She who fights monsters should see to it that she herself does not become a monster. That’s the slippery slope The Handmaid’s Tale hero June (Elisabeth Moss) is facing after one of her most violent acts of rebellion yet.
Still, it’d take a lot of blood and terror for Moss’s marginalised protagonist to be more monstrous than the late Commander Fred (Joseph Fiennes) or his nasty widow Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski), or the sexist regime they embody. We can’t wait to see the fallout, and perhaps even June’s villain arc, when season five of The Handmaid’s Tale premieres on NEON from September 15.
Slowly realising her vision of destroying Gilead, June seems to have absolutely no remorse for her former owner Fred’s murder in season four’s shocking, graphic cliffhanger. “He had to pay for what he did. I killed him”, she tells Luke (O-T Fagbenle) in the trailer below, “and I loved it so much.”
Let’s hope that this bloodlust, and planned destruction of Serena, doesn’t overpower her ultimate love for her family and friends (like Samira Wiley’s fiercely justice-driven Moira).
The next season of The Handmaid’s Tale will play out over ten episodes as usual, and the season finale is optimistically titled “Safe”. We really hope that the adjective applies to June and the survivors of Gilead’s reign of misogyny.
Gunning for another Emmy, Moss ends the trailer by tearfully praying for the next generation: “may they live a life without all this hate…dear God, may they do better than we did.” As talented as she is, the celebrated actor certainly has a lot of real-life dystopian horror to draw from as her motivation…
