The Handmaid’s Tale star Elisabeth Moss has broken down the shock return of a main character in the final season.
Hulu’s hit dystopian series – adapted from Margaret Atwood’s best-selling 1985 novel – is about a totalitarian society, Gilead, ruled by a fundamentalist regime that sees women as state property
While the show is midway through season six in the US, it has only just started in the UK, with episode one arriving on Saturday (3 May) on Channel 4 and Prime Video.
*Spoilers follow – you have been warned*
The premiere picked up where the previous left off – with June Osborne (Moss) and Serena Waterford (Yvonne Strahovski) coming face-to-face on a train transporting Gilead refugees far away from the place that’s caused them so much horror.
At the end of the episode, June and her baby daughter arrived at a refugee camp in Alaska – and to the surprise of viewers, she discovered that one of the facility’s medical staff was her mother, Holly (Cherry Jones).
Holly has only appeared in flashbacks before, with June discovering in season two that her mother, a women’s rights advocate, had been sent to the Colonies in Gilead – a contaminated area where officials send the women it believes to be “unfit” for manual labour.
However, her mum survived and escaped Gilead – and the episode’s final moments showed her finding her daughter’s name on the list of arrivals, and calling out: “June Osborne? Sweetheart?”
Hearing her mother’s voice, June emotionally ran into her arms and the pair embraced.
Moss said that this moment “really has to do with the ending” and “with where we’re going” in the final episodes.
She told TVLine: “The whole show is so much about June’s motherhood and June’s role as mother. But I feel like, in order to really, fully tell that story, you’ve got to bring her own mum into it.”
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Moss revealed that, when they discovered Jones “was open to coming back on the show”, it was considered “a no-brainer to get her back for this final season”.
The Handmaid’s Tale showrunners previously expressed concern about the current state of America, saying that “women in our country have fewer rights now than when we started production in 2016”.
The show premiered in April 2017, months after President Donald Trump became president for the first time.
Since its debut, viewers have found some of the show’s storylines eerily relevant to the U.S. political climate under the Trump administration – and even more so now, eight years later.
Speaking to ex-CNN reporter Oliver Darcy for his Status newsletter, showrunner Eric Tuchman admitted: “No, I don’t think any of us could have predicted how closely the show would maintain its relevance and continue to reflect real events.
“The series has been called a cautionary tale about what can happen when power is abused and people’s rights and freedoms are stripped away,” he continued.
“But that warning was ignored, apparently, by the majority of voters, and Roe v Wade was overturned. Women in our country have fewer rights now than when we started production in 2016,” Tuchman added.
