The Handmaid’s Tale Just Resurrected a Seemingly Dead Character Who Could Be the Secret to June Getting Back Hannah
Spoilers ahead for The Handmaid’s Tale. The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian show, which means that at this point, we shouldn’t really be surprised by the fact that bad things happen. Just like we shouldn’t be surprised by the fact that the show continues to throw twist after twist our way. The show, based on the best-selling novel by Margaret Atwood, has just returned to Hulu for its sixth and final season.
The series, which stars Elisabeth Moss, is set in Gilead, a totalitarian society in what used to be the United States of America. In the show, women are treated as property of the state, and within a world plagued by environmental disasters and a plummeting birth rate, the few women who remain who are still able to get pregnant are forced into sexual servitude. June, the main character, played by Moss, has managed to escape Gilead after six seasons and is on the run with her baby, all while trying to find her oldest daughter, Hannah.
But at the end of the first few episodes of Season 6, June reunites with someone she thought was dead—her own mother, Holly. But what happened to June’s mom in The Handmaid’s Tale? How did she survive? And how did the two finally reunite?
What happened to June’s mom on The Handmaid’s Tale?
The beginning of Season 6 sees June, who is in really bad shape, head to Alaska with baby Nicole. As June is telling herself that things are going to be okay, she hears a voice calling her name. For a moment, it feels like a hallucination, but it isn’t. It is indeed her mother, Holly. Fans had been assuming Holly was dead, as no one knew where she was.
Holly Maddox, June’s mother, was a woman’s rights activist before the rise of Gilead and is believed to have died in the Colonies for most of the show, which is why it’s very surprising for June to find her working as a doctor in the refugee camp in Alaska. After they reunite, June learns that the Gilead authorities were responsible for her mother’s disappearance and that she was targeted for her beliefs. She was sent to the Colonies, where she was held prisoner.
Eventually, she survived the Colonies, and after they were liberated, she was sent to Alaska, where her medical expertise came in handy. And Holly always held onto hope that she would one day cross paths with her daughter once more.
About the reunion, Elisabeth Moss told Deadline that this season was such a “love letter to motherhood and a love letter to being a parent,” and she spoke about June’s “relationship with her mother and how that translates to her relationship with her daughter is an extremely important part of the show.” Moss also reiterated that the “opportunity to work with Cherry (Jones) again is obviously something we were so excited about.”
“For June to make some of the decisions she makes later in the season, she needed that figure to kind of guide her in some of those choices, and needed that person to kind of be able to look to and say okay, what I’m doing is the right thing and you’re going to have my back.”
The Handmaid’s Tale hasn’t exactly been the kind of show that has delivered too much in the way of happiness, so fans were excited to see one happy reunion for June. Reactions on X (formerly Twitter), ranged from “OMG June’s Mother is alive. It was assumed she had been murdered by #Gilead #TheHandmaidsTale #spoileralert” to “No way! ! ! ! No Way! ! ! ! ! It’s June…….OMG! ! ! ! 601 ending #TheHandmaidsTale” alongside a GIF of someone shedding tears.
Now, fans are hoping the next reunion they see will be between June and her daughter, Hannah. Though, perhaps, they’ll have to wait until the already-announced The Handmaid’s Tale sequel, The Testaments, for that. The book the show is based on does, after all, not feature a reunion between June and her daughter—though it does seem to imply in the epilogue that they do reunite at some point.
