LIFE & CULTURE

Everything You Need To Know About ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Season 3

It can't come fast enough
Loading the player...

Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Handmaid’s Tale season two

The season two finale of The Handmaid’s Tale left many, for lack of a better word, shook. 

The final 15 minutes showed June/Offred (Elisabeth Moss) escaping with her newborn baby, running through backyards with the help of various Marthas.

Watch the trailer for The Handmaid’s Tale season three:

With both Nick and, surprisingly, Serena’s help, you finally think Offred is going to make it to Canada and be reunited with her husband, Luke.

But in the final few seconds, she passes the baby to Emily (Alexis Bledel) and chooses, instead, to stay in Gilead. 

Of course, Offred staying in Gilead to save her daughter Hannah makes way for the third season of The Handmaid’s Tale. Which, TBH, we’re not mad about.

Below, everything we know so far.

When will it be released?

Hulu, the show’s creator, has revealed the show will be released in the US on June 5, 2019. Although we don’t know for sure if that means SBS will pick it up for the same date, it does mean we can expect to see it within the next few months. 

Will all the major cast be back?

In the final episode of season two, Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) was attacked with a knife by Emily, however, showrunner Bruce Miller has confirmed she will be back (via IndieWire). Emily has (hopefully successfully) escaped to Canada, so we’ll likely see less of her on the show. Australian actress Yvonne Strahovski, who plays Serena Joy Waterford, is pregnant in real life, but she has confirmed she’ll be back for season three.

the handmaid's tale

Aunt Lydia is going to get worse

“Aunt Lydia doesn’t die, [but] she’s transformed by this event,” Miller said of Emily’s attack. “The fact that one of her girls… has literally stabbed her in the back. I think that that alters your workplace feelings on a day-to-day basis… In her case, it makes her double down that she feels like she just wasn’t strong enough in her discipline. So she, I think, has decided it’s time to get tough,” he explained.

We’re going to see more of Commander Lawrence 

You know, the guy who helped Emily escape but also helped create Gilead? “I think we’re gonna learn a ton about him. I think the fact that he’s, you know, our Oppenheimer character, the man who designed an atomic bomb and then saw what it could do,” Miller told The Wrap.

the handmaid's tale

Serena will likely swap sides

Throughout season two, Serena seemed to be battling internally about which side she was on – going from allowing Offred to work with her in Commander Waterford’s office to holding her down as he raped her. However, in the final episode, we saw a transformation: first, when she read the bible out to the husbands and then when she let Offred escape with the baby. “It would be nice to see her continue on this sort of breakdown path of maybe come to more realisation about the society that she’s helped create and what that means and where she goes from there,” Yvonne Strahovski said of her character.

“But ultimately it’s a negotiation with where she’s stuck, because we see all these characters at the end and they’re still in Gilead, they’re still right there in that household. Whatever they’re truly feeling at the time is going to be a negotiation against the society as we’ve seen in the last two seasons, because they can’t get out. It’s a very tricky position to be in.”

Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Handmaid’s Tale season two

The season two finale of The Handmaid’s Tale left many, for lack of a better word, shook. 

The final 15 minutes showed June/Offred (Elisabeth Moss) escaping with her newborn baby, running through backyards with the help of various Marthas.

Watch the trailer for The Handmaid’s Tale season three:

Related stories