The Handmaid's Tale Season 6 Is Coming: Release Date, Plot & Everything We Know

The sixth and final season of The Handmaid's Tale is coming soon to Hulu. For the past five seasons, showrunner Bruce Miller has allowed viewers to peer into the lives of a number of recurring characters in the fictional totalitarian state of Gilead.

Now is the time to find out what awaits us in the new season.

Season 6 Release Date

The first three episodes of the new season of The Handmaid's Tale will debut on Hulu on April 8. The series will continue to release one episode per week. Thus, the season, which consists of ten standard episodes, will end on May 27.

The sixth season, like the fifth, begins and ends with the direction of Elisabeth Moss herself, the star of the series.

In the seven years since the release of the first episodes, Moss has become a true symbol of the fight for women's rights, and the final season promises to consolidate this fame.

What Will Season 6 Be About?

According to showrunner Bruce Miller, the main character will return to Gilead. The final chapter of June's story will emphasize the importance of hope and solidarity for the sake of freedom. The final season clearly aims to match the first in terms of expressive language and intensity.

While parts of the fourth and fifth seasons were set largely in Canada, where June fled, the sixth season clearly intends to be set firmly in Gilead – with its symmetrical structures, giant plazas, and other signs of the dystopia that June wants to destroy.

What Happened in the Previous Five Seasons?

In the first season, we are first introduced to Gilead, a newly formed state. Gilead is a place where totalitarian ideology and a social order based on a perverted interpretation of the Old Testament flourish.

In Gilead, a man is the head of state and family; a woman is forbidden to read, write, or control her own body. Gilead's interests, of course, are focused on saving humanity, which means fighting the reproductive problem, or in other words, infertility.

The plan is simple: catch all fertile women and turn them into handmaids in the houses of the commanders. The handmaids bear the names of their masters and are required to undergo a "ceremony" once a month, which means that once a month the commanders rape their handmaids in the hope of conceiving a child.

After successful conception and birth, the handmaid is sent to another family. Not surprisingly, desperate fighters against lawlessness eventually emerge.

We spend most of the time watching June's struggle, but the further we go, the more we realize that she is not alone. And the fight she is waging gradually becomes not just a fight for her own life, but a fight for the lives of others.

In season four, June manages to escape Gilead. The season four finale leaves us with the question: Will the former Handmaids be able to resume their normal lives?

And season five largely answers it. June is torn between bouts of PTSD, a desire for revenge, and a desire to find her daughter, who has been a prisoner of Gilead since season one.