When The Handmaid’s Tale returned to Hulu for its sixth and final season on Tuesday, it brought with it a familiar face.
Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Handmaid’s Tale Season 6.
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One of the first lines spoken in The Handmaid’s Tale Season 6 premiere, “Train,” was “Mommies always come back.” That line, uttered in the opening minutes of the episode by June (Elisabeth Moss) during a quiet moment shared with her daughter Nichole and Serena’s (Yvonne Strahovski) son Noah, proved to have more meaning than it initially seemed. By the end of the episode, and after five seasons of watching families torn apart and children ripped from their mothers’ arms, June was reunited with her own mother, Holly Maddox (Cherry Jones), who had been presumed dead.
The reunion came after June – now separated from both her daughter Hannah (Jordana Blake), who remains in Gilead, and her husband Luke (O-T Fagbenle), who was arrested after killing the man who ran June over – boarded a train in the Season 5 finale in an effort to escape Toronto. After a notably tense hours-long ride in the Season 6 premiere, during which she saved Serena’s life by pushing her from the train, June stepped off the train with Nichole in her arms and arrived at a refugee camp in Alaska, where during the final seconds of the episode she was reunited with her mother.
Holly had largely been presumed dead after flashbacks earlier in the show from June’s time in the Red Center revealed she had been brought to the Colonies, areas contaminated by pollution and radioactive waste where Unwomen, or those women convicted of crimes, are sent as punishment. Being banished to the Colonies is all but a death sentence, but as Holly later revealed in Season 6, Episode 2, “Exile,” Gilead kept her alive, as she was previously a doctor, and her medical knowledge was used to care for the Aunts and Guardians.
“They kept us prisoner and killed my friends,” she said. “But I hung on with the hope that I might see you someday.”
Holly managed to escape Gilead and the Colonies when the US army freed her colony. She was then sent to Alaska to seek refuge in a camp, where she began working in the medical unit.
The reunion marked an uncharacteristically happy moment for June, who has spent the past several years being tortured by Gilead, leading an uprising, and relentlessly fighting to rescue her daughter Hannah. However, the happy moment was short-lived. By the end of the second episode, June, determined to see Gilead fall, left Nichole in her mother’s care and fled to continue the fight against the dystopian, totalitarian society.
Three episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale Season 6 are now streaming on Hulu. New episodes drop Tuesdays.
