When a TV show captures the public imagination of a distant future like The Handmaid’s Tale did, the way it wraps up its most talked-about characters can leave fans buzzing for years. The much-loved series based on Margaret Atwood’s award-winning dystopian novel ended its six-season run in May 2025, and the fans saw Elizabeth Moss’s character, June, witnessing the future of Gilead going up in ashes, but in the most tragic way possible. Season 6 of The Handmaid’s Tale was unforgettable for so many reasons, but above all, there is one that has touched the fans’ nerves.

While showrunners had hinted that there would be some big, unexpected revelations and a shocking turn of events in the final season, no one expected them to kill Nick Blaine. In Season 6, Episode 9, fans saw Nick, alongside Commander Lawrence, perishing in a fiery plane crash. It hit a lot of viewers and fans of Max Mighella hard. Since then, many fans have been debating and arguing whether the finale was a fitting end for Gilead’s ultimate enigma. Or was it a tragic example of bad writing? Nick was a very complex character; his entire journey was a tightrope walk over a pit of moral questions, and his final moments forced everyone to ask, one last time: Who exactly was Nick Blaine, and did he get the ending he deserved?

Nick’s Endgame in The Handmaid’s Tale’s Final Season Is Dividing Fans

For six seasons of The Handmaid’s Tale, Nick Blaine was the quiet man in the background who often turned out to be right at the center of June Osborne’s dangerous world. Fans first met him as Commander Waterford’s driver, a man of few words, whose illicit affair with June gave her a sliver of humanity and a baby, Nichole, in the oppressive horror of early Gilead. In retrospect, it’s fair to say that Nick kept June alive by making sure again and again that she survived. However, Nick was never just the romantic interest, passing through June’s life here and now.

Nick was an Eye, Gilead’s secret police officer, then a Commander, always moving in and out of the regime’s power structures. His progress towards power was never explained, but it was always a point of commendation as there must be something about him or something he hid that he was able to reach that position. This constant shifting made him both a vital ally to June at times and a deeply frustrating puzzle to fans. All throughout the show, it was never quite clear where his true loyalties lay, or if “loyalty” even meant the same thing to him as it did to others.

The show’s final season pushed these ambiguities to their limit. In the run-up to the series’ climax, Mayday, the underground resistance hatched a desperate plan: eliminate a group of Gilead’s most hardline commanders by bombing their plane en route to D.C. Commander Lawrence (Bradley Whitford), in a surprising act of self-sacrifice for the greater good, agreed to board the doomed flight. Then came the moment that had many fans yelling at their screens.

Nick’s wife, Rose, still recovering from a complication in the pregnancy, apparently created by the cake she ate at Serena’s wedding, which was mixed with sedatives, pleaded with him: “You need to show your allegiance to Gilead and God and me and our son. You need to end her [June].” Just as Lawrence finishes his heroic walk, Nick appears on the tarmac and takes his place on that same plane, looking every bit like the “true Gilead commander,” unaware of the bomb ticking away. June could only watch in stunned horror as the aircraft, carrying two men who had, in very different and complicated ways, been lifelines for her, exploded in the sky.

This sudden, violent end for a character who had survived so much by navigating shades of gray understandably divided the audience. As online forums and discussions showed, many viewers felt it was a betrayal of his character. “His arc was perfectly set up at the end of s5 to join the resistance,” one common argument pointed to his recent defiance of Gilead to protect June and his tentative alliance with Mark Tuello. “Then all of a sudden they decided to trash it all.”

For these fans, the Nick who boarded that plane didn’t feel like the same man who had risked so much for June and Nichole. Others, however, might argue that this ending, however harsh, was true to Nick’s lifelong pattern of ambiguous choices and perhaps a final, fatal miscalculation in a high-stakes game. Even Max Minghella, who played Nick, has said in other contexts that he enjoys the show when it leans into these unexpected and emotional endings. During an interview with ELLE magazine, he said:

Nick’s Complexities as a Survivor and Compromiser in Gilead

To really understand why Nick’s ending hit so many different nerves, it’s important to look at who he was throughout the series. He was never the straightforward good guy, nor was he purely a villain. Nick was the ultimate survivor, a man who made one difficult, morally murky choice after another to stay alive and, sometimes, to protect the very few people he seemed to care about in Gilead’s brutal landscape. Some interpretations, often voiced by fans, see him as fundamentally self-interest-driven. In fact, Nick has never made clear comments on whether he ever did or did not support Gilead’s ideology, which included state-sanctioned rape, brutal punishments and a rigid patriarchal ideology. However, Nick had admitted he “was nobody before Gilead” and he chose power, over and over again.

In America, Nick was a regular man who never went to college, had no higher education, was abandoned by his mother and possibly had an abusive relationship with his father. In Gilead, he had security, money, shelter, position and power. From this angle, helping June wasn’t necessarily about fighting Gilead’s ideology, but more about his personal connection to her and Nichole, fitting those acts of assistance into his broader strategy of navigating and advancing within the regime. His earlier refusal of Tuello’s offers to get him out of Gilead safely certainly supports this idea – he chose to remain, to play the game. And when the time came to prove his loyalty, he broke June’s trust by exposing Mayday’s plan to take over Gilead.

However, there’s another, equally strong way to see Nick: as a man trapped by circumstance, a victim of the system just like so many others, albeit one who had to make dirtier compromises to survive. It’s like getting caught up in a gang you can’t get out of. Once he was an Eye, then a Commander; what were his real options for escape, especially if he wanted to offer any kind of protection, however limited, to June or his child? The show often hammered home the idea that it was repeatedly said in the show that he didn’t have a choice. His loyalty to June, then, becomes his primary driving force, pushing him into increasingly dangerous situations where every choice is a gamble.

Nick’s actions could be read as desperate attempts to carve out a small space of safety for those he loved within a world designed to crush such loyalties. So, was his final decision to board that plane a last, misguided attempt to secure his new family’s position by showing allegiance? Or was it simply the tragic end for a man who had run out of moves in a game he was always destined to lose? The show leaves these questions open, making his character a continuous source of debate.

Fans of The Book Feel Nick’s TV Ending Was a Betrayal

The Show’s Nick vs. Atwood’s The Testaments

The passionate fan reaction to Nick Blaine’s on-screen death is also deeply connected to the alternative fate hinted at for his character in Margaret Atwood’s 2019 sequel novel, The Testaments. While the show carved its own path after adapting the original novel in its first season, many fans held onto the hope that key characters might eventually align with their literary counterparts. In The Testaments, set about fifteen years after the events of the first book, Nick Blaine is never explicitly named, but strong clues suggest that Nichole or Daisy’s (given name in The Testaments) biological father became a vital, high-risk operative within the Mayday resistance, working deep undercover within Gilead.

In the book, he’s described to Nichole by a Mayday contact as being “so deep underground he needs a breathing tube,” painting a picture of a dedicated, almost legendary, resistance hero. This image of Nick as a committed Mayday operative stands in stark contrast to his end in the television series, where his final act on that plane reads, at least on the surface, as a reaffirmation of his Gilead allegiance. This divergence is a major reason many fans felt his TV ending was a letdown or a betrayal. After the final season aired, some fans even started online campaigns, like a Change.org petition titled “Save Nick Blaine — Bring Him Back as a Double Agent in The Testaments,” showing just how much they wanted to see this more heroic, book-aligned version of Nick on screen.

Of course, showrunners are always free to make different choices when adapting material for a new medium. The decision to give TV Nick a more immediately tragic ending could have been driven by various factors: a desire for a more shocking dramatic impact for the final season, a reflection of the show’s often bleaker and more brutal portrayal of Gilead’s realities, or a narrative choice to further emphasize June’s isolation and the immense personal cost of her fight.

Whatever the artistic reasoning, this clear split from the hopeful future hinted at in The Testaments remains a key point of contention and fuels the ongoing discussion about Nick Blaine’s true nature and legacy within The Handmaid’s Tale television universe. Yet, this divergence aside, a strong case can be made that any path for the TV show’s Nick Blaine was perilous, making a conventional “happy ending” a remote possibility. His deep connection to June and desire for Nichole’s safety constantly clashed with his committed role within Gilead, a position further complicated by his new family with Rose.

As the rebellion intensified in the final season, Nick was in a complicated position: as a Commander, he was a Mayday target, and at the same time, any overt move to aid the resistance would make him an enemy of the state. Furthermore, his desperate hope June might give up her all-consuming fight for Hannah to build a new life with him in Paris arguably underestimated her fierce maternal resolve. As long as June remained entangled in Gilead’s horrors, Nick’s attachment to her ensured he, too, would be caught in its violent, inescapable orbit, making a peaceful resolution for his character an illusion.