Who’s pumped to return to Gilead? The Handmaid’s Tale, everyone’s favorite nightmarishly topical dystopia, is back on Hulu in just over a month, which is exciting for people who like panic attacks as well as Mike Pence. But don’t worry: The new Season 3 trailer makes a show that bowed mere months after our current POTUS’ inauguration look pretty positive, showing all our favorite and once-hissable characters finally plotting to take down the patriarchy.
When last we left her, Elisabeth Moss’ Offred — a once-free modern woman trapped in a new America that turns women into second-class citizens, prostitutes, slaves or walking wombs for more powerful women — having decided to stay in Gilead? Why on earth would she do that? So she can plot its downfall from within.
The new trailer is rife with Moss doing the Malcolm MacDowell-in-A Clockwork Orange sinister stare, a Cheshire grin betraying her glee at destroying the totalitarian republic. She even has help: Nick (Max Minghella), her on-again-off-again friend-with-benefits, appears to be on-board, as do her old masters the Waterfords (Joseph Fiennes and Yvonne Strahovski).
Of course, you can’t trust anyone in Gilead, so don’t be too surprised if some of them turn out to be turncoats. Let’s also remember that, by now, we’re far, far afield from Margaret Atwood’s classic source, which ended with Offred’s fate largely lost to history and possibly quite grim. Still, the very idea of a happy ending in the despairing world of The Handmaid’s Tale is worth grasping onto with both hands.
Offred and company will return to Hulu on June 5, roughly 18 months before the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
