You almost forget that Elisabeth Moss can smile. The lead actor on Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” now in its sixth and final season, spent much of her screen time contorting her face in distress as she played June Osborne—one of a class of “handmaids” who are imprisoned, ritually raped, and forced to bear children in the show’s world, in which America has been taken over by a dystopian theocratic regime called Gilead. Moss’s eyebrows raised in terrified pleading as she begged various Gilead functionaries for their mercy, their secrecy, or their help as she sought to escape. Her mouth twisted in horror and rage as she was subjected to the order’s inventive and brutally violent punishments, which the series depicted in gruesome scenes of women suffering amputation, eye gouging, singeing, shackling, whipping, genital mutilation, drowning, hanging, and being thrown off of roofs. Her jaw trembled in shocked exhaustion as she watched her comrades captured, tortured, and killed.

As the series progressed, with June eventually escaping Gilead and becoming a rebel leader seeking to take down the regime, Moss increasingly wore expressions of furious resolve: an unlined brow; hard, level eyes; a stiff jaw. “The Handmaid’s Tale” has been on the air since 2017, and Moss’s persona sometimes seems to have fused with her character’s. When the actress chats politely to an interviewer or bends toward an outstretched microphone on a red carpet, it is almost uncanny to see her happy and at ease after playing a woman in extremity over so many years.

If Moss seems out of place outside “The Handmaid’s Tale,” it may be because the show, for better or worse, has come to stand in for an era. The series benefitted from uncommonly apt timing: its initial season premièred just five months after Donald Trump’s first election and promptly became a hit, representing onscreen what liberal Americans, and particularly liberal women, feared from a Trumpist future. Women began appearing at anti-Trump protests wearing costumes inspired by the show—the handmaids’ long red cloaks and snow-white broad-brimmed bonnets serving as symbols of their political discontent. The ten-episode first season quickly ran through the source material, a 1985 novel by the Canadian author Margaret Atwood, but the series was renewed again and again.

Almost a decade after its première, “Handmaid’s” retains its signature violence but has thoroughly exhausted its narrative premises. The characters repeatedly make choices that do not align with their values or motivations, and return to relationships—and locations—that have long since spent all their potential. As it has since Season 1, much of the plot relies on June’s magnetic attraction to Nick, a Gilead driver turned Commander played by a charmless Max Minghella, a reticent and opaque character who does not seem capable of inspiring all the self-destructive devotedness that the story requires him to. The writing, now far from the original book, is marked by the familiar late-season laziness of TV writers phoning it in. (One particularly grating bit of dialogue, appearing as two characters discussing the aftermath of a massacre, devolves into them debating whether there is anyone hotter than Rihanna.)

The biggest problem for the writers is finding reasons to keep Moss’s character in Gilead. In the early seasons, June repeatedly refuses to leave the country when given opportunities to do so; after she finally does flee to Canada, in Season 4, the writers have to keep inventing new ways to bring her back. As the sixth season opens, rising anti-refugee and pro-Gilead sentiment in June’s adopted home of Toronto has forced her to go west with Nichole, her toddler daughter whom she gave birth to in Season 2, to an American refugee camp in Alaska. (In the series, Alaska and Hawaii are the only two states of the former U.S. that have not been overtaken by Gilead; the flag flies two tiny stars.) A pretext is quickly introduced to bring June back to Gilead: she discovers that her best friend, the former handmaid Moira (Samira Wiley), and her husband, Luke (the English actor O-T Fagbenle, approaching the show’s dismal material with more seriousness than it deserves), are planning to lead a rebel operation within Gilead territory. Scared for their safety, June sets out to stop them. Inevitably, she winds up joining their effort instead. Soon, June finds herself back in Gilead, and back in her now infamous red robe.

Writing in the Reagan years, Atwood imagined an authoritarianism of the repressive Christian variety. The sexual politics of our era’s conservatives are more prurient and boorish: the misogynists of Gilead say “Blessed be the fruit”; ours say “Grab ’em by the pussy.” Still, the sadism of the show’s fictional world finds ample comparisons in our own. In an interview with the Washington Post, Yahlin Chang, a current showrunner of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” spoke of consulting psychologists and the U.N. for a scene in the second season, in which June is allowed a clandestine ten-minute visit with Hannah, her kidnapped daughter. “A week after it aired,” the Post wrote, “Trump announced his policy of separating families at the border.”

You might expect “Handmaid’s” to have grown more confident, even strident, as its creators’ vision was vindicated. But that is not the show that Hulu made. If anything, each successive season has become limper, less assured, and the show’s treatment of its themes—particularly its primary subject, motherhood—more conflicted. Almost as if apologizing for its depictions of forced pregnancy and childbirth, “Handmaid’s” continually insists on the maternal feelings of its characters. After her escape, June’s professed motive for returning to Gilead again and again, at great personal risk, is an all-consuming desire to be reunited with her stolen daughter, Hannah. Janine, a troubled handmaid, is driven to madness for several seasons by her love for the baby girl she gives birth to while enslaved—but her return to sanity, too, is driven by her love for her child. Maternal love makes women capable of anything, and any action, however violent, can be justified by its moral power. Even the show’s least compassionate characters benefit from this vision of maternity. In flashbacks to the pre-Gilead era, Serena Joy Waterford (played by the excellent Yvonne Strahovski), before she became June’s mistress, is a conservative public intellectual in the style of Phyllis Schlafly, and her ambition is taken as evidence of her narcissism and emotional emptiness. But the show becomes almost tenderly sympathetic to her after she gives birth to a son.

In earlier seasons, Serena, an architect of the political movement that brought Gilead to life, was central to June’s experiences of “the ceremony,” a monthly rape by Commanders of the handmaids during the women’s fertile periods, during which wives hold the handmaids down. In later seasons, the show makes a determined effort to humanize Serena: she is unhappy, the screenwriters suggest, her ambition stifled and her loneliness mounting. In the second season, Serena calls on Gilead to allow girls to learn to read, after which the Commanders cut off one of her fingers. By the sixth season, she has found herself in Canada, and she and June are—incredibly—something like friends: all of June’s rapes by the Commanders, which Serena was a party to, seem to recede in June’s mind. Instead, the show emphasizes the importance of Serena’s redemption. It’s a fantasy of feminism’s ultimate moral power, a dream that the wrongness of misogyny will inevitably make itself evident to all women—even women who have become misogyny’s most devoted partisans. The show pursues this dream to the point of absurdity, holding out hope for Serena’s absolution long past the point when a reasonable observer would have abandoned it.

This fantasy of reconciliation is especially potent in the series’ later seasons, written and released in the wake of #MeToo. In Season 4, after June escapes to Canada, she manages to lure her old master and rapist, the Gilead commander Fred Waterford, into a forest, where she and a group of other former handmaids beat him to death. In the aftermath, as June grapples with disgust and despair at her own capacity for violence, the show becomes a parable about the moral emptiness of revenge. (In this respect, it seems to be following the lead of Atwood, a vocal critic of #MeToo, who has condemned what she sees as its excess of vengefulness.)

In its early seasons, “The Handmaid’s Tale” was criticized for what some saw as its self-indulgent scaremongering. The show, its detractors sneered, was trauma porn for middle-class women who wanted to see themselves as victims of the Trump age. (Some of these critiques were justified: in a country with a very real history of systemic rape and forced childbearing among enslaved Black women, it is conspicuous that the show’s main victims of forced reproduction are largely white.) As the Trump years wore on, the show, and the women who saw themselves in it, came to be associated with the Resistance era’s embarrassing earnestness: it was excessively self-serious, insufficiently self-aware, and wildly overwrought.

When you watch the show now, with the clarity of distance, what’s most striking is not its hysteria but its lack of conviction. Many of the features of its world that were once branded as alarmist now seem like sober realism. Democracy really has eroded under Donald Trump. (A flashback from the second season, in 2018, that shows June and Luke watching news coverage of an attack on the Capitol building uncannily evokes January 6th.) Roe v. Wade really was overturned. An explicit, sadistic misogyny really did return to cultural prominence, exemplified by a Vice-President who once decried “childless cat ladies” and by the explosive popularity of influencers such as Andrew Tate, who seem to celebrate rape as an expression of male dominance.

But, rather than grappling with these events, the show takes a view of femininity that differs from Gilead’s more in style than in substance. It cheers for its protagonists when they act on behalf of their children, or their men, or the principle of forgiveness. It distrusts them when they act on behalf of themselves. In its simultaneous embrace of the righteousness of women’s feminist aspirations and its distaste for what would be required to fulfill them, “Handmaid’s” may be understood as a product of liberal feminism’s post-#MeToo decline: the show, like the movement, is weak and lacking in energy, unable to update its assumptions to present circumstances, and almost cripplingly afraid of giving offense.

In the early days of Trump’s second term, a spate of articles and commentary noted the absence of a large-scale protest movement, the fading of the anti-Trump forces from view. What happened to the Resistance? “The Handmaid’s Tale” offers a clue: its proponents were stymied by attacks from allies, unable to grapple with the strength and virulence of their enemy, and ultimately became too tame, too conciliatory, too afraid to be unpopular, and too alienated from the movement’s radical roots. The protesters who remain are unable to launch a serious effort to defeat Trumpism, because, like the series, they no longer quite know what they believe in.

Early in the sixth season, when June reaches the refugee camp in Alaska, she makes a shocking discovery: her mother, Holly, long presumed dead, is there, alive. Holly (Cherry Jones), a former abortion provider, was in earlier seasons a stand-in for the kind of strident, self-serious feminism that many viewers saw in the show itself. (In one flashback to their pre-Gilead days, June and Luke privately complain that Holly wants them all to go to a vegan restaurant.) Now, in Alaska, she and June eye each other warily, trying to decode what the other had to do to escape and survive. Can they love each other after what they’ve been forced to become? The scene is one of the season’s strongest, but Holly is soon written out: she takes the baby Nichole and watches her in Alaska, leaving June free to return to Gilead. It’s a prerogative of melodrama to revive dead characters this way. But Holly, the grizzled representative of the second wave, does not have much to say besides “I told you so.” ♦