This week's Season 3 finale of The Handmaid's Tale was in many ways incredibly satisfying. After episodes upon episodes of near-relentless horror, June, Rita and their fellow rebels pull off a huge win, successfully smuggling more than 100 children across the border from Gilead to Canada.
But for fans of Max Minghella's Nick (and/or his deeply complicated star-crossed romance with June), the finale may be something of a disappointment. Nick's been absent from the show since Episode 6, when he was dispatched to the front lines in Chicago, and he's again MIA throughout the finale. Where the heck is Nick? Showrunner Bruce Miller has some answers.
"When Nick’s gone, he’s truly gone for June, because it’s not like she can look on the Internet or call," Miller says of the character's absence. "It’s like he was plucked off the face of the earth, and in the novel that was such a strong feeling, that he kind of disappeared." The decision to keep Nick off-screen throughout the rest of Season 3 means the audience feels a similar sense of abrupt loss, but Miller says that wasn't originally the plan. Scenes with Minghella were filmed for the season's later episodes, but ultimately cut.
"We just don’t have the real estate in the show," he explains. “We would love to delve into more stories. We had all sorts of other stuff with Nick, and with characters like Janine and Moira. You really feel like you could have 23 hour-long episodes and every single one be interesting. In the end, we made the best we could of it. Max is a wonderful actor. He has scenes that we filmed that we weren't able to use, and it’s heartbreaking. I feel like shit when I have to cut that stuff, but sometimes you have to make those decisions when you're trying to make a good TV show overall."
Despite Nick's disappearance, he's still had a significant influence on June's mindset, thanks to her devastating discovery that he was a soldier in the Gilead crusade, and played a major and violent role in the birth of this regime. Miller says that discovery impacted June in a couple of ways: "First of all it’s like, 'God, this guy that I actually allowed myself to be intimate with and really opened myself up to is not what he appears to be.' That’s shocking up front, but at the same time, she certainly didn’t ask the questions. He didn’t necessarily lie to her, but by omission it’s still undercutting her feeling of trust." Given June’s own evolution into a soldier—and a killer—by the end of the season, Miller hints that there's a more complex side to June's reaction. "If you look at it from a slightly different direction, June is learning that even a nice guy could've done horrible things. And that gives her permission to be a nice person who does horrible things."
So, in a twisted way, maybe there is hope for June/Nick shippers? At least they have a body count in common now!
