War is coming to The Handmaid’s Tale in its final season

Though June Osborne (Elisabeth Moss) seemed ready to put Gilead behind her in The Handmaid’s Tale’s season 5 finale, a new trailer for the show’s sixth season finds her back in the belly of the beast quietly rallying other women to strike back at their Christofascist oppressors. While Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) and Serena Joy Waterford (Yvonne Strahovski) don’t seem to know exactly how June plans to destroy everything they’ve built, they can feel that there’s a new subversive energy coursing through Gilead’s population of subjugated handmaids.

That doesn’t appear to be an immediate concern for Commander Joseph Lawrence (Bradley Whitford) as he achieves a new level of power within Gilead. But the trailer’s shots of handmaids arming themselves with switchblades makes it seem like they’re way past ready to burn everything down if that’s what it takes to be free.

When The Handmaid’s Tale first premiered in 2017, it seemed so dystopian that it was easy for some to dismiss it as pure speculative fiction. But given the ongoing push to further limit women’s access to reproductive healthcare in the US, the show is probably going to feel that like even more of a plausible vision of the future when it returns on April 8th.