“God has a plan for me and I cannot hide from his plan anymore,” says Yvonne Strahovski’s Serena Joy in the first full trailer for the final season of The Handmaid’s Tale. That plan appears to involve (ding ding) round two of life as the wife of a Gilead Commander. The trailer shows Serena as the bride in a full-scale Gilead wedding, complete with pews of Handmaids in attendance.
Who’s the groom? Not Bradley Whitfield’s Commander Lawrence, who tied the knot with widow Naomi Putnam (Ever Carradine) in season five following the execution of her husband. Serena’s second husband is a new character played by The Good Wife’s Josh Charles, who joined The Handmaid’s Tale for its sixth and final season. We see a shot of the wedding, one of him carrying her over the threshold, and then a blistering row in which Serena tells her new man that he’s “just like the rest of them!”.
Are Serena and the new Commander residents in Gilead proper, or is their costal home part of Commander Lawrence’s “New Bethlehem” – a kind of Gilead-lite he proposed last season to build on a New England island as a way to retain the health and fertility benefits of the theocratic regime, but with less of the brutality. We only have to wait until April 8 on Hulu to find out.
Meanwhile in season six, Elisabeth Moss’ June is plotting with her allies Luke, Moira, Nick, Mark Tuello, Rita and – as she puts it in the trailer – “anyone who hates Gilead”, to burn the whole thing down. We see June rallying the troops and telling her fellow Handmaids to rise up and fight for their freedom: “For years, we’ve been afraid of them, now it’s time for them to be afraid of us.”