help us make sense of political or societal upheaval and cultural change. 

"It's a way that we begin to kind of work out our fears as a collective," said Shana MacDonald, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo. "We get to talk about it at the water cooler."

Without giving too much away, the final episodes centre on a rebellion led by Osborne, an army of handmaids and a resistance known as Mayday, aimed at toppling Gilead and its oppressive commanders. 

For Osborne, it's an act of vengeance but also another step in her unrelenting quest to reunite with her daughter, Hannah, who was taken from her in the very first episode and eventually sent to live as the adopted child of another Gilead commander. 

The show was set in a fictitious world in a not-so-distant future, but MacDonald says one of the reasons it was so relatable was that it was on the "edges of possible." 

Atwood, who wrote the book more than 30 years before the series debuted in 2017, has said that one of her inspirations for the story was the political climate of the 1980s and the rise of the religious right in the U.S. 

"People, even back then, were saying what they would like to do, should they ever have a chance to take power. Now that faction is in power in the United States," she said in 2017, referring to U.S. President Donald Trump, who had taken office just months before the series premiered.

MacDonald sees similar parallels between what plays out in Gilead and what has happened in the U.S.

She points to the repealing of women's reproductive rights under Trump and the rise of pronatalism — a movement to encourage or incentivize people to have more babies for the sake of society.