In the series finale of The Handmaid’s Tale, June takes a long walk. It leads her to places real and imagined, past and present, here and gone. Mostly alone, she walks the vacant streets of Boston, USA, in the moments after its liberation from Gilead occupation. She walks by her excruciatingly well-preserved memories of early motherhood and past the echoes of always-too-short assignations with her now-dead lover. She imagines belting out karaoke numbers with the women she survived hell alongside — Rita, Moira, Emily, Brianna, Janine, and Alma — in a Boston that never existed.

Finally, in the end, June walks herself to the burnt-out husk of a small bedroom that she once called hers — a room that changed the course of her life. June sits on a window seat and forces herself to remember it all from what now feels to her like her own beginning.

The Handmaid’s Tale is adept at making June suffer. We’re accustomed to her fighting and screaming and crying and begging and scheming. Last week, in “Execution,” we watched her flail against the sky, her hands clawing at the noose tightening around her neck. Were the show’s writers ever tempted to just let her hang — to take six seasons of June’s life of suffering to its terrible, logical extreme? To some, death may seem the fitting end. It’s easier for me to imagine dauntless June dead than it is for me to imagine her taking Holly to swim class. A series finale in which various characters memorialize June almost writes itself. Perhaps her mother would share an anecdote about June’s childhood stubbornness, which, looking back, appears to augur every stupidly heroic thing that followed. All would vow that June Osborne won’t die in vain.

Luckily, the series takes a more ambitious, if far quieter, road out of Gilead. There was no call for a supersize finale, because the season that preceded it was so exquisitely paced and desperately tragic. Suggestively titled “The Handmaid’s Tale,” this week’s episode is the first of the series to be set entirely in America — a context that permits June the space to breathe and consider. What does her mind return to when it’s not consumed by the demands of surviving? June remembers holding Hannah’s hand, the two of them bathed in rainbow carnival lights. When she finds Hannah near the carousel after briefly losing track of her, she holds her daughter close and whispers, “Mommies always come back.” It’s the same refrain June whispered in baby Noah’s ear earlier this season — a code she believed in before she ever read “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum” etched inside a closet.

In voice-over, June tells us that Boston falls (which is to say, rises) 19 days after Mayday’s attack — that the fighting was over before the Marines ever landed in Southie. More than once, the episode insists on this kind of geographic specificity; later, we’ll see June share the frame with the Boston Globe building’s gigantic name sign. But the snow-dusted streets she spends the hour walking feel anodyne. All traces of the city’s identity were scrubbed away by the Gilead overlords, just like they would have been in New York and Ohio and Kansas — more places that June tells us are now America again.

The others — Moira, Rita, and Luke, especially — are able to find joy in repelling Gilead from Boston. There’s bonfires and celebrations. There’s flag-burning, and, more darkly, the stringing up of deposed Guardians. Luke, desperate to avoid coming down from his revolutionary high, devotes himself to the next item on his punch list — “reccy-ing” Mayday’s New York HQ. I know we’re not supposed to underestimate Mister June Osborne anymore, but I can’t help it that he seems so adorably pumped to use military slang IRL.

When June stares into the flames of the burning Gilead flags, though, she sees only the futures that she’s lost. Her memories of Hannah are stuck in time — her little girl forever small enough and light enough to toss into the sky. June remembers Nick — a man so determined to survive he ended up dying for a cause he never believed in. Her alienation from her comrades has narrative advantages. In the space of an hour, June pinballs between almost everyone she cares about, with two notable exceptions: Hannah, who we learn is moving to D.C. for her father’s hasty promotion up the depleted Commander ranks, and Moira, whom the episode unceremoniously sidelines.

Her run-ins lead June to crystallize her plans for the future. First, she belatedly learns that U.S. Commander Mark Tuello — an unfortunate titular coincidence — is the father of a son who lives in the safe cradle of Hawai’i. He considers the work that he is doing to resuscitate America work that he is doing on his kid’s behalf. This is how you father a son from the far side of the world.

It’s Mark that gives June the backstage pass that lets her freely walk around Boston, now under a different military’s control. She’s passing an empty storefront in her old neighborhood when, confusingly, she sees Emily. Yes, Emily Emily. June’s first walking partner from when she became Fred and Serena’s Handmaid, back when women were compelled to walk this city two-by-two. That they run into each other in front of the shut-down ice cream parlor where, in season one, Emily told June the salted caramel was better than sex threw me for a hot second. Is this a ghost? A hallucination? Can we expect an undead visit from Nick or Joseph? But no, it’s real-life Emily, who has been working under the guise of a Martha in Connecticut since she left her wife and son in Canada to rejoin Mayday after season four. The “pious little shit” tells June that, like Mark, she’s been fighting the fight for her family from a distance.

Emily’s role here — other than providing a thrill for Emily stans, if that’s a thing — is to nudge forward the debate about good parenting in the time of authoritarianism. Are there conditions under which child abandonment is morally justified? Can it ever be morally imperative? These encounters are provocative but ultimately ask little of June. I was much more compelled by the conversations that stopped and started, the good-byes that June couldn’t exhale in a single breath. Perhaps the trickiest question “The Handmaid’s Tale” had to answer was what to do about Serena. Her having helped orchestrate the overthrow of the American government, it seems wrong to let her chill here with America’s makeshift army; in Gilead, she’s likely to be executed; and despite all the New Bethlehem goodwill tours she gave, no foreign country’s stepping up to issue her a passport. Mark arranges for mother and son to be moved to a U.N. refugee camp and assures Serena that he’ll make sure they’re safe — a promise I’m concerned he makes with a romantic twinkle in his eye. Their interactions always leave me queasy.

Besides Noah (and, apparently, Mark), June might be the only person left who cares what happens to Serena Joy. And Serena cares for June, too — enough to be the first to acknowledge that she’s in mourning over Nick. Perhaps these women can never be friends, but even with this terrifyingly uncertain life ahead of her, Serena manages to be compassionate and attentive and insightful — a person who, in a very different world, could have been worthy of June’s friendship.

Serena should be grateful to be leaving Gilead as a refugee and not a war criminal; instead, she worries aloud that she’s “nothing” at all now. “You’re his mother,” June assures her warmly. “Just be that.” Later, we’ll see Serena comfort Noah in a communal camp bedroom and whisper against his skin that he’s all she ever wanted. It’s hard to buy the truth of that sentence given how much Serena’s tried to control over the last six seasons of television, but maybe — like June’s promise that mommies always come back — it’s less a statement of fact than of purpose. If Serena can remember that it was her dream of motherhood that kick-started her political crusading, then maybe she can find solace in the fact that she’s a mother now, despite her world crumbling down all around her.

But before Serena and Noah board a bus to a temporary settlement where she’ll immediately be told that she should expect to be moved again tomorrow, Serena takes one last shot at apologizing to June, emphasizing how ashamed and sorry she feels. Finally, June makes the decision to forgive her. Maybe it’s because forgiveness is a process that June has finally made it to the end of. Maybe because it’s easier to forgive the past when you feel some optimism about the future. In America, you can begin to let go.

Janine and Lydia escaped the gallows in “Execution,” too, only to be rearrested by the Eyes, it turns out. We learn that Lydia has since been released back to her post at the Red Center, which seems impossible, yet — as readers of The Testaments know — inevitable. I’ve never cared about the problem of so-called “plot armor” protecting June; she’s the protagonist, so for the show to keep going and be compelling, she’s going to have to survive some close scrapes. But in this case, it does feel like it’s armor from another series’ plot that’s standing between Lydia, a woman with no allies and zero admirers, and the Wall.

At least she’s available to help Mark get Janine safely back to America. I trusted the series to save Janine, but I did not anticipate that Naomi Lawrence would turn up to the border exchange with Charlotte. And I needed it. I needed a mother to see her girl again. I needed someone to get June’s happy ending. “I want you to be safe,” Naomi tells the girl she’s raised from birth before letting her run to Janine. Do I believe Charlotte would be so immediately comfortable in her biological mother’s arms after years of absence? No, not really. Did I cry tears of joy and relief to see Charlotte so comfortable in her mother’s arms after years of absence? Only both times I watched it.

Then I cried again to see Holly restored to June’s arms, and then again to see that same maternal devotion mirrored between June and her own mother. Both baby and grandma Holly were able to board domestic flights between Alaska and Logan Airport thanks to Luke’s efforts to get the power grid up and running. But they’ve only been together a few hours, it seems, when June tells her youngest daughter that soon they’ll be apart again. June has walked herself to the conclusion that it’s her job to keep all the little girls of Gilead safe, which means that when the episode ends, Holly is going back into the care of her grandmother and June will be heading for the fray. I hate it, but what else is there? Is June going to join the PTA while Hannah, thousands of miles away, completes her training to become a Wife? Like Mark and Emily, she makes the decision to abandon her child to save the world for her children. It’s the same decision she’s made before, but it hits different in America, because in America, fighting is optional.

Motherhood is a form of armor on The Handmaid’s Tale; it makes you brave and certain and unrelenting. “Not fighting is what got us Gilead,” June tells her mother, who questions why it always has to be her daughter — the little girl she used to toss into the sky — signing up to destroy the machine. Holly vows to tell June’s baby her remarkable story every single day, but then suggests that it’s June’s job to tell it. June needs to write it all down for her daughters, and for the mothers who will never see their daughters again. For the children who may grow up in Gilead wondering if their real parents ever fought for them. The truth is that, in Gilead, most mommies do not come back. But maybe there can be comfort for everyone in knowing how hard the mommies tried.

Holly’s suggestion that June write a memoir felt a bit labored to me, given we’ve hardly ever seen June read or write or divulge. And it felt clumsy to hear Luke repeat the recommendation so soon after, especially inside the same conversation that sees the longtime couple polish off the most credibly amicable breakup I’ve seen on television — more natural and affecting than the many times we’ve watched them recommit themselves to their tattered marriage. June and Luke don’t end “The Handmaid’s Tale” together, but both are confident that the world will arc them toward Hannah. The suggestion of a meet-up one day in D.C. is met with a round of “fuck yeah”s. In America, you can part on your own terms. Good-bye doesn’t have to break you.

So June keeps walking past it. The route she chooses doesn’t lead to her childhood home or her apartment with Luke, but to the Waterfords’ house. It takes her to ceremony nights, stolen hours with Nick over the garage, and “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.” June’s life ended when she lost Hannah, and then it started again, right here, in Gilead. How do you hold out your hand and touch your daughter from this impossible distance? June pulls out a recorder and starts listing the contents of the room as she found it on the day she became Offred. It’s a bookend to the series premiere, when June sat in this same window wearing Offred’s red cloak and listed the same chair, table, lamp, window, and white curtains and shatterproof glass. If you go back and watch the series premiere, you can even hear the recorder’s telltale click.

But I don’t recommend letting the recursive bread crumbs lure you back. To watch that scene once more, I first had to watch June lose Hannah again, and it was so much scarier and more agonizing than I remembered. I prefer to picture mother and daughter as June does throughout “The Handmaid’s Tale” — smiling with their faces pressed up against the cool aquarium glass, the deep-blue water behind them dreamy and peaceful. I prefer to picture June as she sits on this bench now with the bedroom around her half-demolished, knowing that her red cloak is feeding a victory bonfire downtown. I’m going to let The Handmaid’s Tale end for me as the episode does: with one last inscrutable stare from a woman who survived hell only to realize hell is where she belongs. Because hell is where her daughter lives, and mommies always come back.