June (Elisabeth Moss), Janine (Madeline Brewer), Moira (Samira Wiley), and Aunt Phoebe (D’Arcy Carden) — who is really a CIA agent named Ava working with Mark (Sam Jaeger) — start the episode excited for their next steps, but are stopped by Wharton’s (Josh Charles) guards. He knows June is behind the 37 Commanders killed after his wedding, and he wants her separated from the others and sent to a prison cell. There, she tries to appeal to him, but ultimately fails and finds herself prepared to be hanged alongside her friends and even Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd).

“We wanted, in the beginning of the episode, for the handmaids and June to enjoy at least a few minutes of exhilaration and freedom before she was captured. Gilead being Gilead, that window of joy doesn’t last very long [but] as far as putting her in danger and then having her survive the episode, we always felt that a lot of the narrative plot — a lot of the story threads — would reach conclusion in the penultimate,” co-showrunner Eric Tuchman, who wrote the episode, aptly titled “Execution,” tells Gold Derby.

Then, he adds, “the final episode becomes more of [the] original handmaid’s emotional character-driven, reflective, introspective experience. The aftermath of her experience in [Episode 9] is what the finale is really about.”

In a penultimate episode of a show told from June’s point of view, it seemed clear that she wouldn’t actually die, but that didn’t make the danger she faces in “Execution” any less heart-pounding and emotional, starting with what Tuchman calls the “summit meeting between June and Wharton, really representing the good and the bad guys.”

In a cold room taken up primarily by the cage June has been put in, the two face off for the first time, and she tries to appeal to his religious nature.

“I have to credit Elisabeth Moss [who also directed the episode],” Tuchman says of the exchange between characters, “because the scene [originally] ended a little bit differently. It still had the same outcome: He still rejected her appeal, but Lizzie felt on the day that she needed to bring Serena back into it. She needed to bring the idea of Serena’s God — that kind of loving God. So on the day, I rewrote a few of the last lines, and Lizzie was absolutely right, and she delivered them beautifully, and Josh responded in such an amazing way.

“When she reaches out and touches his arm, it’s so striking and startling to me because she has the audacity as a handmaid to touch the High Commander Wharton, and she leaves her hand there. I didn’t expect it when she did it. I was waiting to see how Josh Charles responded to that physical gesture, and what he did was just astonishing and magnificent, the way he just slowly slid her hand off his arm, as if she was disgusting, and he did it without taking his eyes off her eyes,” he continues.

Nothing June tries in that moment works on Wharton — perhaps because he has already realized just how different Serena’s vision for the future is from his own — but when she is on the stage, with her friends behind her, looking out at a sea of Gileadian citizens, mere seconds from being hanged, she asks Wharton if she can pray. And that reaches him, so he allows her to speak. She starts with a legitimate prayer, talking about how she has failed and been selfish and reckless and asking God to protect his “humble servants,” before turning it into a war cry to all the members of Mayday in the crowd, screaming the now-infamous line, “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”

To Wharton and anyone else who buys into Gilead in full force, June’s prayer sounds like she is atoning for failing to live the way the regime wanted her to. But everyone in Mayday — and the audience — can hear the deeper meaning: that she is apologizing to everyone she tried to save but couldn’t and reminding all of the still-oppressed that their lives have meaning.

“When I wrote it initially, I thought it was a manipulation — that she was playing the God card with this guy. She knew she needed to grab the attention of this crowd. How can she have an opportunity before she’s [hanged] to finally inspire this crowd? It’s her last few moments on Earth. She knew he wasn’t going to give her the microphone willingly, and she’s smart enough to know how to play this guy,” Tuchman says of the prayer. “However, all that being said, when I watch that sequence now, I feel like June is genuinely contrite, and when she is apologizing for her failures to her friends and her family, it’s 100 percent genuine.”

Although Wharton lets his guard down enough to grant her one final speech, when it turns into a call for the people to “rise up,” the noose goes around her neck and she is swiftly pulled into the air, having to rely on Mayday to storm the guards and take out enough of them to get her down.

They do, in a tightly choreographed sequence that gives Luke (O-T Fagbenle) his moment to be a hero and allows Rita (Amanda Brugel) to take out the guard working the crane, dropping June back down in the nick of time.

Wharton may not be able to successfully execute the women he deemed “immoral, remorseless sinners,” but the title of the episode still proves to be literal.

After the failed attempt on the handmaids’ lives turns into a very successful attack from Mayday, with an assist from the Army, the highest of the Commanders prepare to flee to DC. Mark realizes he needs a man on the inside and recruits Lawrence (Bradley Whitford) to load an explosive onto the plane. June brings Lawrence to the hangar early, but the other Commanders are eager to get out while they can and also arrive early, leaving Lawrence to have to smuggle the explosive onto the plane on his person and take off with them.

Whitford tells Gold Derby that prior to starting work on the final season of The Handmaid’s Tale he was “very anxious” because he “had this paranoia of, ‘This show needs a big male obstacle,’ and I was wondering which way this guy was going to go.

“In my head, I’ve always had a very clear idea — a model for this guy — Robert McNamara, who was a guy who did a lot of damage in South Vietnam. He was a very bright guy whose brain obliterated his humanity, and he killed hundreds of thousands of people. And the fog of war is that you see there’s humanity in there trying to peek out, and that was always my idea for this guy. I kept thinking, ‘Why did this guy go, ‘Who is that girl — that impossible handmaid?’ To me, the whole arc of this was, ‘Why did I go out on a limb for her so many times?'”

Whitford says that in the early days of Lawrence paying attention to June, Lawrence was “drenched in condescending misogyny, casual misogyny,” but over time the relationship strengthened and even started to mirror his real-life relationship with Moss, who he has known for more than 25 years, since their West Wing days. Getting on the plane is part “recklessness because [he] didn’t care about [his] death,” Whitford points out, and part “insufficient redemption” for a character that helped build Gilead but then came to fight for its reform.

“One of the redemptive but still disappointing aspects of this character to me is it took the death of his wife for those consequences to hit home personally, which is always something that frustrates me about politics,” he explains.

Sacrificing himself to kill a plane full of the top Commanders may not have been in the original reform plan, but this is the chance Lawrence has to make a real difference in the future of Gilead.

“I did want to make sure that we didn’t see the actual explosion because it kind of cheapens it when that happens. First of all, it’s a really difficult thing to make look good, and it just felt like it was going to be all about that then, and it’s not about that; it’s about what [June] is feeling in that moment,” Moss tells Gold Derby.

The emotions on June’s face as she watches the plane explode in mid-air are extra heavy because it’s not just Lawrence, who has been an ally to her, who she loses on the plane: It is also Nick (Max Minghella), who she has loved and who fathered her daughter.

“It’s a painful loss. It’s something that we thought a lot about and we didn’t take lightly. We didn’t do it for shock value; we did it because we wanted to be honest about who these people were. Especially from June’s point of view, she had to recognize that even if he’s a wonderful person with her, there’s no such thing as a wonderful person who’s also a Nazi,” Tuchman says.

“Didn’t she remember in Season 3 when the Swiss delegation wouldn’t even talk to Nick because he’s a war criminal and not to be trusted? Doesn’t she remember when Serena said, ‘Hasn’t Nick told you what he did before Gilead came to power?’ Didn’t she remember in Season 1 when he didn’t bat an eye when Emily was mutilated, and she said, ‘Are you an eye’ and he didn’t deny it? … When he stops at the top of that staircase before he gets on the plane, there’s that choice that he’s had before, but now if he gets on that plane, he’s all in, there is no turning back, and he gets on the plane.”

As emotional as it is for June to watch Lawrence and Nick ascend the plane stairs, filming the interior plane scenes between the two men — one who knows he is doomed and one who may have felt conflicted about his choice but still thinks he is in a position of power — became just as highly charged.

“It was a distracting night because it was Max and my last shot of this incredible experience together. Lizzie’s directing, it’s all emotionally loaded,” Whitford recalls. “She basically just walked up and said, ‘Let him be Lawrence here too.’ It just opened it up for me. I think I was thinking exactly what I don’t want to be thinking, which is, ‘How should I play this?’ And she was basically saying, ‘Let me turn the camera on and watch the amoebas in your eyes and see what happens.'”

In those moments, Whitford says, Lawrence does not feel he is redeemed — nor that he deserves to be. But the actor points out that the “amazing thing about” The Handmaid’s Tale is its ability to “retain the possibility of redemption” for characters who bought into the Gilead system but come to see the error of their beliefs.

“It’s the dynamic of June blowing on the spark of decency and all of these different characters. It’s a testament to the writing, to the original conception of June by Margaret Atwood, and to extraordinary acting, I would say particularly with Aunt Lydia and with Serena … and I think it’s where the hope is,” he says.

The series finale of The Handmaid’s Tale drops Tuesday at midnight ET/PT on Hulu.