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[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for The Regime Season 1 Episode 6 series finale, “Don’t Yet Rejoice.”]
The Regime always promised we were seeing the final year of an authoritarian regime, and viewers saw Chancellor Elena Vernham’s (Kate Winslet) reign come toppling down in The Regime Episode 6 finale.
The HBO limited series came to a close on Sunday, April 7, wrapping up Elena and Herbert’s (Matthias Schoenaerts) wacky love (or lust) story and revealing both of their fates as their political world crumbled around them. Elena and Herbert spent most of The Regime finale on the run after rebel forces unseated Elena from power. Finding the Chancellor and having her answer for her crimes was the top of the rebel forces’ list of priorities after the coup. Keeping Elena safe was the top of Herbert’s.
Elena was as delusional as ever hiding in the countryside, thinking they’d soon come across a supporter who’d give them safe harbor. The soldier Herbert knew this was foolish, but they still accepted help when an old man offered it. But the man tricked the pair, locking them in a room of his home and calling the authorities. Elena and Herbert were both questioned intensely when the victorious rebels arrived and were eventually separated.
Emil Bartos (Stanley Townsend), who had arranged for Elena’s safe arrival at his residence, offered her a deal with the American Senator Judith Holt (Martha Plimpton). There was an opportunity to wrest power back from the rebels and have Elena reinstated as Chancellor. Agreeing to this plan also meant agreeing to far less real control for her. When given the choice between saving herself and maintaining power, or saving Herbert and risking losing everything, she chose the former.
Herbert was killed as he tried to sleep, and Elena became even more of a talking head. She stayed with her husband, Nicholas (Guillaume Gallienne), and started a new era with her people by giving a speech outside of the palace while standing in a bulletproof glass box. The box was not that far off from the coffin in which she kept her father’s rotting corpse.
Holding on to power was the most important thing for this dictator in the end. It’s an end viewers perhaps aren’t surprised by, but there was a disturbing twist. The Chancellor was able to move on from her father’s death and move his body out of her home, but she replaced her father’s body with Herbert’s. The series ends with Elena basically back where she started, but more worse for wear.
Miya Mizuno/HBO
Winslet tells TV Insider that Elena is a more healed woman by the end, despite the optics of that speech and replacing her father with Herbert.
“I think the reason that she triumphs, or the reason it’s great that she triumphs is, because this was a female leader, not a male leader,” Winslet says. “We need women to win. We need them to come out on top. And actually, there’s something gratifying about the place that she ends up in because it’s connected to her.”
“It’s nothing to do almost with winning or gaining more power, she almost feels as though she has come to understand and make peace with herself a little bit more,” Winslet continues, saying that Elena’s “emotional journey” is “complete” by the finale’s end. “When you meet her in Episode 1 and the emotional place of a kind of closure that she achieves by the time you reach Episode 6, it’s just unbelievable.”
Schoenaerts tells TV Insider it’s a fitting end to the political satire because “it’s a very disturbing and honest reflection on the power, but then again also the danger of being loyal. That’s a huge question to leave an audience with, I think. Loyalty, is it now a good thing or is it just going to get you killed? That is a deeply profound question in my opinion, an existential question.”
“By doing so, the audience leaves and the series is still in their system,” he continues. “It has a clear ending, so you have the satisfaction of the end, but it still will work your mind and heart afterwards, and that’s always a good thing.”
“Nobody wins, nobody loses,” Schoenaerts continues of the ending. “There’s no one-dimensional outcome or resolution to it all. It stays in paradox and contrast, and that is brilliant.”
The Regime, Season Finale Available Now, Max